Relief of Mourning Women
Description
Object Label: New Kingdom funerals often featured female mourners wailing and gesturing dramatically. Although sometimes called “professional mourners,” more likely these local women joined the funeral procession to express solidarity and sorrow, and also to participate in a public event. The sloppy carving and indistinct lines show that the sculptor of this tomb relief was relatively unskilled, but he did successfully convey how ancient women demonstrated grief by throwing dust on their heads and even falling to the ground. The different shapes of the figures indicate different ages. Caption: Relief of Mourning Women, ca. 1319–1204 B.C.E.. Limestone, remains of pigment and stucco, 11 1/2 × 16 × 2 1/4 in. (29.2 × 40.6 × 5.7 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 37.31E. (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 carved limestone relief depicting a group of mourning figures.
The relief features a series of standing and kneeling figures, each displaying gestures of mourning with hands raised to their faces. The figures are carved in low relief, typical of Egyptian artistic style, with focus on detailing garments and expressions. Notable are the repeated postures that suggest a funeral or mourning scene.
Cross-references (2)
- BKM-Accession 37.31E tier-2
- BKM-Object 3942 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.