Whip Handle Inscribed with Cartouche of Amunhotep IV
Description
Object Label: Tools Egyptian workers, including artisans, farmers, and fishermen, required a wide variety of specialized tools. Woodworkers employed axes that had copper or bronze blades lashed to wooden handles with leather. Carpenters produced smooth surfaces with copper chisels, often with serrated edges. Tanners used broad, flat knives to cut strips of leather for sandals, harnesses, and whips, which they then pierced with metal awls. Field hands cut grain with curved sickles fitted with small flint blades. Fishermen relied on metal hooks with tiny barbs, much like their modern-day equivalents. Officials used siphons to inspect the liquid contents of vessels without breaking through the protective mud seals. Caption: Whip Handle Inscribed with Cartouche of Amunhotep IV, ca. 1539–1292 B.C.E.. Wood, pigment?, 1 5/8 × 1 3/4 × 12 in. (4.1 × 4.4 × 30.5 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 37.952E. (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.
A dark wooden whip handle (or similar staff-like implement) is shown in profile, with a long incised/painted register of hieroglyph-like marks along its upper surface.
The image shows a long, curved whip handle with a rounded left end and a thicker right end. Along the top of the handle runs a continuous band containing what appear to be incised and/or painted strokes resembling hieroglyphic signs. The interior of the band is light-toned compared to the dark handle, suggesting pigment and/or shallow engraving. No clearly legible full cartouche is resolved at this image resolution; only the presence of inscribed symbols is evident. The surrounding background is museum display lighting with the object mounted on a stand; no additional inscriptions in Greek/Coptic/Arabic are visible.
Cross-references (2)
- BKM-Accession 37.952E tier-2
- BKM-Object 4117 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.