Female Birth-God
Description
Object Label: Amulets In the New Kingdom, amulets represented magic in miniature form. At that time, the Egyptians frequently wore amulets proclaiming their devotion to the cult of major deities such as Thoth, god of wisdom, or Hathor, an ancient goddess associated with music and love. These charms were intended to provide protection from specific dangers. Amulets of birth-gods, for example, were believed to protect women during pregnancy and childbirth and to watch over a newborn in the first years of life. In the Eighteenth Dynasty, certain amulets began to be placed within mummy bandages to guarantee life after death. The most common included wedjat-eyes, signifying the restoration of wholeness; tyt-amulets, emblems of the goddess Isis, who restored her dead husband Osiris to life; and flowers, traditional symbols of fertility. Beads inscribed with a person’s name ensured that the memory of the individual would survive throughout eternity. So-called heart scarabs, known since the Thirteenth Dynasty, are frequently found on New Kingdom mummies. The Egyptians believed that a deceased person’s fate would be determined by weighing his or her heart against the “Feather of Truth” on a divine balance. Texts carved on heart scarabs prevented the deceased’s heart from revealing anything negative during the weighing ritual. Caption: Female Birth-God, ca. 1539–1425 B.C.E.. Faience, 1 5/16 in. (3.4 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 37.965E. (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.
Small blue faience object shaped like a standing figure with a disk-like element at the head, shown in profile/front view.
The image shows a compact, sky-blue faience amulet-like piece photographed against a plain white background. The main form is a standing deity/figure with a large head element that resembles a seated/disk-like headdress or collar, and a striped or pleated body surface. The face area has incised/outlined features and a dark inset at the eye/mouth region. The back and edges are not fully visible, but the object appears to be a single molded piece with a flat base. No clear hieroglyphs or readable inscriptions are visible; any markings on the figure cannot be securely identified as specific Egyptian signs.
Cross-references (2)
- BKM-Accession 37.965E tier-2
- BKM-Object 4118 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.