Bound Nubian Prisoner
Description
Object Label: The ancient Egyptians thought of their country as the center of the ordered universe. They saw foreigners as emanations of chaos that had to be controlled or even annihilated. Since the Egyptians believed that images of things might be magically equated with the things themselves, ritually damaging and burying representations of bound foreigners (here a man from Nubia, a neighboring culture) was meant to guarantee dominion over potential enemies and control over external threats to order. Catalogue description: Culture Egyptian Caption: Egyptian. Bound Nubian Prisoner, ca. 1979–1801 B.C.E.. Limestone, 4 7/16 x 1 3/4 x 1 3/8 in. (11.3 x 4.5 x 3.5 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 73.23. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)
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, partially preserved ancient Egyptian statuette of a human figure.
The artifact is a slender statuette depicting a human figure with simple features. The head is proportionately large with a headdress or hair styled in a rounded form. The body lacks detailed carving, with only basic outlines visible. The figure is mounted on a modern support, indicating that it may have been part of a larger composition. The style appears rough, with an emphasis on simplicity rather than intricate detail.
Cross-references (2)
- BKM-Accession 73.23 tier-2
- BKM-Object 3817 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.