Description:
This brightly painted wood and polychrome mummiform shabti, probably coming from Deir el Medineh, has a round face with nicely modeled details, and wears a tripartite wig and a broad collar necklace. The hands, mostly hidden by the long wig, are crossed over the chest and are holding agricultural implements for work in the afterlife.
There are six horizontal bands of hieroglyphic text from the so-called shabti spell (spell 6 of the Book of the Dead).
What is remarkable about this piece, apart from the size, is the fact that the expected name of the owner is absent. This was meant to be written in the empty space in the first line. For this relatively rare phenomenon compare a parallel in the National Museum of Antiquities, Leiden, The Netherlands (Schneider (1977), part II, p. 52, no. 3.1.3.1; part III, pl. 16).
Egyptian women as well as men placed funerary figurines in their tombs. Often certain details of the figure and the text were adjusted to reflect gender differences, but sometimes only the name and title would indicate whether the owner was male or female. But occasionally a mistake was made.
On the shabti of the Lady of the House Maya the type of wig, the strands of hair across the forehead, the use of hair bands and braids, the carved and painted details of the face, and her title all attest that the owner was a woman, even though the scribe, in an apparent oversight, used masculine pronominal references in the text (Spanel (1996), p. 151-152; Silverman (1997), p. 252-255 and fig. 83b).
A similar error occurred on the shabti for the songstress of Amon Tentimentet, where both her titel and her appearance are clearly feminine, and yet the text uses the expressions "HE says", "as a MAN at HIS work", and "for HIM" (Aubert (2005), p. 80-81, no. 14). The shabti in Leiden, mentioned above, does not have a name, but the hairdress is clearly that of a woman; yet here too the masculine pronoun was used in the text.
However, our shabti takes this one step further and is therefore extremely exceptional. The scribe who wrote the text left all options open. If complete, the text would have read "The enlightened Osiris so-and-so, he says", or "... she says". But not knowing if a man or a woman would own the statuette in future, the scribe decided to write both the pronouns "she" and "he", leaving the choice of gender to be decided in the future.
All the parallels mentioned above are made of wood, brightly painted, and have a considerable size. They all seem to have been made in Deir el-Medina, which makes it possible that our shabti was also created there. As home to the workmen and artists who built and decorated the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings, Deir el-Medina was an unsurpassed atelier for funerary figurines (Spanel, p. 152).
Published:
Royal Athena Galleries, Art of the Ancient World, Vol XVIII, (2007), p. 81, no 219.
Bibliography:
Jacques F. Aubert - Liliane Aubert, Statuettes funéraires égyptiennes du Département des Monnaies, Médailles et Antiques (Paris, Éditions de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2005);
Hans D. Schneider, Shabtis - An Introduction to the History of Ancient Egyptian Funerary Statuettes. With a Catalogue of the Collection of Shabtis in the National Museum of Antiquities at Leiden (3 volumes, Leiden, Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, 1977);
David P. Silverman (ed.), Searching for Ancient Egypt. Art, Architecture, and Artifacts from the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (Dallas, Dallas Museum of Art; Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Museum; Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1997);
Donald B. Spanel, "Shabti of Maya", in Anne K. Capel, - Glenn E. Markoe (eds.), Mistress of the House, Mistress of Heaven. Women in Ancient Egypt (New York, Hudson Hills Press in association with Cincinnati Art Museum, 1996), p 151-152.
Dating:
New Kingdom, 19th - 20th dynasty, circa 1292 - 1070 B.C.
Size:
Height 24.8 cm.
Provenance:
US private collection P.A., New York (1908-2004), a UN diplomat who acquired the piece in Cairo in 1970; thence by descent; with Royal Athena Galleries, New York; private Virginia collection, acquired from the above in 2008; thereafter with Sands of Time Ancient Art, Washington DC.
Condition:
Expected minor pigment losses; a large crack in the back; otherwise intact and in very good condition overall with excellent, bright remaining polychrome in red, yellow, white, black, and some faint remnants of blue. A pin from a previous stand underneath.
SOLD
Stock number:
E1340