At the end of last year, nearly four decades after its inauguration, the Metropolitan Museum’s Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, dedicated to the art of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, closed for a much-needed renovation and upgrade. To compensate for the absence of these important collections for the next two years, the Met created “The African Origin of Civilization,” a tightly focused exhibition with some outliers (more about that later).¹ Organized by Alisa LaGamma, the curator in charge of the department of the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, and Diana Craig Patch, the curator in charge of the department of Egyptian art, and drawn entirely from the museum’s holdings, it combines superb works from sub-Saharan Africa with equally significant works from Egypt, uniting what the wall text terms “icons from an ancient cradle of civilization” with ones from “other major cultures that followed.” That is to say, it’s a gathering of forty-two stunning works of art, presented in informative, thought-provoking pairs. It hardly needs saying that the Egyptian works predate those from the sub-Sahara, sometimes by millennia. The earliest sub-Saharan works in the gallery are metal objects made in the sixteenth or seventeenth century (more about them later, too). Most of the other works, mainly made of perishable wood, date from the nineteenth or early twentieth century; one sculpture in wood may have been made in the eighteenth century; one on view elsewhere in the museum may or may not date from the fifteenth century. (As far