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

Sealing

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

Description

Middle Kingdom, Dynasty 12–13, ca. 1981–1640 B.C. Mud. From: Cemetery, Lisht North, Memphite Region, Egypt. Excavation: MMA excavations, 1920–22. Credit: Rogers Fund and Edward S. Harkness Gift, 1922.

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, dark mud sealing fragment in the form of a rectangular/rounded-taboid piece with a molded impression on its front face.

The object appears to be a hand-sized mud sealing with a thick, trapezoid/rectangular outline and irregular breaks along the top and edges, consistent with a fragment. The surface shows compacted, stippled mud texture. On the lower/front area there is a clearly impressed design within a shallow rounded/arch-shaped border, but the individual hieroglyphic signs are too worn or indistinct to read confidently at this resolution. No identifiable royal cartouche, deity figure, or clear sign list can be confirmed. There is no visible Greek, Coptic, or Arabic text. No pigment traces are clearly discernible; the material reads visually as dried mud/terracotta-like clay.

funerary Middle Kingdom (as catalogued); exact reign/date unclear from the visible impression. fragmentary
Materials mud (dried clay)
Signs unclear impressed hieroglyphic/sign group within arched border ×3
Visible text "Impressed sign group within a rounded border; characters too indistinct to transcribe reliably."

Inscriptions (1)

Inscription #1 AI reading of the photograph

Visible text (machine reading)

Impressed sign group within a rounded border; characters too indistinct to transcribe reliably.

Connections

Found at Lisht
Materials Mud
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.