Sistrum (Rattle)
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
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 Egyptian sistrum/rattle with a human-faced figure at the top and a U-shaped frame with crossbar.
The object is a handheld bronze sistrum (rattle). A tall, straight handle rises to a top element resembling a male human head/face in relief with a small projecting crown or headdress-like form. At the very top, a U-shaped metal frame is held by two side loops, with a transverse bar across the middle; this would represent the moving component typical of a sistrum. The composition is vertically oriented with the handle forming the main axis. No clear hieroglyphic, Greek, Coptic, or Arabic text is visible on the image. No cartouches are visible. The overall condition appears worn/patinated but intact.
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.