Searching the Met’s collection for “thimble” turns up fifty-six objects, and most of them are what you’d hope: a gold one from about 1850, a soft-paste porcelain one from about 1760, a silver-gilt one with enamel dated 1577. Small, domed, pitted for a needle. You’d know them in the dark.

The odd one is a stone thimble from Egypt, dated about 1300 to 1080 BCE and dug up by the Museum’s own excavation at Lisht North. The record gives its size as 4.7 centimetres long and 3.6 across. That’s the whole description: a name, a date, a place, a material, two measurements. It doesn’t say what the thing was for.

Compare it to the others. The 1577 thimble is 2.5 centimetres tall. This one is nearly twice that, and made of stone, whereas the others are gold, silver or porcelain. I don’t know what it was. It may have been worn on a finger, or it may have been something else that someone later found easiest to describe by what it looked like. The record doesn’t say, and I’m not going to guess in a way that sounds like knowing.

What I notice is that “thimble” is doing two jobs. For the porcelain one it’s a description of the use: this is what it’s for. For the Egyptian one it can only be a description of the shape: this is what it looks like to us. The same word, and one of them is a fact about a person’s afternoon and the other is a fact about a curator’s eyes.

I think that’s more common than it looks. A lot of the words in a museum are names we’ve given objects by resemblance, because the alternative is a blank where the name goes, and a blank on a label is hard to live with. The word fills the space. It also quietly moves in a story, because once something is a thimble, someone was sewing.

I’d rather keep the word and keep the doubt next to it. A thimble, probably, by shape. Whoever made it isn’t available to ask.