Middle East

Golden masks excavated from the Kalmakareh Cave in Lorestan, Iran, first half of the first Millennium BC, National Museum of Iran

None of the fragments have been found in their original context at Mycenae. In other words, we have no idea how they were originally used at the site. But the mere fact that they are at Mycenae, and nowhere else in the world, indicates that there is probably a special relationship between this site and Egypt during the time of Amenhotep III,

Towering more than sixty feet high and destined to stand guard for the next thirty-four hundred years, even as the mortuary temple that stood behind them was looted for its magnificent stone blocks and slowly crumbled into dust, the two huge statues standing at the entrance to Amenhotep III’s mortuary temple at Kom el-Hetan were, and still are,

They say the same thing about the Mona Lisa: the more that people swarm her, the more poignant is her serene detachment. The effect is even more pronounced here, because the statue was designed to have a life independent of the viewer. It wasn’t made to be an art object. It was a machine for establishing Hatshepsut’s presence in the djet world.

The suggestion that we are looking at the documentation of an early fourteenth-century BC voyage from Egypt to the Aegean, rather than a record of Mycenaeans and Minoans coming to Egypt, seems plausible for the following fascinating reason. There are a number of objects with the cartouche (royal name) of either Amenhotep III or his wife Queen Tiyi