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

Cylinder seal

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

Description

Old Kingdom, Dynasty 4, ca. 2649–2100 B.C. Gray stone. l. 1.4 cm (9/16 in). From: Egypt. Credit: Purchase, Edward S. Harkness Gift, 1926.

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.

A small cylindrical/rounded stone seal carved in low relief with an encircled eye/oval motif and short horizontal bands of incised marks.

The object appears as a dark gray stone cylinder seal with a vertically oriented face of carved iconography. In the center is a round/oval motif framed by an arc-like shape, resembling an eye-like or symbolic form rather than a clearly legible hieroglyph or royal name. Below and around the central motif are faint, horizontally arranged incisions and additional small marks, but the overall signs are too blurred to securely identify as specific hieroglyphs. No clear Egyptian cartouche, royal titulary, Greek, Coptic, or Arabic text is visible. The carving style is consistent with seal engraving, but specific deities cannot be confirmed from the image quality.

decorative Old Kingdom (catalogue ground truth; carving/signs not clear enough for independent dating) fragmentary
Materials gray stone
Signs undetermined eye-like/oval symbol undetermined horizontal incised bands ×2

Connections

Materials Gray Stone
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.