Signet Ring Bearing Cartouche of Tutankhamun
Description
Object Label: Rings The earliest Egyptian rings were purely decorative, but later rings came to carry significance. By the Eighteenth Dynasty of the New Kingdom, they were frequently inscribed with the name of a god, a king, or the owner. The most popular type was made of faience and bore the name of the reigning monarch. Archaeologists have discovered thousands of these simple, mold-made rings; they were probably distributed as mementos at religious or state celebrations. Other rings feature protective symbols, including the wedjat-eye. Wealthy members of Eighteenth Dynasty society often wore rings made of inlaid glass or semiprecious stones. Caption: Signet Ring Bearing Cartouche of Tutankhamun, ca. 1329–1322 B.C.E.. Faience, 13/16 × 1/2 × 3/4 in. (2 × 1.2 × 1.9 cm) mount: 7/8 × 1/2 × 1 1/2 in. (2.2 × 1.3 × 3.8 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 37.889E. (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.
A small blue faience signet ring or amuletic seal with an oval bezel engraved in dark lines, showing an arrangement of hieroglyph-like symbols inside an oval field.
The object appears as a compact, oval stamp/signet with a projecting/raised ring mount at the top edge (only partially visible). The oval face is filled with dark, incised or inlaid hieroglyphic marks arranged in a cartouche-like composition, though the individual signs are not sufficiently clear to read reliably. The outer bezel is smooth and the inner field contains multiple lines and shapes resembling Egyptian hieroglyphs. No clearly legible Greek, Coptic, or Arabic text is visible. No human figures or deities are shown in figural form; the only evidence of inscriptions are the hieroglyphic symbols on the oval face.
Cross-references (2)
- BKM-Accession 37.889E tier-2
- BKM-Object 4106 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.