Metropolitan Museum of Art — Egyptian Art (Open Access) · vessel

Mud jar sealing

Source of record: Metropolitan Museum of Art — Egyptian Art (Open Access) — catalogued by the holding institution. View the original record →

Description

Sealing, jar. Predynastic, Late Naqada III–Early Dynastic Period, ca. 3200–2650 B.C. Clay, mud. From: Tomb 414, Tomb 414, Tarkhan, Fayum Entrance Area, Egypt. Excavation: BSAE excavations 1911-1913. Credit: Gift of The Egyptian Research Account and British School of Archaeology in Egypt, 1912.

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 roughly rectangular, broken piece of baked/turned clay with raised relief impressions and cutouts consistent with a mud jar sealing fragment.

The image shows a small, irregular, broken ceramic/mud-clay fragment photographed against a plain light background. One face contains several shallow, blocky relief elements and depressions arranged in a way that resembles stamp/mark impressions typical of mud jar sealings; the opposite side appears plain or more abraded. No clear cartouche, royal name, or recognizable standardized hieroglyph shapes are legible at this resolution. There are no visible modern inscriptions or Greek/Coptic/Arabic text. Overall preservation is fragmentary, with edges and corners broken and surface pitting/erosion consistent with age or post-excavation wear.

decorative Predynastic, Late Naqada III–Early Dynastic Period (as catalogued; exact dating not independently confirmable from the image). fragmentary
Materials claymud

Connections

Found at Tarkhan
Materials ClayMud
About this record's data
  • From the source institution — accession, description, dimensions, and dating are as catalogued by Metropolitan Museum of Art — Egyptian Art (Open Access).
  • 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.