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-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 human-headed lid, featuring hieroglyphic inscriptions.
This canopic jar is crafted from limestone and is topped with a human-headed lid, potentially representing one of the four sons of Horus. The front of the jar is inscribed with vertical hieroglyphic texts in a rectangular layout, typical of funerary artifacts. The jar's design and inscriptions suggest its use in storing the organs of the deceased during the mummification process. The style and composition are indicative of New Kingdom art with carefully carved features and inscriptions.
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.