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

Mummy Mask of a Man

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

Description

Object Label: Egyptian men living under Roman rule used mummy masks that combined contemporary and traditional elements. This example features wavy locks of black hair, a Roman fashion at this time. The protective winged scarab on top decorates a traditional headdress adorned with lappets containing images of the deceased’s mummy before Osiris, god of the dead. The face is unlined and ageless, also a traditional element. Caption: Mummy Mask of a Man, early 1st century C.E.. Stucco, gold leaf, pigment, 20 x 12 x 7 1/4 in., 7.5 lb. (50.8 x 30.5 x 18.4 cm, 3.4kg). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 72.57. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

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 gilded and painted funerary mummy mask front face of a male, with wig-like black hair and a gold-painted face, bordered by colored collar and patterned shoulder panels.

The image shows a rectangular, anthropoid-style Egyptian mummy mask/man-face viewed straight-on. The face is modeled in gold/yellow with a calm expression, outlined eyebrows, dark painted eyes, and a short mouth. The hair is indicated by dark blue/black curls across the top of the forehead and around the brow line. A broad, gold-painted collar frames the neck and shoulders, decorated with alternating bands and registers featuring painted figures and symbols in red, blue, and white on a light ground. Along both sides of the collar/shoulder area are structured decorative panels with repeated horizontal bands; a central vertical element is present in the chest/collar area. At the top of the mask, a rounded gold element sits on the headdress/wig surface (possibly a finial). No clearly legible hieroglyphic text, cartouches, or alphabetic scripts can be read in the provided image at this resolution.

funerary Roman Period (as catalogued) good
Deities unknown (no clearly identifiable deity names readable)
Materials gold leaf/metallic gold (face and major areas)paint/pigment (blue/red/black/white details)stucco or plaster-like surface (base under paint)

Connections

Deities Osiris
Materials Limestone

Cross-references (2)

  • BKM-Accession 72.57 tier-2
  • BKM-Object 3813 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.