Heart Amulet with Head of a Scarab
Description
Object Label: The heart was generally the only organ left inside the human mummy. Ancient Egyptians believed that the heart was the seat of one’s consciousness, and that it was weighed against the feather of truth during Osiris’s judgment of the deceased. If the scale remained in balance, the deceased was accepted into the afterlife. To ensure success, a heart scarab was placed close to the heart of the mummy. Its inscriptions asked the heart to support the deceased during judgment. The unusual shape of this amulet represents an animal’s heart—the shape of the hieroglyph for “heart”—with the head of a scarab beetle, a symbol of regeneration. Caption: Heart Amulet with Head of a Scarab, ca. 1539–1190 B.C.E.. Jade (probably), 9/16 x 1 1/16 x 1 7/8 in. (1.5 x 2.7 x 4.8 cm) Weight: 0.1 lb. (31.7 g). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 37.492E. (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.
A stone artifact shaped like a pomegranate or similar fruit.
The artifact is a small, stone object possibly representing a pomegranate. It is smooth and has a rounded, tapering shape with a crown-like top, typical of fruit representations in Egyptian art. Its surface appears polished with a slight patina, possibly from aging or context of use.
Cross-references (2)
- BKM-Accession 37.492E tier-2
- BKM-Object 117136 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.