LATE PERIOD TO PTOLEMAIC PERIOD, 664-30 B.C.

Behind The Metropolitan Museum of Art stands the iconic “Cleopatra’s Needle,” a monumental Egyptian obelisk that was brought from Alexandria to New York by naval officer Lieutenant Commander Henry H. Gorringe in the summer of 1880. It was a gift to the United States from Isma’il Pasha, the Egyptian Khedive, for the nation’s neutrality in Britain and France’s struggle for political control over Egypt. While Gorringe was tasked with the transport of the national gift, he had also begun his own personal collection of Egyptian antiquities. Following his death just six years after his task concluded, his collection of Egyptian artifacts, including this Osiris, was inherited by his sister and her family. The collection was relocated to the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts in 1915, and was briefly reunited with “Cleopatra’s Needle” when it was transferred to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1947 for possible purchase.