Weight in the Form of a Hippopotamus Head (c. 1540–1296 BCE): Art, History and Details

Weight in the Form of a Hippopotamus Head (c. 1540–1296 BCE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Sensuously carved and polished to a silky luster, this weight takes the form of a hippopotamus head. Eyes, ears, and nostrils ae modeled in relief; the mouth is closed. The flat underside provides a surface on which to rest the object. This hippo head weighs 62.1 grams, roughly three-quarters of a deben, a unit of weight in ancient Egypt. As such it does not correspond to any of the more usual subdivisions of the deben, although similar examples are known. In fact it is an inter-standard weight, representing eight seniu or two-thirds of a deben, and is equivalent of an Aegean unit of 62.1 grams.

Object facts

• Title: Weight in the Form of a Hippopotamus Head
• Date: c. 1540–1296 BCE
• Culture: Egypt, New Kingdom (1540–1069 BCE), Dynasty 18
• Type: Tools and Equipment
• Technique: hematite
• Dimensions: Overall: 2.2 x 3 x 4.2 cm (7/8 x 1 3/16 x 1 5/8 in.)
• Collection: Egypt - New Kingdom
• Department: Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern Art
• Accession number: 1992.114

A detail from the museum

The word hippopotamus comes from the ancient Greek for "river horse" (ἱπποπόταμος).

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Turner, Evan H. “Selected 1991 Acquisitions.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 79, no. 2 (1992).
• Turner, Evan H. “The Year in Review for 1992.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 80, no. 2 (February 1993): 38–79.
• Berman, Lawrence M., and Kenneth J. Bohač. Catalogue of Egyptian Art: The Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1999

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.