Home › Browse › BKM › Object 19961
Brooklyn Museum — Egyptian, Classical, Ancient Near Eastern Art · other

Model Grinder Inscribed for Amunhotep II

Source of record: Brooklyn Museum — Egyptian, Classical, Ancient Near Eastern Art — catalogued by the holding institution. View the original record →

Description

Object Label: Foundation Deposits In addition to commissioning new buildings, Egyptian kings occasionally claimed existing structures such as temples or palaces as their own. The most common way for a king to do this was to substitute his own name for that of the original builder in the inscriptions. When a king commissioned a new structure, he buried objects in the four corners of the foundation to be certain that the gods would remember the true builder and that later kings could not find and reinscribe them. These so-called foundation deposits usually included plaques with the king’s name, as well as models of objects used to erect the building, such as grinders, hoes, and rockers needed to move large stones. Caption: Model Grinder Inscribed for Amunhotep II, ca. 1426–1400 B.C.E.. Egyptian alabaster, 1 3/8 × 11/16 × 3 1/8 in. (3.5 × 1.8 × 7.9 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 36.621.2. (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.

An ancient Egyptian carved stone with inscriptions.

The artifact is an oval-shaped stone with engraved hieroglyphics. The carvings are clear and well-preserved, featuring a mixture of symbols including possibly a cartouche. The style and engraving suggest a functional use, likely a personal or ceremonial object.

hieroglyphic only unknown good
Materials limestone
Signs cartouche

Connections

Found at Egypt
Materials Limestone

Cross-references (2)

  • BKM-Accession 36.621.2 tier-2
  • BKM-Object 3409 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.