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Brooklyn Museum — Egyptian, Classical, Ancient Near Eastern Art · vessel

Squat Jar

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

Description

Object Label: Pottery Manufacture Available materials, construction technique, and even social status all played a role in the manufacture of pottery. Most ancient Egyptian towns had at least one skilled potter who served the entire community. Palaces, estates, and temples employed dozens of craftsmen to fashion luxury and ritual wares. Potters used two principal materials: alluvial silt (soil deposited by the floodwaters of the Nile) and soft desert shale called marl. Silt contains iron oxides and fires red; marl, rich in calcium carbonate, fires to a buff color. To make both clays more workable, potters added straw, crushed stone, or pulverized pottery. Potters constructed vessels by hand or on a wheel. Hand building involved shaping the clay manually and with simple tools. To create vessels on a wheel, artisans rotated the clay rapidly on a low, flat turntable and let centrifugal force pull it into shape. Spiral marks, evident on several examples in this case, indicate wheel manufacture. Caption: Squat Jar, ca. 1479–1400 B.C.E.. Clay, pigment, 4 1/2 x Diam. 4 13/16 in. (11.4 x 12.2 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 07.447.470. (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 ceramic vessel with a rounded body and decorated with horizontal bands.

The image showcases an ancient Egyptian ceramic pot with a wide, rounded body and a short neck. It features horizontal bands as decoration, typical of the pottery style used in everyday life in ancient Egypt. The texture and shape suggest it was likely used for storage. The vessel's simplistic design signifies utility over ornamentation, common in household vessels.

daily life unknown good
Materials ceramic

Connections

Materials Ceramic

Cross-references (2)

  • BKM-Accession 07.447.470 tier-2
  • BKM-Object 4218 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.