A gold crown of Princess Khenmet, possibly daughter of King Amenemhat II.
She is mainly known from her unrobbed tomb containing a set of outstanding personal adornments.
This masterpiece was found in the tomb of Khnemet and her sister “Ita” in Dahshur. The crown is made of a network of interlaced gold wires that entangle nearly 200 small flowers, each with a carnelian eye and five turquoise-inlaid petals. The wires are tied to three pins on each side of five ‘crosses’, which are actually five clusters of lotus blossoms, and terminate at a pair of rings on the back of a sixth ‘cross’.
Middle Kingdom, 12th Dynasty, ca. 1991-1803 BC. From Princess Khenmet’s burial next to the pyramid of Amenemhat II at Dahshur. Now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
And he looked at the slain, recalling their names. Then suddenly he beheld his sister Éowyn as she lay, and he knew her. He stood a moment as a man who is pierced in the midst of a cry by an arrow through the heart; and then his face went deathly white; and a cold fury rose in him, so that all speech failed him for a while. A fey mood took him.
‘Éowyn, Éowyn!’ he cried at last: ‘Éowyn, how come you here? What madness or devilry is this? Death, death, death! Death take us all!’ . The Return of the King, J. R. R. Tolkien.
