Group of Large and Small Monkeys New Kingdom, Amarna PeriodTell el-Amarna, Egypt
Description
Object Label: The British archaeologist and Egyptologist Sir Flinders Petrie found at least twenty-three crudely modeled figures of monkeys in a dump at Amarna in 1891–92. Some of the figures play harps, lyres, or flutes. Others hold their young, eat or drink, and even drive chariots. These figures have been interpreted as popular caricatures of the royal family. If this was their true purpose, then acceptance of royal dogma, including respect for the king and the god Aten, was not nearly as complete as Akhenaten imagined. Caption: Group of Large and Small Monkeys, ca. 1352–1336 B.C.E.. Limestone, pigment, 3 1/8 x 2 1/4 in. (8 x 5.7 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Evangeline Wilbour Blashfield, Theodora Wilbour, and Victor Wilbour honoring the wishes of their mother, Charlotte Beebe Wilbour, as a memorial to their father, Charles Edwin Wilbour, 16.68. (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 16.68 tier-2
- BKM-Object 3139 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.