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

Amulet of a cow?

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

Description

Amulet, cow (?). Ptolemaic Period, 306–30 B.C. Faience. From: Dendera, Northern Upper Egypt, Egypt. Excavation: EEF excavations, 1897–98. Credit: Gift of Egypt Exploration Fund, 1898.

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 dark, faience amulet shaped like a recumbent cow (or cow-associated form), shown in profile.

The object is a small, matte dark faience piece photographed against a light background. It appears as a stylized animal figure lying or crouched, with a rounded body and a distinct head projecting to the left; the neck and back are simplified into smooth contours. Surface decoration is minimal and worn/obscured, with no clearly legible hieroglyphs, cartouches, or text visible on this image. No explicit features identifying a specific deity (beyond the general cow symbolism) are unambiguously readable from the provided view.

decorative Ptolemaic Period (per catalogue) poor
Materials faience

Connections

Found at Dendera
Materials Faience
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.