Located inside a chapel within a tomb, a false door was the portal through which the ka, the immortal spirit of the deceased, could pass to partake of offerings left by priests. This false door comes from the cemetery area west of the great pyramid of Ghiza (near Cairo). The inscriptions commemorate Iry-en Akhet, a Lector-Priest, and list ritual prayers to the gods Osiris and Anubis to facilitate his voyage to the afterlife. Iry’s name is repeated countless times to ensure the survival of his ka in the world beyond. All seven figures are symbolic portraits of the deceased. He stands in the conventional Egyptian pose, with his head, legs and feet seen in profile, while his eye and torso are frontal. As was most Egyptian sculpture, this panel was once painted in brilliant colors.

The inscriptions are carved in hieroglyphs, a system of writing consisting of pictures representing words, syllables and sounds. Scribes developed these characters from images of men, animals and other common objects in Egyptian life. Some passages are read from top to bottom, others from left to right or right to left.

The strong vertical and horizontal emphasis in the panel, in which one side nearly mirrors the other, also communicates the Egyptian concept of space. The ancient Egyptian imagined his world as a box-like structure determined by two natural forces crossing at right angles: the south-north flow of the Nile and the east-west passage of the sun across the ceiling of the heavens.