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Brooklyn Museum — Egyptian, Classical, Ancient Near Eastern Art · statue

Palette with Two Stylized Bird Heads

Source of record: Brooklyn Museum — Egyptian, Classical, Ancient Near Eastern Art — catalogued by the holding institution. View the original record →

Description

Object Label: The Egyptians ground galena and mixed it with animal fat to make the eyeliner called kohl. Palettes like this one are known from earliest times in Egypt and were used as a base for the grinding process. Caption: Palette with Two Stylized Bird Heads, ca. 3500–3100 B.C.E.. Greywacke, 5 1/16 x 3/8 x 11 5/8 in. (12.9 x 1.0 x 29.5 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Evangeline Wilbour Blashfield, Theodora Wilbour, and Victor Wilbour honoring the wishes of their mother, Charlotte Beebe Wilbour, as a memorial to their father, Charles Edwin Wilbour, 16.580.126. (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.

A small, leaf-shaped stone cosmetic palette with two stylized bird heads formed at the top. The bird heads face outward with painted or inlaid eye-like circles.

The object is shown front-on against a light background. Its body tapers to a point at the bottom like a teardrop/leaf. At the top, two rounded bird heads are fused side-by-side, separated by a shallow central groove; both have prominent beak-like projections and circular eye markings (appearing as small pale/yellowish dots). The remaining surface appears largely undecorated aside from wear/scuffing and faint discoloration consistent with age and handling; no clear pigments besides the small eye/marker dots are visible. No hieroglyphs or cartouches are visible, and no Greek/Coptic/Arabic text appears on the image. The catalogue description as a greywacke palette with two stylized bird heads matches the bird-head form visible in the image.

decorative Predynastic Period, late Naqada II to Naqada III (per catalogue) good
Materials stone (grey-green/grey surface consistent with greywacke per catalogue)

Connections

Found at Gebelein (Krokodilopolis)

Cross-references (2)

  • BKM-Accession 16.580.126 tier-2
  • BKM-Object 3179 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.