Heart Scarab of Bapu
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: Heart Scarab of Bapu, ca. 1539–1075 B.C.E.. Jasper, 1 15/16 × 1 9/16 × 1 in. (4.9 × 4 × 2.5 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 37.480E. (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 green/black scarab-shaped amulet is shown from the front, with the back filled by incised bands of Egyptian-style hieroglyphs.
The object is a heart scarab/large scarab amulet with a rounded, shield-like central body and a raised rim around the top. The surface is dark green to black, with fine incised lines forming rows of hieroglyphic signs across the back/underside. The hieroglyphs are tightly packed in horizontal registers; individual sign forms are not clearly legible at this resolution. No clear cartouche, royal name, or specific deity figure is visible. No other scripts (Greek, Coptic, Arabic) are seen. The photo is studio-lit on a light background, and only the single artifact is present.
Cross-references (2)
- BKM-Accession 37.480E tier-2
- BKM-Object 4043 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.