Model Rocker
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 Rocker, ca. 1478–1458 B.C.E.. Wood, 2 × 3 1/2 × 9 in. (5.1 × 8.9 × 22.9 cm) mount: 2 × 9 × 3 1/2 in. (5.1 × 22.9 × 8.9 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Egypt Exploration Fund, 02.226. (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.
Wooden, boat-shaped ancient Egyptian “model rocker” with a series of crossbars and traces of incised marks along its body.
The image shows a small, wedge/boat-like wooden object composed of two long side panels forming a shallow hull. Several evenly spaced wooden crossbars/rollers run between the sides, giving the piece the appearance of a simple rocker or sled-like toy/device. The surface is weathered and worn; there are small perforations/pinholes along the side panel edges and along the top surface where the crossbars attach. Along the right-hand portion of the upper surface there are faint, localized carved/inscribed lines that resemble a short row of small marks, but the details are not clear enough to reliably read as specific hieroglyphs. No clearly identifiable deities or royal cartouches are visible. No Greek, Coptic, or Arabic text is apparent in the provided view. Overall form and material match the museum’s catalogue description of a wooden New Kingdom “Model Rocker,” though the exact nature of the faint markings cannot be confirmed.
Inscriptions (1)
Visible text (machine reading)
Cross-references (2)
- BKM-Accession 02.226 tier-2
- BKM-Object 3199 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.