Hand Clutching an Olive Branch
Description
Talatat, olive branch. New Kingdom, Amarna Period, Dynasty 18, reign of Akhenaten, ca. 1353–1323 B.C. Limestone, paint. H. 8 11/16 in. (22 cm). Probably originally from: Amarna (Akhetaten). Subject: Hands, Olive Trees. Credit: Gift of Norbert Schimmel, 1981.
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.
Painted limestone relief fragment showing a hand holding or grasping a branch-like element, with stylized foliage above and painted detail lines.
The artifact is a rectangular limestone fragment with a largely worn/abraded surface. On the left side, a human hand is painted in reddish-brown tones, reaching up toward a diagonal, staff-like or stem element. Above and around the hand are blue-painted stylized leaves/flowers arranged in a cluster, and a diagonal blue-outlined form suggests a branch or olive-branch motif. On the right side of the fragment, the background is mostly plain limestone with only faint, worn marks and traces of paint; no clearly legible hieroglyphs are visible. The painted elements (blue and red/brown) and the presence of a grasped branch-like motif are consistent with the catalogue theme of a hand clutching an olive branch, though the exact shape of the plant is not fully preserved.
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.