Bracelets of Nimlot

Said to be from Sais, the western Nile Delta, Egypt
22nd Dynasty, around 940 BC

The son of king Sheshonq I, founder of the 22nd Dynasty

The archaeologist Pierre Montet (1885-1966) found some remarkable jewellery in the burials of the Egyptian kings of the Twenty-first to Twenty-third Dynasties, in the royal cemetery at Tanis. Most of this material is now in the Cairo Museum, but The British Museum possesses this pair of bracelets, that almost certainly came from a mummy.

The bracelets were made in the Third Intermediate Period. Each bracelet is made of two segments of sheet gold, hinged together and fastened with a retractable pin. The principal decoration is a figure of the god Horus the child, usually known by his Greek name, Harpokrates. He is depicted as a royal child, squatting on a lotus flower and holding a sceptre. On his head is a moon disc, either side of which is a large gold serpent with a sun disc on its head (uraeus). The rest of the bracelet was probably inlaid with red or blue glass.

E.R. Russmann, Eternal Egypt: masterworks of (University of California Press, 2001)

C.A.R. Andrews, Ancient Egyptian jewellery (London, The British Museum Press, 1996)