Scarab Coffin
Description
Object Label: The scarab beetle lays its eggs in small balls of dung, which it sometimes moves into position with its forelegs. This action led to associating the scarab with the force that rolls the sun across the heavens. Because the word for scarab beetle in the Egyptian language contains the same consonants as the word for “to come into being,” the ancient Egyptians especially associated the scarab with the sun, when it newly comes into being every morning. Scarabs could therefore be mummified to make requests to the sun god. Caption: Scarab Coffin, 664–332 B.C.E.. Wood, animal remains, Coffin with Lid: 1 7/16 × 1 15/16 × 3 1/8 in. (3.6 × 5 × 8 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 37.1368Ea-c. (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.
A brown, ribbed object with a circular form, possibly a pottery piece.
The artifact features a ribbed texture and appears to be a fragment of pottery or a similar material. The object is circular with visible horizontal and vertical lines indicating sections or segmentation. The overall appearance suggests it is an ancient object, possibly a part of a larger piece.
Cross-references (2)
- BKM-Accession 37.1368Ea-c tier-2
- BKM-Object 117920 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.