Metropolitan Museum of Art — Egyptian Art (Open Access) · vessel

Jar

Source of record: Metropolitan Museum of Art — Egyptian Art (Open Access) — catalogued by the holding institution. View the original record →

Description

Predynastic Period, ca. 3850–2960 B.C. Pottery. From: Cemetery R, Tomb R18A, Abadiya, Northern Upper Egypt, Egypt. Excavation: EEF excavations 1898–99. Credit: Gift of Egypt Exploration Fund, 1899.

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 large, plain cream-colored ceramic jar with a rounded body and a narrow neck.

The image shows a single storage jar (amphora-like) photographed against a neutral background. The jar has a rounded, bulbous body that tapers slightly toward the bottom, with a short, narrow neck and a thickened rim at the top. The surface appears to be hand-made or lightly finished, with small chips, pitting, and discoloration consistent with age. Near the lower body there are a few faint, small incised or stamped marks resembling short lines/glyph-like scratches, but no clearly readable full hieroglyphic text is visible at this resolution. No painted decoration, cartouches, or legible inscriptions are apparent. No modern labels or Greek/Coptic/Arabic text are visible; a small red/gray accession or inventory marking is present near the base but it is not legible as script.

daily life Predynastic Period (ground-truth catalogue), though exact date cannot be confirmed from image alone poor
Materials pottery/ceramic
Signs faint incised/stamped marks (unidentified) ×3
Visible text "Unclear, only small faint incised marks near lower body; no readable hieroglyphs."

Connections

Found at Abadiya
About this record's data
  • From the source institution — accession, description, dimensions, and dating are as catalogued by Metropolitan Museum of Art — Egyptian Art (Open Access).
  • 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.