Offering table or Hetep

Offering table (hetep) with two libation channels, richly decorated and inscribed, and still bearing traces of reddish and yellow paint.
Each side of the symmetrical scene contains three lotus flowers with highly stylised stems, although only one of them is open, and two hes libation vessels. In the middle is a quadrangular offering table with four round bread loaves and an elongated bread ring. The inscription, which mentions the name of the dead man (Meshlble) and alludes to different funerary formulas, runs around the entire edge of the piece and beside the libation channels.
Offering tables were placed at the entrances to chapels, erected east of the Meroitic pyramids.
This piece was among the approximately three thousand artefacts that the museum received as “partage” in the second half of the 1960s. In 1959 the UNESCO appealed to the international community to help it save as many archaeological sites, monuments and ancient ruins as possible before they were flooded as a result of the construction of the Aswan Dam. Spain answered the call, creating the “Spanish Committee to Save the Monuments of Nubia” and conducting various archaeological excavations in the area. As compensation for this assistance and effort, Egypt and Sudan gave Spain half of the retrieved artefacts.