Metropolitan Museum of Art — Egyptian Art (Open Access) · statue
Hippopotamus
Description
Faience
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.
The image depicts a faience hippopotamus figure with decorative patterns.
The artifact is a small hippopotamus figure crafted from faience, a material often used in ancient Egyptian art. It features a blue-green glaze with painted details, depicting floral and geometric patterns. Notable features include its lifelike posture and finely detailed surface decorations, which are typical of faience figures. Such figures were often symbolic, possibly representing fertility or rebirth.
decorative
Middle Kingdom
fragmentary
Materials
faience
Cross-references (4)
- Wikidata-Q Q116235371 tier-1
- Collection-QID Q160236 tier-2 (wikidata-mediated)
- Inventory-Number 32.1.230 tier-2 (wikidata-mediated)
- MET-Object 545564 tier-2 (wikidata-mediated)
About this record's data
- From the source institution — accession, description, dimensions, and dating are as catalogued by Metropolitan Museum of Art — Egyptian Art (Open Access).
- 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.