Canopic Jar and Lid (Depicting a Human)
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 Human), 664–525 B.C.E., or later. Limestone, 10 1/2 × Diam. 4 1/2 in. (26.7 × 11.4 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 37.896Ea-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 human-headed canopic jar lid surmounts a cylindrical jar body, carved in limestone and showing a face with stylized features.
The image shows a single carved limestone vessel with a rounded, human-like lid integrated with the jar body. The lid has a frontal human face with painted/relief-like features: a broad head, prominent eyebrows, almond-shaped eyes, a straight nose, and a defined mouth. Beneath the lid, the jar body is mostly plain except for an incised hieroglyphic inscription panel arranged in stacked lines, centered on the front. The inscription is clearly hieroglyphic in style but the individual signs are not fully legible at this resolution; no readable cartouche or royal name can be confirmed. No Greek, Coptic, or Arabic text is visible. No explicit deities are identifiable from the inscription marks with certainty from the image alone. Overall condition appears fair to good with surface wear on the lid and minor erosion consistent with age and handling.
Cross-references (2)
- BKM-Accession 37.896Ea-b tier-2
- BKM-Object 4109 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.