Bottle Imitating Leather Water Container
Description
Object Label: Pottery Decoration After a pottery vessel had dried to a leathery consistency, it was ready to be decorated and fired. The simplest technique was to apply a layer of clay, paint, and water—called slip—on the pot’s drab exterior. Other methods included incising designs with pointed objects, polishing the surface with a cloth, or using a stone to burnish it, creating an attractive sheen. Painted decorations appear on pottery throughout the Eighteenth Dynasty. Early designs included thin lines and long pendant triangles. Around the time of Thutmose III, artists invented a pastel blue paint that eventually dominated pottery decoration. A rare type of pot made exclusively for tombs was painted to reproduce the appearance of stones such as breccia. After decorating the vessel, the potter placed it in a kiln for firing. Potters wrapped cords around large unfired vessels to prevent them from collapsing. These ropes burned away during firing, but traces of them remain on the sides of some pots. Caption: Bottle Imitating Leather Water Container, ca. 1479–1400 B.C.E.. Clay, 6 1/4 x 4 1/2 x 3 1/4 in. (15.8 x 11.5 x 8.2 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, 16.580.128. (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 terracotta/orange clay bottle with a narrow neck and rounded body, fitted with two small strap-like lugs on either side, shown from the front against a museum background.
The object appears to be a handmade clay (terracotta) bottle. It has a wide, rounded globular body that narrows into a short, tapered neck, ending in a small, slightly flared mouth. Two small circular openings or perforations sit on the upper sides of the body, aligned left and right, suggesting attachment points for a strap or for imitating handle features of a water container. The surface is uniformly orange/red with visible firing and wear; no painted decoration or relief ornament is apparent. No hieroglyphic, Greek, Coptic, or Arabic text is visible on the photograph, and no cartouches or royal titulary are identifiable. No explicit iconography of deities is present in the visible form.
Cross-references (2)
- BKM-Accession 16.580.128 tier-2
- BKM-Object 3180 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.