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

Shrew Coffin of Pahapy

Brooklyn Museum — Egyptian, Classical, Ancient Near Eastern Art, acc. 37.411Ea. Public domain (CC0). Copy archived by egyptianinscriptions.org with attribution; original at the holding institution.

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Accession: 37.411Ea
Find spot: Lower Egypt, Egypt, Egypt approx. site location
Period: Late Period to Ptolemaic Period
Dynasty: Dynasty 26, or later
Date: 664–30 B.C.E.
Date range: 664 BCE – 30 BCE
Materials: ['Bronze']
Repository: Brooklyn Museum
At source: View original →

Cite & export

Brooklyn Museum — Egyptian, Classical, Ancient Near Eastern Art, Shrew Coffin of Pahapy (37.411Ea). Egyptian Inscriptions Database. https://egyptianinscriptions.org/object/18571

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Description

Object Label: Bronze coffins added value to votive mummies and possibly were thought to help influence the god to help the petitioner. A man named Pahapy used this coffin for a shrew mummy. The Egyptians regarded shrews as guardians of the sun god Re and included requests to him in many types of animal cemeteries. Caption: Shrew Coffin of Pahapy, 664–30 B.C.E.. Bronze, 2 1/8 x 1 1/2 x 3 1/2 in., 0.6 lb. (5.4 x 3.8 x 8.9 cm, 0.25kg). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 37.411Ea. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum (Gavin Ashworth, photographer))

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 small bronze funerary/coffin-form object with a shrew-shaped figure mounted on top, facing right.

The image shows a dark bronze object with the form of a rectangular coffin base. On top of the base is a cast animal figure (shrew-like) with head to the right and legs visible, standing in a naturalistic pose. The front and side faces of the base are decorated with incised or chiseled linear designs and what appear to be hieroglyphic-style strokes/signs, though individual characters are not fully legible at this resolution. The surface has casting seams and age patina; edges are worn and some details are obscured. No Greek, Coptic, or Arabic text is visible, and no clearly readable royal cartouche is discernible.

funerary Late Period to Ptolemaic Period (consistent with catalogue; specific dating unclear from image alone). good

Materials bronze (dark patinated metal)

Signs Incised hieroglyphic-style linear signs (unreadable at this resolution) ×8

Connections

Found at Lower Egypt

Deities Ra

Cross-references (2)

BKM-Accession 37.411Ea tier-2
BKM-Object 117064 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.