Relief Representation of a Battle Scene
Description
Object Label: The walls of New Kingdom temples frequently show the king triumphing over Egypt's enemies. Such reliefs either depict idealized versions of actual historical events or serve as propaganda warning foreigners of the inevitable destruction that would follow acts of hostility against Egypt. Symbolically, these scenes represent the victory of Egyptian universal order over the forces of chaos living in foreign lands. In such battle scenes, the Egyptian army, as the defender of Ma'at, is invariably arranged in orderly groupings while the enemy scatters in disarray. This block has recently been identified as coming from a monumental wall relief commemorating a military victory in Syria by King Tutankhamun. On the accompanying reconstruction of the entire scene, we see a fundamental convention of Egyptian art: relative size implying relative importance. The king, who coordinates all attempts to preserve Ma 'at, is far larger than his chariot forces, infantry, and fan-bearers. Note how the Syrians lie in a confused mass under the ordered charge of the Egyptian chariots. Caption: Relief Representation of a Battle Scene, ca. 1332–1322 B.C.E.. Sandstone, pigment, 8 1/2 × 10 1/2 × 1 1/8 in. (21.6 × 26.7 × 2.9 cm) mount: 11 1/4 × 13 1/2 × 2 1/2 in. (28.6 × 34.3 × 6.4 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 77.130. (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 fragmentary relief depicting a person kneeling before a hanging animal.
The artifact is a fragment of a limestone relief featuring a scene with a person engaged in an activity involving a suspended animal, likely related to hunting or ritualistic preparation. The style is characteristic of depictions found in daily life scenes, with simplistic yet expressive figures carved in low relief.
Cross-references (2)
- BKM-Accession 77.130 tier-2
- BKM-Object 3863 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.