THIRD INTERMEDIATE PERIOD- LATE PERIOD, 25TH-26TH DYNASTY, CIRCA 747-525 B.C.

Jack Leonard Warner was a Canadian-American film executive who was best known as co-founder of Warner Bros, established in 1923 alongside his three older brothers. In 1937 Warner bought a mansion in Beverly Hills and enlisted architect Roland E. Coate to enlarge and rebuild the mansion in the Georgian style with an impressive Greek Revival portico. In keeping with the mansion's elegant new facade, the interior was installed by the famous actor and designer, William Haines. After his death in 1978, Ann, his widow, lived there until her death in 1990.

This sunk relief shows two offering bearers carry a papyrus stalk entwined with a lotus flower and the second carrys a water fowl and a lotus flower. On the left edge there are the remains of an animal hoof - this joins onto a panel now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which depicts an offering bearer carrying a haunch of beef (inv. no. MFA 65.1686) from the tomb of Mentuemhat.

The style of the relief not only reflects a return to the classical manner of representation of the Old Kingdom, but also a reflection of the style of the 18th Dynasty as represented in the temple reliefs of Hatshepsut at the nearby Deir el-Bahri temple. Mentuemhat's artists are known to have borrowed iconographical details and stylistic features from Theban tombs of the New Kingdom, as well as from other royal and private monuments located on the west bank. For similar reliefs from the tomb of Mentuemhat see pp. 399-401 in Berman, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Catalogue of Egyptian Art. Mentuemhat, fourth prophet of the god Amun and Mayor of Thebes, was one of the most powerful administrators of his time. He was interred in Western Thebes in an enormously large and impressively designed tomb, considered one of the most lavishly decorated private tombs built in ancient Egypt.