Amulet of a Heart
New Kingdom, Dynasty 18 (about 1550–1295 BCE)
Ancient Egyptian
Glass; 2.1 × 1.9 × 0.6 cm (7/8 × 3/4 × 1/4 in.)
The Art Institute of Chicago, purchased with funds provided by Henry H. Getty and Charles L. Hutchinson, 1894.855
This amulet represents the human heart, the two projections at the sides being stylized renderings of aortas. It was made of glass gathered on a small rod or wire. When the rod was withdrawn, a hole from the top to the bottom was created, allowing the amulet to be strung.[1] The glass was flattened and pinched into shape.[2] The underlying blue glass was covered with trails of yellow and white that were marvered smooth.1
In ancient Egypt, the heart, rather than the brain, was believed to be the seat of the soul and of reasoning, probably because it made an audible sound associated with consciousness, whereas the brain did not. In the funerary context, the heart was the representative of a person’s deeds and moral standing. It was weighed on a balance scale against the goddess Maat, the personification of truth, in order to determine whether the deceased could be declared “justified” or “true of voice,” and thus be permitted to enter into the state of immortality. According to Book of the Dead Spell 30B, the heart was to give testimony before the gods that would ensure the deceased’s access to the blessed state. The spell also contains the plea from the deceased for the heart to not give false testimony, a telling comment about a possible conflict between a person and their soul.[3]2
Additional View of Cat. 88
Back of cat. 88.
For more on amulets, see About Amulets.3
Provenance
Reverend Chauncey Murch (1859–1907), Luxor, Egypt; sold to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1894.4
Publication History
Thomas George Allen, A Handbook of the Egyptian Collection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923), 123.
5
- According to Sidney Goldstein, these heart amulets could also be “formed on a flat surface out of a solid wad of glass, subsequently drilled.” Sidney M. Goldstein, Pre-Roman and Early Roman Glass in the Corning Museum of Glass (Corning, NY: Corning Museum of Glass, 1979), 79.
- For a reference to the use of pincers, see Birgit Schlick-Nolte, “Glass—From the Beginning to the End of the Amarna Period,” in In the Light of Amarna: 100 Years of the Nefertiti Discovery, ed. Friederike Seyfried, exh. cat. (Berlin: Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung, 2012), 113.
- Thomas George Allen, trans., The Egyptian Book of the Dead or Going Forth by Day: Ideas of the Ancient Egyptians Concerning the Hereafter as Expressed in Their Own Terms, Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization 37 (Chicago: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 1974), 40.
Emily Teeter, “Cat. 88 Amulet of a Heart,” in Ancient Egyptian Art at the Art Institute of Chicago by Emily Teeter and Ashley F. Arico, ed. Ashley F. Arico (Art Institute of Chicago, 2025), https://doi.org/10.53269/9780865593213/90.
© 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/.
