Sistrum (Rattle) Ptolemaic PeriodEgypt
Description
Object Label: The human face with cow’s ears and horns on the sistrum’s handle represents the goddess Hathor, who personifies heaven and motherhood. The pairs of holes originally held rods with metal disks or squares that produced sound when shaken. Egyptian myths suggest that enraged gods and goddesses became pacified at hearing the sounds of the sistrum. As a symbol of Hathor appeased, the sistrum came to be used in rituals and ceremonies for Hathor, Bastet, and other deities. Caption: Sistrum (Rattle), 332–30 B.C.E.. Bronze, 10 3/16 x 2 11/16 x 1 5/16 in. (25.9 x 6.9 x 3.4 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 37.583E. (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 37.583E tier-2
- BKM-Object 117224 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.