Hippopotamus Egypt
Description
Object Label: The standing hippopotamus represented Seth, the brother of Osiris who murdered him and then claimed his throne. It was thus a symbol of chaos. Egyptians controlled negative forces in the tomb by including a hippopotamus with the legs purposely broken. The lotus flowers drawn on its flanks reflect the animal as it would be seen standing in the Nile among the natural vegetation. Caption: Hippopotamus, ca. 1938–1539 B.C.E.. Faience, 4 5/16 × 2 15/16 × 7 3/16 in., 2 lb. (11 × 7.5 × 18.3 cm, 0.91kg). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Ernest Erickson Foundation, Inc., 86.226.2. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)
AI image analysis GPT-5.4-nano
A machine reading of the photograph made Jul 2026: deities, names, signs and a description as the model saw them. Not curatorial; treat it as the model's best reading, not authority.
Cross-references (2)
- BKM-Accession 86.226.2 tier-2
- BKM-Object 4255 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.