Inner Cartonnage of Gautseshenu
Description
Object Label: This cartonnage provides a Who’s Who of Egyptian gods, both funerary and non-funerary. They include Osiris, lord of the afterlife; Anubis, the jackal-headed god, conducting the dead to the next world; and the Four Sons of Horus, who protected specific mummified organs of the body. Among the sky gods are Khepri, the winged beetle; Sokar, in his boat; and the hawk-headed form of Horus with outstretched wings. Thoth, the god of intellectual activity, takes the form of an ibis bird. This mummy’s name, Gautseshenu, means “bouquet of lotuses.” The Egyptian word seshen (“lotus”) is the origin of the name Susan. Provenance: Culture Egyptian Caption: Egyptian. Inner Cartonnage of Gautseshenu, ca. 945–712 B.C.E.. Linen, gesso, pigment, and human remains, 65 1/4 x 16 1/2 x 11 1/2 in. (165.7 x 41.9 x 29.2 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 34.1223. (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.
Painted, human-shaped funerary cartonnage (mummy-cover style) with a stylized wig and broad collar, shown frontally in a museum display.
The image shows a full-height, anthropoid inner cartonnage figure standing upright in a glass case. The head has a smooth, painted human face with large almond eyes and a composed expression, covered by a blue-and-gold headdress/wig that frames the forehead and ears. The figure wears a wide ceremonial collar with layered bead/feather-like patterns in gold, blue, and other colors. Below the collar, the body is densely painted with vertical registers of colored scenes and ornaments (including repeated motif blocks and possibly offering/ritual imagery) separated by bands and lines. At the bottom portion, the paint continues into pedestal/ground-like patterning. The overall style is consistent with Third Intermediate Period funerary cartonnage, though specific textual captions are not clearly legible at this resolution. No clearly readable Greek/Coptic/Arabic text is visible. Materials visible are inferred from appearance: a painted, gessoed surface with colored pigments over a textile (cartonnage). Human remains are not directly visible. No royal names/cartouches can be confidently read from the image.
Cross-references (2)
- BKM-Accession 34.1223 tier-2
- BKM-Object 3345 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.