Model Shell
Description
Object Label: The Egyptians believed they would need food and drink in the afterlife. Early Dynasty 12 burials commonly included large wooden models depicting offering bearers or people engaged in activities such as baking bread and brewing beer. Later, under Senwosret III, the large wooden models were replaced by small-scale replicas of food. These faience shells probably represented a variety of Red Sea snail, an ancient delicacy. Caption: Model Shell, ca. 1836–1700 B.C.E.. Faience, 1 3/16 x 1 7/8 in. (3 x 4.7 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Peter Sharrer, 82.170.2.
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, conical blue-green object with a rounded, knob-like top, photographed against a plain white background.
The image shows a single small artifact that appears uninscribed and undecorated. Its surface is mottled turquoise to bluish-green with darker speckling and weathering. The form is tapered, narrowing toward the bottom, with a rounded top that resembles a model shell or conical shell fragment, though no sculpted shell ridges or apertures are clearly discernible at this resolution. No painted designs, relief details, or fastening elements are visible. There is no legible hieroglyphic, Greek, Coptic, or Arabic text, and no cartouches or royal names are visible. The material looks consistent with a glazed ceramic (faience) based on the granular, glassy/turquoise appearance and pitted surface.
Cross-references (2)
- BKM-Accession 82.170.2 tier-2
- BKM-Object 3900 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.