Judgment of the Dead in the Tomb of Horemheb (KV57)

This Egyptian wall relief features a seated Osiris on the far left wearing the Atef crown and holding an ankh, while a figure—likely the deceased—stands before a balance scale. The scene is densely packed with vertical registers of hieroglyphic text and small iconographic figures, including a jackal-headed Anubis and a solar barque carrying deities on the right. A long, diagonal staircase leads upward from the bottom right toward the central figures, populated by a procession of standing, stylized human figures in profile. The work is executed in low relief, with the figures rendered in the classic Egyptian canon of proportions, using thin, precise lines.

This scene depicts the psychostasia (weighing of the heart) from the Book of Gates, a major funerary text of the New Kingdom intended to guide the deceased through the trials of the Duat. It represents the crucial moment of judgment where the soul's purity is assessed before the king of the underworld, Osiris.