Jar with Boat Designs
Description
Object Label: Originally this pot was suspended with string through holes in the three handles. The three painted boats all include palm branches at the prow, what may be oars along the bottom, and two cabins on deck. Each cabin houses a female figure flanked by smaller males, possibly representing a goddess and her priests. The upraised arms and long skirt of the female figures resemble those on the slightly earlier terracotta statuette in a nearby case, but the heads look very different. Caption: Jar with Boat Designs, ca. 3450–3350 B.C.E.. Clay, pigment, 6 7/8 x greatest diam. 8 1/4 in. (17.5 x 20.9 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 09.889.400. (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.
Photographed terracotta jar with painted, dark motifs resembling boats/boat-like vessels and decorative bands, plus circular/loom-like geometric elements.
The object is a round-bodied ceramic jar with a wide mouth and a short neck. Across the visible field are multiple painted, dark designs: a large boat-like motif with a central vertical element and what appear to be two raised/curved sides, enclosed by a curved rim or sail-like shapes. Surrounding the central scene are geometric elements including a dotted or segmented circular rosette-like pattern and a band of repeated short marks (possibly rows of dashes) that run along the lower and upper parts of the painted register. No readable true hieroglyphic text is clearly preserved; the marks look primarily decorative rather than alphabetic/cartouche lettering. No deities or royal names are identifiable. No Greek/Coptic/Arabic text is visible. The pigment appears brown/black over a tan clay surface.
Cross-references (2)
- BKM-Accession 09.889.400 tier-2
- BKM-Object 3276 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.