Image Details

The Art Archive/Musée du Louvre Paris/Dagli Orti

Standing 4-feet-high, this 2,300-year-old statue of an Apis bull (now on display in the Louvre Museum in Paris) was uncovered by the French archaeologist Auguste Mariette during his excavation of the Serapeum at Saqqara in the 1850s. Apis bulls, thought to be earthly incarnations of the underworld god Osiris, were selected by Egyptian priests, worshiped while they lived, and then buried in the Serapeum.