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-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 display of two ancient Egyptian bead necklaces.
The image shows two necklaces composed of beads, likely made from faience or semi-precious stones like amethyst. The purple hue suggests amethyst or a similar material. The necklaces are meticulously strung, indicating skilled craftsmanship. They are set against a plain background, likely for display purposes in a museum setting.
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.