Amulet of a Left Eye
New Kingdom–Late Period (about 1550–332 BCE)
Ancient Egyptian
Glass; 1.5 × 3.1 × 0.9 cm (5/8 × 1 1/4 × 3/8 in.)
The Art Institute of Chicago, purchased with funds provided by Henry H. Getty and Charles L. Hutchinson, 1894.945
This eye is beautifully crafted of an oval-shaped gather of pure-white, opaque glass that was formed around a wire or a very small rod, which left a hole when it was removed. A piece of jet-black glass was fused to the center of the piercing to create the pupil and iris. Finally, a continuous trail of bright blue glass was overlaid on the top edge of the white surface, starting from the outer canthus and moving toward the inner canthus and back again, the ends of the blue trail raised and overlapping slightly where they met at the wire or rod around which the eye was formed. On the lower side of the eye the blue was more cleanly fused to the white layer and perhaps polished smooth, whereas on the upper side the blue trail retains its original, rounded profile. The glossy surface of the eye convincingly mimics the moisture of a real eye.1
This glass eye resembles the eye inlays constructed for stone and wood statues, coffins, and cartonnage mummy masks that were made of an almond-shaped piece of pure-white travertine into which a round of black obsidian was inset.[1] That style of inlay was sometimes surrounded by a copper alloy frame in the shape of the eye rim and cosmetic line.[2] In some cases, a piece of clear crystal was overlaid on the stone, giving the eye a reflective quality that is startingly lifelike. Such inlays are known from the late Old Kingdom onward; they may have been the inspiration for the glass eye amulets of the New Kingdom and later.2
The early range of dates proposed for the manufacture of this eye is based on other New Kingdom objects, especially the hoop-shaped earrings (cats. 62–63) that show a similar technique of overlaying and fusing layers of glass.3
Additional Views of Cat. 89
Side of cat. 89.
Back of cat. 89.
For more on amulets, see About Amulets.4
Provenance
Reverend Chauncey Murch (1859–1907), Luxor, Egypt; sold to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1894.5
Publication History
Thomas George Allen, A Handbook of the Egyptian Collection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923), 16.
6
- The resemblance led Thomas George Allen to comment that this object was “originally inlaid in a mummiform coffin of perhaps the Graeco-Roman period.” Thomas George Allen, A Handbook of the Egyptian Collection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923), 16. However, the piercing indicates that it is an amulet that was strung on some sort of cord. For examples of eyes that were originally inlaid, see Robert S. Bianchi and Birgit Schlick-Nolte, “Catalogue of Ancient Egyptian Glass (EG-1–43),” in Reflections on Ancient Glass from the Borowski Collection, ed. Robert S. Bianchi, exh. cat. (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2002), 128–29, cats. EG-7a–b, 8a–b.
- For an example of this technique, see Martin Fitzenreiter, Christian E. Loeben, Dietrich Raue, Uta Wallenstein, and Johannes Auenmüller, Gegossene Götter: Metallhandwerk und Massenproduktion im alten Ägypten (Rahden: Verlag Marie Leidorf, 2014), 276–77.
Emily Teeter, “Cat. 89 Amulet of a Left Eye,” in (Art Institute of Chicago, 2025), https://doi.org/10.53269/9780865593213/91.
© 2025 by The Art Institute of Chicago. This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license: creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
