Canopic Jar and Lid (Depicting a Baboon)
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 Baboon), 664–525 B.C.E., or later. Limestone, 10 × Diam. 4 1/2 in. (25.4 × 11.4 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 37.897Ea-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 featuring the face of a baboon, above a rectangular panel of incised hieroglyphs.
The object is a small, roughly cylindrical canopic jar shape with a separate, rounded lid. The lid is modeled in the likeness of a baboon: a forward-facing muzzle, simplified facial features, and a rounded head form. The jar body has an incised hieroglyphic text arranged in a vertical rectangular panel centered on the front; additional smaller lines appear around/within the panel, but the signs are worn and not fully legible from the image resolution. No Greek, Coptic, or Arabic script is visible. No explicit royal name cartouches are clearly readable. The surface shows age-related wear and abrasions consistent with limestone sculpture.
Connections
Cross-references (2)
- BKM-Accession 37.897Ea-b tier-2
- BKM-Object 4110 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.