Pair of Clappers in Form of Human Hands
Description
Object Label: Wood, Bone, and Ivory in the New Kingdom Egyptian artists were resourceful in overcoming the problems of working with difficult materials to make the objects seen here. Egyptian trees, such as acacia, sycamore, and tamarisk, are too small to produce large planks. Carpenters working with native woods thus had to develop complicated joinery techniques to build large objects like coffins and furniture. For expensive luxury items they used timbers such as ebony, cedar, and juniper, imported from Nubia and Punt to the south and Syria and Lebanon to the northeast. Ancient craftsmen used tools that would be familiar to modern carpenters, including adzes, chisels, reamers, and saws. Many ancient Egyptian wooden objects left in tombs as funerary offerings have survived remarkably well. Undisturbed tombs maintain extremely stable climatic conditions, slowing the effects of repeated expansion and contraction that are so damaging to wood. Egypt’s relatively dry climate also discourages the growth of mold, insects, and microorganisms that feed on wood. Ancient Egyptian ivory used for carving came from the tusks of elephants and hippopotami. Elephants had probably disappeared from Egypt by the end of the Predynastic Period (circa 3100 B.C.E.), so their ivory had to be imported from Nubia. Hippopotami remained common in the lower Nile Valley until the seventeenth century C.E. Some antiquities mistakenly said to be made of ivory are actually made of the bones or antlers of cattle, sheep, goats, and antelopes. Egyptians used the often ideally shaped leg bones of these animals to create the handles of tools or weapons. Caption: Pair of Clappers in Form of Human Hands, ca. 1539–1190 B.C.E.. Ivory, 49.58.1: 1 5/16 x 7 3/8 in. (3.3 x 18.8 cm) 49.58.2: 1 5/16 x 7 5/16 in. (3.3 x 18.5 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 49.58.1-.2. (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.
Two curved, hand-shaped ivory clappers/implements are shown from above, each formed as a pair of human hands with the fingers rendered in relief.
The image displays two similar objects placed one above the other. Each object is a single curved form shaped like a human hand (or hands) with distinct finger segments extending toward the right. On the upper object, shallow incised/relief bands and small patterned marks appear near the base/palm area, including a small grid-like or diagonal motif; comparable decorative incisions are also present near the base of the lower object. The surfaces appear pale and smooth with scuffs consistent with ivory or a closely related pale hard material. No readable hieroglyphic characters, cartouches, or inscriptions can be confidently discerned beyond non-specific incised decoration. No visible Greek/Coptic/Arabic text is present.
Connections
Cross-references (2)
- BKM-Accession 49.58.1-.2 tier-2
- BKM-Object 3538 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.