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

Clay jar sealing impressed faintly with name of Khasekhemwy

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

Description

Sealing, jar. Early Dynastic Period, Dynasty 2, reign of Khasekhemui, ca. 2650 B.C. Clay (unfired). Probably from: Umm el-Qaab, Tomb of Khasekhemwy. Credit: Gift of Egypt Exploration Fund, 1901.

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 broken, unfired clay jar sealing bearing faint impressed Egyptian signs, including what appears to be a royal name within a damaged rectangular field.

The object is a fragment of unfired clay with a flattened face. On the main face, an impressed seal design is visible as shallow, worn hieroglyphic-like strokes arranged in a band across the top portion and a larger horizontal register near the center. The lower edge is chipped and uneven, with multiple losses that obscure parts of the sign forms. No clear cartouche outline can be confidently traced from the worn impressions, but the arrangement and style are consistent with an Early Dynastic jar-sealing inscription. No Greek/Coptic/Arabic text is visible. A small red/black handwritten museum number is present on the right-lower area, but it is not part of the ancient inscription.

hieroglyphic only Early Dynastic Period (as catalogued) fragmentary
Royals Khasekhemwy (name not clearly legible from this image; only general consistency with a royal-name sealing)
Materials clay (unfired)
Signs rectangular sign field/register with impressed strokes (individual signs unclear) ×6
Visible text "Faint impressed hieroglyphic signs; specific characters not reliably readable due to wear and breakage."

Inscriptions (1)

Inscription #1 AI reading of the photograph

Visible text (machine reading)

Faint impressed hieroglyphic signs; specific characters not reliably readable due to wear and breakage.

Connections

Materials Clay
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.