Scribe's Exercise Board with Hieratic Text
Description
Object Label: Hieratic, the cursive form of hieroglyphs, was used most commonly for writing literature, business and personal letters, and record keeping. The text is an extract from “The Instructions of King Amunemhat,” composed nearly four hundred years earlier. The king urges his son: “Be on your guard against all who are subordinate to you . . . trust no brother, know no friend, make no intimates.” This “teaching” belonged to a common literary genre of classic texts often used to practice writing. Caption: Scribe's Exercise Board with Hieratic Text, ca. 1514–1493 B.C.E.. Wood, ink, 6 3/16 x 10 15/16 x 3/16 in. (15.7 x 27.8 x 0.4 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, 16.119.
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.
A fragment of an ancient Egyptian artifact with hieratic script.
The artifact is a piece of papyrus or similar material displaying several lines of hieratic script, a cursive form of Egyptian hieroglyphs used primarily for religious texts and administrative documents. The text is inscribed in horizontal rows with faded black ink, alongside some red ink used as rubrication to highlight sections. The artifact appears aged, with visible deterioration and cracks, indicating its ancient origin.
Cross-references (2)
- BKM-Accession 16.119 tier-2
- BKM-Object 3147 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.