Model of Ceremonial Mace Head
Description
Object Label: Foundation Deposits In addition to commissioning new buildings, Egyptian kings occasionally claimed existing structures such as temples or palaces as their own. The most common way for a king to do this was to substitute his own name for that of the original builder in the inscriptions. When a king commissioned a new structure, he buried objects in the four corners of the foundation to be certain that the gods would remember the true builder and that later kings could not find and reinscribe them. These so-called foundation deposits usually included plaques with the king’s name, as well as models of objects used to erect the building, such as grinders, hoes, and rockers needed to move large stones. Caption: Model of Ceremonial Mace Head, ca. 1938–1759 B.C.E.. Faience, 2 1/4 x Diam. 1 15/16 in. (5.7 x 5 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 59.199.2. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)
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.
Small blue faience object shaped like a hemispherical/pot-like mace head with a narrow cylindrical stem, photographed against a plain background.
The image shows a compact ceremonial-mace-head type form: a rounded, dome-like head in bright turquoise/blue with darker blue streaks and patches, set atop a straight, narrow metal pin/stem. The surface appears glossy and weathered with scattered lighter spots and areas of abrasion consistent with ceramic/faiance glaze wear. No carved hieroglyphs, cartouches, or figures are clearly visible on the photographed surface. There is no readable Greek, Coptic, or Arabic text. The catalogue’s subject—"Model of Ceremonial Mace Head"—is consistent with the overall silhouette (rounded mace head with a shaft), though the photo does not show diagnostic inscriptions or specific iconography.
Cross-references (2)
- BKM-Accession 59.199.2 tier-2
- BKM-Object 3677 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.