Necklace
Description
Object Label: Middle Kingdom Jewelry Gracious taste, arresting design, and technical mastery of materials characterize Middle Kingdom jewelry. Jewelers elevated their craft to a level of artistic accomplishment unrivaled in Egyptian history. They refrained from excess, choosing simple, clean forms and understated color patterns. For instance, unlike flamboyant examples from the later New Kingdom, Middle Kingdom necklaces were usually monochromatic and almost never included beads of more than three colors. The most expensive jewelry featured beads made of gold; because it never tarnishes, gold was called the “flesh of the gods” and conveyed immortality. Jewelers of the Middle Kingdom also relied on certain attractive semiprecious stones that had appeared only sporadically in the Old Kingdom. Red carnelian represented blood’s life-giving properties, and green turquoise symbolized vegetation and fertility and thus resurrection. Purple amethyst and pale blue anhydrite, however, seem to have had no magical powers and were admired solely for their visual appeal. Caption: Necklace, ca. 1938–1759 B.C.E.. Carnelian, faience, Length: 23 1/4 in. (59 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Egypt Exploration Society , 26.161. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)
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 beaded necklace is shown lying on a display surface, composed of alternating turquoise/blue and red bead segments with a plain red pendant near the bottom.
The image depicts a necklace laid flat against a neutral brown/orange background. It consists of many small, rounded beads strung in repeating color groups (predominantly blue/turquoise with red accents), forming a single loop. At the lower right of the loop there is a larger, smooth, reddish-pink pendant or bead element. No hieroglyphic inscriptions, cartouches, or textual marks are visible. No deity iconography is apparent; the design is purely ornamental with beadwork and a single pendant element.
Connections
Cross-references (2)
- BKM-Accession 26.161 tier-2
- BKM-Object 3298 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.