Canopic Jar and Lid (Depicting a Hawk)
Description
Object Label: Canopic jars first appeared in the tomb of Hetepheres, the mother of Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid. They were intended to hold the separately mummified internal organs. The middle-class examples of canopic jars, which first appeared seven hundred years later, are often dummies like these, never hollowed out to hold the organs, but still included in the tomb. Canopic jars demonstrate the development of a custom at a royal cemetery that was then adopted in a cheaper form by the middle class. Caption: Canopic Jar and Lid (Depicting a Hawk), 664–525 B.C.E., or later. Limestone, 10 1/2 × Diam. 5 in. (26.7 × 12.7 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 37.895Ea-b. (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 canopic jar with a falcon-headed lid, featuring inscriptions.
The artifact is a canopic jar crafted from limestone, characterized by a falcon head as the lid. The body of the jar features hieroglyphic inscriptions which are vertically aligned. These jars were typically used for storing the organs of the deceased as part of ancient Egyptian burial practices. The style and craftsmanship suggest careful attention to detail, typical of religious or funerary items.
Cross-references (2)
- BKM-Accession 37.895Ea-b tier-2
- BKM-Object 4108 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.