These gold sandals and toe stalls housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art were once part and parcel to the lavish funerary accessories of an Egyptian queen during the reign of Thutmose III in the mid 18th Dynasty.
Gold was everything to the ancient Egyptians who believed that the flesh of gods was made of gold, their bones made of silver and hair made of lapis lazuli. Gold was considered a beacon for immortality, eternity and divinity. The sun god Ra was often referred to as a mountain of gold. The Royal Tomb was known as the “House of Gold.” The pharaohs of the Old Kingdom were called the “Golden Horus.”
Egyptian finger and toe stalls fashioned from gold were common to the 18th Dynasty of Egypt and were used to protect the digits of the deceased during burial, especially from “magical dangers.”
The gilded accoutrements were found in Thebes at Wadi Gabbanat el-Qurud in the Tomb of the Three Foreign Wives of Thutmose. Similar gold sandals were found on the mummy of Tutankhamun or “Tut,” one of Thutmose’s descendents who ruled at the end of the same dynasty. These gold sandals, however, were practically a fleck compared to King Tut’s sarcophagus weighing in at 110kg of pure gold and valued at over $6 million.
Menhet, Menwi and Merti were three foreign-born wives of pharaoh Thutmose III who were buried in an impeccable rock-cut tomb with the finest dressings in the southwest valley near Luxor. Each of the ladies were given the title of King’s Wife, although they likely had minor roles as part of the royal harem. It is unknown whether each of the wives is related to one another, as the faces on the lids of their canopic jars are largely unidentical.
Some of the treasures found within their tombs include the gold sandals and toe stalls, gold diadems, carnelian and glass bracelets and a collection of vessels. Each of their bracelets is inscribed with the cartouche of Thutmose III. Cartouches were hieroglyphs made up of an oval and a line at one end, which indicated that any enclosed text referred to a royal name. The ancient Egyptian word for cartouche was shenu, and the cartouche could be likened to an expanded shen ring. The word shen itself meant encircle and the shen ring was symbolic of eternal protection.
