The description of the new “Divine Egypt” exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art lets me know that this exploration of the most mythologically complex and visually rich civilizations in human history will be a great time for anyone interested in learning about how ancient human civilizations explored their relationships with higher powers.
You’ll also see a rad statue of a fertility god cranking his huge hog. Hell yeah. You won’t read about that in the New York Times.
If you walked into the Egyptian city of Qift in 3300 BCE, you would have immediately encountered a 13 foot statue of a guy cranking his hog. pic.twitter.com/jvPtQjWB5j
— microplastics dedicator (@irregulargrapes) October 20, 2025
With nearly 250 objects, some on loan from institutions like the Louvre and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the show turns the Met’s galleries into displays of gods who ruled the cosmos and the afterlife in Egyptian lore. And among the gods, like the falcon-headed Horus and the beautiful Hathor, you will find a little perv with a long beard that nearly reaches his set of dong and balls, because whichever anatomically obsessed man sculpted this centuries ago not only make sure to include the ball sack, but provided a wee bit of indentation to let you know that this particular scrotum has a symmetrical set of testicles on either side of it.
Yes, you will walk away from the exhibit feeling culturally enriched, having established a deeper, more meaningful connection with the countless lives that paved the road to the present. You will also giggle because the over 5,000-year-old Colossal Statue of Min, depicting the titular Min, doesn’t have a penis anymore. His penis has been lost to the sands of time. So now it’s just a set of balls below a clenched fist with an exceptionally girthy hole in the center where a stone penis used to be.
The Colossal Statue of Min isn’t terribly colossal. Not anymore at least. It stands at 1.77 meters, or 5.8 feet. It used to be taller. It used to be 8 ½ or so feet tall. The hole where the penis should be looks a little bigger than a baseball, so this ancient fertility god wasn’t all marketing. He was equipped for the job.
According to Met researchers in the museum audio guide, the original penis was a detachable, separately carved piece of stone that has since been lost to time. It could have been stolen, since there is evidence to suggest that ancient Egyptians once ground up dust from sacred statues like Min’s to absorb some of its divine mojo.
That’s it. That’s all I have to say. A good museum is putting on a good exhibit that features a god gripping his hog for all eternity. Sounds like a fun time. Make it out there if you can.
I will leave you with this, an excerpt from Min’s Wikipedia page, which I have edited to bring the setup and punchline a little closer together: “There have been controversial suggestions…that the pharaoh was expected to demonstrate, as part of a Min festival, that he could ejaculate—and thus ensure the annual flooding of the Nile…This myth may have originated from a misinterpretation of a different festival.”
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