Baboon
Description
Object Label: Baboons warm their stomachs by sitting up, raising their paws, and facing the sun each morning, a behavior the Egyptians interpreted as solar worship. Baboon figures were included in burials to assist in the deceased’s rebirth. Wild baboons had all but disappeared from around the Nile Valley by the Middle Kingdom, when this figure was made. Female baboons were placid enough to be domesticated and kept as pets, but they had to be imported at great cost from central Africa, making them exotic luxuries and conspicuous status symbols. Caption: Baboon, ca. 1938–1700 B.C.E.. Faience, 2 1/2 x 1 1/2 x 1 3/4 in. (6.4 x 3.8 x 4.4 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 59.199.3.
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 small stone statue of a squatting baboon.
The artifact depicts a baboon in a squatting position, carved from stone. The style is simplistic with minimal detail, capturing the animal in a natural pose. The surface shows wear, suggesting age. The absence of additional ornamental or hieroglyphic embellishments indicates it may have served a simple symbolic or decorative purpose.
Cross-references (2)
- BKM-Accession 59.199.3 tier-2
- BKM-Object 3678 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.