Vulture Headdress Inlay (100–1 BCE): Art, History and Details

Vulture Headdress Inlay (100–1 BCE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The vulture headdress was worn by goddesses and queens. This inlay in the form of a vulture headdress has more than 100 stones: lapis lazuli (dark blue), turquoise (light blue), petrified wood (red), and an unidentified white stone painstakingly cut to shape and separated by thin plates of gold. Body, wing, and tail feathers are carefully distinguished in minute detail.

Object facts

• Title: Vulture Headdress Inlay
• Date: 100–1 BCE
• Culture: Egypt, Greco-Roman period (332 BCE–395 CE), Ptolemaic dynasty (305–30 BCE)
• Type: Jewelry
• Technique: gold and semi-precious stones
• Dimensions: Overall: 3 x 2.8 cm (1 3/16 x 1 1/8 in.)
• Collection: Egypt - Ptolemaic Dynasty
• Department: Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern Art
• Accession number: 1920.1991

A detail from the museum

When creating this headdress, artisans used numerous semiprecious stones with inset partitions to keep them separate. To ensure that the stones would stay in place, a resin-like material was used as an adhesive.

Collection credit

Gift of the John Huntington Art and Polytechnic Trust

Further reading listed by the museum

• The Illustrated London News (3 November 1928)
• Bates, Kenneth F. The Enamelist. Cleveland and New York: World Pub. Co, 1967.
• Cooney, John D. "Three Minor Masterpieces of Egyptian Art." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 62, no. 1 (1975)

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.