Storage Vessel with Simple Incised Decoration
Description
Object Label: Pottery Manufacture Available materials, construction technique, and even social status all played a role in the manufacture of pottery. Most ancient Egyptian towns had at least one skilled potter who served the entire community. Palaces, estates, and temples employed dozens of craftsmen to fashion luxury and ritual wares. Potters used two principal materials: alluvial silt (soil deposited by the floodwaters of the Nile) and soft desert shale called marl. Silt contains iron oxides and fires red; marl, rich in calcium carbonate, fires to a buff color. To make both clays more workable, potters added straw, crushed stone, or pulverized pottery. Potters constructed vessels by hand or on a wheel. Hand building involved shaping the clay manually and with simple tools. To create vessels on a wheel, artisans rotated the clay rapidly on a low, flat turntable and let centrifugal force pull it into shape. Spiral marks, evident on several examples in this case, indicate wheel manufacture. Caption: Storage Vessel with Simple Incised Decoration, ca. 1539–1425 B.C.E.. Clay, 19 15/16 x Diam. 8 9/16 in. (50.6 x 21.7 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 07.447.444. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)
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.
An ancient Egyptian pottery vessel with a narrow neck and bulbous body.
The artifact is a pottery vessel characterized by its bulbous body and narrow neck, with a slight lip at the top. The surface appears to have a smooth finish with a single visible crack or imperfection. Its simple, utilitarian design suggests its use in daily life for storage or transport of liquids. The vessel lacks decoration but shows signs of age and wear.
Connections
Cross-references (2)
- BKM-Accession 07.447.444 tier-2
- BKM-Object 4210 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.