Shrew Mummy Early Roman PeriodAbydos, Egypt
Description
Object Label: Shrews and ichneumons both prey on snakes and therefore won the Egyptians’ admiration and worship. Though snakes could turn their powers to protecting kings and queens, serpents also threatened the sun god Re on his journey through the next world. Egyptian religion made room for both the positive and negative aspects of certain animals. The shrew mummy bundle shows that more than one animal was sometimes included in one package. Caption: Shrew Mummy, 30 B.C.E. – 50 C.E.. Animal remains (Crocidura flavescens, C. nana, C. olivieri, or C. religiosa), linen, 1 1/4 × 8 9/16 × 1 3/8 in. (3.2 × 21.7 × 3.5 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Egypt Exploration Fund, 14.653. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)
AI image analysis GPT-5.4-nano
A machine reading of the photograph made Jul 2026: deities, names, signs and a description as the model saw them. Not curatorial; treat it as the model's best reading, not authority.
Cross-references (2)
- BKM-Accession 14.653 tier-2
- BKM-Object 8645 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.