62cm total height x 52cm x 2cm

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The Stele of Revealing stands out from the other stelae in Room 21 on the upper floor of the Egyptian Museum, Cairo. By comparison, it is exceptionally finely painted and, highly unusually, it is also painted on the reverse with excerpts from the Book of the Dead. But what would it have looked like in antiquity?

Originally an essential part of the funerary equipment of Ankh-af-na-khonsu, a priest of the God Montu, the consensus of scholarly opinion dates the Stele to the 25th Dynasty (747-656 BCE). It was a turbulent period in Egyptian history, culminating in the sack of Thebes by the Assyrians in 665 BCE.

Over the intervening 25 centuries, the original varnish, heavily applied to the face side, has 'yellowed' with age producing the distinctive honey colour one sees today. This varnish also affects how we see the original colours beneath it. Today, it is as if you are looking at the original painting through a transparent coloured film.

There are also two mysterious holes at the top of the Stele's front face. For what purpose were these made?

Further comparison with contemporary artefacts and research on the pigments available to the ancient Egyptians suggested the likely original pallette in which the Stele would have been decorated.

Perhaps most poignantly, I used as a particular point of reference the coffin of Besenmut, probably a grandson of Ankh-af-na-khonsu, now in the British Museum.

The most distinctive feature of this recreation of the ancient Stele is the pair double plumes that adorn the top.

On the Stele of Revealing, the centre of Nuit's body is pireced by two holes with some damage to the paint surrounding. The earliest photographs of the Stele, taken at the Boulaq before the now famous 666 label was applied, show that the holes do not pirece through the reverse.

The holes appear to be original. As they do not peirce the back, they are highly unlikely to have been used for some form of suspension. It would appear that they may have been fixings for a now missing piece of applied decoration; either damaged by plunders or even seperated from the Stele itself by the excavators. This was, sadly, not an uncommon practice in the 19th century. Disassociated fragments of decoration appear in many old collections of Egyptian antiquities.

The tops of stelae from the Ptolemaic period (505-30 BCE) were frequently decorated with wooden figures of the Ba in the form of a human-headed bird. The iconography of this later period is often an over-elaboration of earlier forms.

The National Museum of Archaeology in Madrid has a finely painted wooden stele from Thebes dedicated to a Lady Tayeskheret. The extraordinary feature of this stele is the tall pair of painted wooden feathers and solar disc attached to the top.

The stele of Tayeskheret is dated to the Third Intermediate Period (1069-525 BCE), a broad span of over 500 years but which does include Ankh-af-na-khonsu's day (c.700 BCE).

It is thought that the pair of plumes and solar disc indicate the presence of the 'Hidden One', Amun, the paramount Theban deity. Tall plumes were the primary symbols of Amun. However, they were also the distinguishing feature of the hawk-headed Montu, to whose priesthood Ankh-af-na-khonsu belonged.

This unique, recreation of the Stele of Revealing offers us an idea of what it may originally have looked like.