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

Falcon-Headed Sun-God

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

Description

Object Label: Egyptian religion frequently adopted a mulitplicity of approaches to explain or represent different aspects of a single divine concept. The sun god, for instance, had a morning aspect called Khepri, commonly depicted as a scarab beetle pushing the sun disk across the heavens much as a beetle rolls a ball of dung across the desert floor. The noontime sun was Re or Re-Horakhty, often shown as a falcon or falcon-headed man with a sun disk on his head. Atum, who personified the sun that set over the western horizon to travel through the underworld, could be represented in many guises, including those of a human-headed cobra, a ram-headed man, or a weary old man. Caption: Falcon-Headed Sun-God, ca. 100–30 B.C.E.. Bronze, gold, 4 15/16 in. (12.6 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 51.147.1. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

AI image analysis GPT-4o-2024-08-06

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

An anthropomorphic figure with a large head holds a smaller object or figure.

The artifact depicts a humanoid figure with a distinctively large round head. The figure is interacting with a smaller, less defined object or figure. This composition suggests symbolic importance, possibly reflecting artistic or cultural motifs from a certain Egyptian period. The artwork shows signs of wear, with visible chipping and color erosion.

decorative unclear fragmentary
Materials metalstone

Connections

Deities Ra
Materials StoneBronzeGoldMetal

Cross-references (2)

  • BKM-Accession 51.147.1 tier-2
  • BKM-Object 3560 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.