Donation Stela Third Intermediate PeriodMendes, Egypt
Description
Object Label: This stela, which once stood in or near a temple, commemorates a donation of land to that temple, and its text promises dire punishments to anyone misappropriating the land. In modern times the media have made much of Egyptian curses, especially that of King Tutankhamun's tomb. That curse was in fact an invention of a newspaper reporter, inspired by the sudden death of Lord Carnarvon, the sponsor of the archaeological expedition, several months after he attended the opening of the tomb in 1922. Nevertheless, the ancient Egyptians did aim curses against tomb and temple violators, and they believed it was magic (heqa) in the form of written and spoken words that made those curses possible and effective. Caption: Donation Stela, ca. 804 B.C.E.. Limestone, 20 1/2 x 12 3/4 x 2 1/2 in., 41 lb. (52.1 x 32.4 x 6.4 cm, 18.6kg). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 67.118. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)
AI image analysis GPT-5.4-nano
A machine reading of the photograph made Jul 2026: deities, names, signs and a description as the model saw them. Not curatorial; treat it as the model's best reading, not authority.
Cross-references (2)
- BKM-Accession 67.118 tier-2
- BKM-Object 3762 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.