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

False Door Stela

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

Description

Caption: False Door Stela, 6th century B.C.E.. Limestone, 11 15/16 × 9 7/16 × 2 15/16 in. (30.3 × 24 × 7.5 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 37.1354E.

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.

A carved limestone slab shows a rectangular offering/false-door frame with recessed inner rectangles and surrounding incised hieroglyph-like decoration.

The object appears as a stone stele featuring a large rectangular false-door motif: a thick outer frame enclosing successively smaller recessed rectangles, creating a deep doorway-like niche. Around and within the outer frame are numerous incised signs arranged in vertical columns on both the left and right sides; the signs are worn/abraded but clearly read as Egyptian hieroglyphic-style carvings rather than modern markings. No legible royal cartouche is confidently identifiable from the image resolution. No figures of specific deities are clearly discernible in the visible field; the iconography is dominated by the architectural false-door/serdab-like frame and surrounding inscriptions. A few isolated circular/oval and cross/line signs are visible but cannot be reliably assigned to specific determinatives or names. Overall carving and edges are intact though surface wear is present.

funerary Persian Period (per catalogue; specific date not reliably confirmable from image alone) good
Materials limestone (carved stone surface)
Signs Incised hieroglyphic signs (unreadable individual elements) ×30

Connections

Found at Memphis
Materials Limestone

Cross-references (2)

  • BKM-Accession 37.1354E tier-2
  • BKM-Object 117907 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.