Stela of Pepy
Description
Object Label: Many stelae discovered at Abydos were originally left in tombs with other items intended to help the deceased achieve immortality. British archaeologists working there early in the twentieth century found this stela of a man called Pepy—a traditional name—in a Middle Kingdom tomb. Although the text reveals little about Pepy, a streak of individualism seems to have run through his household: of the eleven relatives and servants depicted here, five have names that appear in no other works from more than three thousand years of Egyptian history. Caption: Stela of Pepy, ca. 1836–1700 B.C.E.. Limestone, 14 x 8 3/4 x 5 in. (35.6 x 22.2 x 12.7 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Egypt Exploration Society, 12.911.1. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)
The same text in other collections
Linked by shared inventory number
(BKM-Object 3081).
Each record below describes this same artifact or text from a different angle.
- Brooklyn 12.911.1 PNM textAbydos
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 limestone stela is covered on multiple registers with incised Egyptian hieroglyphs, arranged in dense blocks across the face. No clear deity iconography or royal cartouche is legible from this image resolution.
The object appears to be a rectangular stela of weathered limestone, with its top edge slightly rounded. The front surface is filled with incised hieroglyphic text in horizontal rows/registers, separated only by the hierarchy of line spacing rather than by clear figure panels. The writing is largely continuous across the visible area; individual signs are visible but not reliably legible at this resolution. No sculpted human or divine figure is clearly discernible; the decoration is predominantly textual. There is no visible Greek, Coptic, or Arabic script. The catalogue title identifies it as a "Stela of Pepy" from the Middle Kingdom, but the image does not show a clearly readable cartouche/name to confirm Pepy, so the identification cannot be verified visually. The damaged/lossy condition and dense layout prevent confident extraction of an inscription excerpt.
Cross-references (3)
- BKM-Accession 12.911.1 tier-2
- BKM-Object 3081 tier-2
- PNM-Object pnm:83886611 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.