Metropolitan Museum of Art — Egyptian Art (Open Access) · vessel

Fired clay jar sealing with ostrich hieroglyphs

Source of record: Metropolitan Museum of Art — Egyptian Art (Open Access) — catalogued by the holding institution. View the original record →

Description

Clay (fired)

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.

A fragmentary clay artifact with intricate carvings resembling early writing signs.

This artifact is a broken piece of clay with a series of carved symbols resembling early writing or proto-writing. The surface features linear motifs that may indicate it was used for record-keeping or an early form of communication. The style appears crude and the edges are irregular, suggesting it may be much older and possibly fragments of a larger piece.

unclear unknown fragmentary
Materials clay
Signs early script sign ×10

Connections

Materials Clay

Cross-references (4)

  • Wikidata-Q Q116243349 tier-1
  • Collection-QID Q160236 tier-2 (wikidata-mediated)
  • Inventory-Number 20.2.51 tier-2 (wikidata-mediated)
  • MET-Object 545778 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.