Falcon-Headed Sun-God
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-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.
Bronze-gold plated small figure of a human-bodied deity with a falcon-like head (or headpiece) holding a long staff/rod and a broad element at the chest/upper body; surface wear reveals dark patina and exposed metal.
The object shows a standing, anthropomorphic form with black/dark patinated metal surfaces and a gold-colored area on the head, chest/upper torso, and the top of the legs/feet. The head appears to be shaped like a bird/falcon head or a falcon headdress, with a beak-like projection and painted/gilded facial details. The deity’s arms are raised: one hand grasps a long vertical staff/rod; the other arm appears bent inward toward the torso, with a smaller gold-colored element at the upper chest. The body is narrow with a stepped/striated collar or belt-like band near the lower torso, and a pointed base element below. No legible inscription is visible in the image; there are no clearly readable hieroglyphs, and no Greek/Coptic/Arabic text is apparent. The catalogued title “Falcon-Headed Sun-God” is broadly consistent with the falcon-like head/appearance of a solar deity, though specific iconographic identifiers (e.g., exact sun disk or the precise god name) are not securely readable from this image alone.
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.