Brooklyn Museum — Egyptian, Classical, Ancient Near Eastern Art · papyrus

Writing Exercise Tablet

Source of record: Brooklyn Museum — Egyptian, Classical, Ancient Near Eastern Art — catalogued by the holding institution. View the original record →

Description

Caption: Writing Exercise Tablet, 4th century C.E.. Wood, wax, 6 3/4 x 5 3/16 x 1/4 in. (17.2 x 13.2 x 0.7 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 37.473E.

AI image analysis GPT-5.4-nano

Machine-generated from the object's image on Jul 2026. Not curatorial; treat deities, names, and signs below as the model's best reading, not authority.

A rectangular, dark brown wooden writing/inscription tablet with a smooth face and several holes along the right edge; a small column of red/orange marks appears near the upper left.

The image shows a single rectangular tablet viewed from the front. The surface is uniformly dark brown with fine scratches and cracking consistent with age or use. Along the right side there are three round holes set vertically, suggesting a means of fastening or storage. Near the upper-left corner there are faint red/orange vertical marks that could be ink/paint strokes from a writing exercise, but the characters are not clearly legible at this resolution. No carved relief, painted figure, or clear cartouche is visible. There is no discernible Greek/Coptic/Arabic text. Overall, the object visually aligns with a wooden tablet used for writing, though the specific contents of the writing are unclear.

decorative Ptolemaic Period (catalogue ground truth; text on object not legible enough to confirm) good
Materials Wood
Signs Unclear vertical ink/paint strokes (possibly hieroglyphic practice)

Connections

Found at Abusir
Materials Wood

Cross-references (2)

  • BKM-Accession 37.473E tier-2
  • BKM-Object 117122 tier-2
About this record's data
  • From the source institution — accession, description, dimensions, and dating are as catalogued by Brooklyn Museum — Egyptian, Classical, Ancient Near Eastern Art.
  • AI-inferred — the image-analysis panel (deities, names, signs) is machine-generated and may be wrong.
  • Approximate location — most map points are plotted at the site centroid, not the exact findspot.
  • Inferred links — cross-references marked with a match method other than explicit-source-field were matched by us, not stated by the source.