Ancient Egypt's Greatest Treasures at the Metropolitan Museum

The Met's Egyptian Art collection is one of the finest outside Cairo — the product of decades of excavation and collecting, including the complete reassembly of the Mastaba Tomb of Perneb, a real Old Kingdom tomb that visitors can walk through. These objects span more than 4,000 years of an unbroken civilisation: from the Predynastic period (before 3100 BC) through the Roman period. What is remarkable about Egyptian art is not just its antiquity but its consistency — the formal vocabulary invented in the Old Kingdom was still being used 3,000 years later. Here are the highlights that best illuminate that extraordinary tradition.