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-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 baboon-headed lid, featuring an inscription on the front.
The artifact is a canopic jar from ancient Egypt characterized by a lid shaped like the head of a baboon, representing one of the four sons of Horus. The jar is made of stone and features vertical hieroglyphic inscriptions on the front. The style and craftsmanship suggest it may originate from the New Kingdom period. The jar is well-preserved with clear etchings.
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.