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.. Amethyst, stone, faience, 24 in. (61 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Egypt Exploration Society , 26.46.
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 simple necklace with two strands of small, evenly spaced purple-toned beads and no visible inscriptions or cartouches.
The image shows a necklace laid against a light background. Two parallel strands of beads hang in a U-shape from a central top point, forming the visible loop. The beads appear small, rounded, and uniform in size, in a purple/lavender color consistent with amethyst or similar stone or glassy material. No hieroglyphic, Greek, Coptic, or Arabic text is visible. No divine figures or royal names/cartouches can be identified from the image. Only the bead material and general bead shape are visible; clasp or stringing material is not clearly shown.
Cross-references (2)
- BKM-Accession 26.46 tier-2
- BKM-Object 3294 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.