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-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 limestone canopic jar with a rounded lid carved in low relief, showing a hawk-like face on top.
The object appears to be a canopic jar (cylindrical body with a domed, separate lid). The lid bears a carved, symmetrical facial motif resembling a hawk’s head with prominent brow/eye shapes; a small beak-like projection is suggested but not fully clear. The jar body is decorated with an inset rectangular panel of closely spaced hieroglyphs in shallow relief, arranged in multiple horizontal lines, with additional small signs bordering/within the panel. No explicit royal cartouche is clearly legible at this image resolution. The surface shows age-related wear and minor chips/erosion, but the general form and relief carving remain visible. No Greek/Coptic/Arabic text is visible.
Inscriptions (1)
Visible text (machine reading)
Connections
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.