Princess Sobeknakht Suckling a Prince
Description
Object Label: Beginning in the Middle Kingdom, craftsmen demonstrated great skill in designing and manufacturing metal statuary. This copper statuette, representing a woman suckling a male child, is considered among the finest of these sculptures. The inscription on the base identifies the subject as the "hereditary noblewoman" Sobeknakht; her fillet and uraeus-cobra show that she is a princess. The figure may have been commissioned to celebrate the birth of a prince, to signal a reigning king's devotion to his mother, or to reflect Sobeknakht's wish for divine help in conceiving a child who would become Egypt's king. Caption: Princess Sobeknakht Suckling a Prince, ca. 1700–after 1630 B.C.E.. Copper alloy, 4 x 2 3/4 x 3 1/4 in. (10.2 x 7 x 8.3 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 43.137. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)
The same text in other collections
Linked by shared inventory number
(BKM-Object 3463).
Each record below describes this same artifact or text from a different angle.
- Brooklyn 43.137 PNM text
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 bronze/copper-alloy seated female figure holding an infant or child against her lap in a nursing gesture on a flat base.
The image shows a dark, patinated metal sculpture: a woman seated upright on a rectangular/oval flat base. Her head is covered by a long, draped headcloth that frames the face, which has almond-shaped eyes and a calm, frontal expression. Both arms are positioned inward as if cradling a small child/infant near the chest, with the child’s body angled across her lap. The overall pose strongly resembles the “suckling” iconography used for royal or elite women in Egyptian art. No clear hieroglyphs, cartouches, or inscriptions are visible on the figure or base in this view. No overt deity attributes (e.g., horned crown, specific divine regalia) are identifiable from the available details. The object’s surface is consistent with cast metal and age-related corrosion/patina. The catalogue’s identification as “Princess Sobeknakht Suckling a Prince” is plausible given the nursing gesture, but the specific name “Sobeknakht” cannot be confirmed from the image because no readable text or cartouche is present.
Connections
Cross-references (3)
- BKM-Accession 43.137 tier-2
- BKM-Object 3463 tier-2
- PNM-Object pnm:83889233 tier-2 (inventory-match)
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.