Kitchen Scene
Description
Object Label: Amarna art frequently provides the modern viewer with scenes of everyday life in an Egyptian palace. This relief presents a highly detailed glimpse of the activities in the palace kitchen. At the far left are two vaulted bakehouses. The worker in the bakehouse on the right shields his face from the flames rising from the fire. Above this scene are the fragmentary remains of the royal brewery. At the center of the relief two men carry a huge wine jar, suspended in a net from a pole, through an open double door into a court. Two details in the court are particularly noteworthy: the small cupboard containing five pairs of sandals, evidently the property of the kitchen help, and the workman who sweeps the floor of the court with a short-handled broom. Caption: Kitchen Scene, ca. 1352–1336 B.C.E.. Limestone, pigment, 8 1/2 × 21 3/8 × 1 1/2 in. (21.6 × 54.3 × 3.8 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 62.149. (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 painted limestone panel preserves multiple figures in a continuous register, with surrounding blocks of red-brown hieroglyph-like signs and what appear to be architectural elements.
The image shows a rectangular limestone fragment with original surface and patchy paint (reddish-brown). Several human figures with arms raised or holding objects stand or move in profile across the lower register. Above and between figures are areas of incised or painted text/signs in dark red-brown, arranged in block-like boxes. One larger architectural motif with vertical rectangular forms appears toward the center-right, resembling built elements or openings. The right side includes a figure facing left near a tall vertical element. Overall, the composition reads as a multi-scene narrative panel rather than a single portrait. No clear royal cartouche is legible, and no explicit deity iconography (e.g., standard divine attributes) can be confidently identified from the available resolution.
Cross-references (2)
- BKM-Accession 62.149 tier-2
- BKM-Object 3723 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.