Apis Bull Late Period to Ptolemaic PeriodEgypt
Description
Object Label: The Apis bull was the most prominent of the sacred animals. He was a living incarnation of the god Ptah. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus records how priests discovered each new Apis, recognizing it by its hide, which was “black with a white diamond on the forehead, a likeness of vulture wings on his back, double hairs on its tail, and a scarab-shaped mark under its tongue.” The forehead diamond and vulture wings are clear in this statuette. The Apis bull then lived as a god in a temple. After its death, the Apis was mummified, mourned, and buried with elaborate ceremony. Caption: Apis Bull, 664–30 B.C.E.. Bronze, 3 3/8 x 1 1/8 x 4 7/16 in. (8.6 x 2.9 x 11.2 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 05.397. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum (Gavin Ashworth, photographer))
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 05.397 tier-2
- BKM-Object 3225 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.