Mentuwoser’s stela is a Middle Kingdom autobiography in limestone: a steward listing virtue, offerings, and the hope that passersby will speak his name.
Mercury 91 is not affiliated with The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Images and object data shown here are public-domain Open Access (CC0) records from The Met collection. Citations are given so you can visit each work on the museum site.
Egyptian stelae are public hard drives. Mentuwoser, a steward under Senwosret I, had his titles and good conduct carved so that visitors would recite offerings. Speech was food. Literacy was a feeding tube from the living to the dead.
The relief is orderly: registers, offerings, a man who wants to be counted as righteous. Compare the writing board in this catalog. One is practice. One is the finished performance of a life in lines.
Stewardship is a Mercury job. Messages, accounts, travel between offices. Mentuwoser would have understood a messenger planet better than a warrior king would. He managed.
This is why a stela is the default 3D shape of the Temple of Thoth. Every work in the hang becomes a vertical slab you approach. Mentuwoser’s object is the type specimen: a wall that talks if you read it aloud.
Citation
Stela of the Steward Mentuwoser. ca. 1944 B.C.. Limestone, paint. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 12.184. Gift of Edward S. Harkness, 1912
Public-domain Open Access (CC0) photograph. Dimensions: H. 103 cm (40 9/16 in.); W. 50.5 cm (19 7/8 in.); Th. 8.3 cm (3 1/4 in.)
