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.. Rock crystal, amethyst, and an unidentified stone, 17 1/4 in. (43.8 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Egypt Exploration Society , 26.160. (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.
Photograph of a beaded necklace laid out in a shallow curve, with dark blue/black beads forming a strand and a single large heart-shaped pendant at the center.
The image shows a necklace composed of many small, uniformly drilled beads strung along a cord, the majority appearing dark blue to black. At the center front is a prominent pendant shaped like a rounded heart/teardrop with a smooth polished surface and a reddish-brown tone (possibly a gemstone). The necklace lies on a neutral, tan display surface. No hieroglyphic, Greek, Coptic, or Arabic text is visible, and no cartouches or royal names are present. No deity iconography is visible beyond the general jewelry form. Visible materials include colored gemstones or glass-like beads; exact identification of each stone is not fully determinable from the image alone, though the presence of a red polished stone pendant is clear.
Connections
Cross-references (2)
- BKM-Accession 26.160 tier-2
- BKM-Object 3297 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.