I am writing this week’s blog about the second part of
Ken’s course The Funerary Culture of the
Ancient Egyptians, the topic being ‘Funerary Figures’. I hope I can do this
justice after last week’s very eloquent contribution by the Reverend Jim
Collins, who was able to offer an insight from a ‘professional’ point of view!
We started with an interesting, and some might say, uncomfortable, look at the
possibility of a very short-lived trend of human sacrifice during the First Dynasty, a subject also touched on in last
Monday’s episode of Egypt’s Unexplained Files on the History
Channel. The evidence for this comes from the tomb of Hor-Aha at Abydos (fig.
1) whose burial was accompanied by a number of subsidiary burials of men who
apparently died at the same time and were buried with their own grave goods
(Morris 2007). The whole area was roofed as one and covered in a sand mound.
The Egyptians quickly realised that bumping off servants, although great for
the deceased king, was probably not such a good idea for those left behind and
something different had to be planned to provide for the afterlife.
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| Fig. 1: Plan of burial complex of Hor-Aha, courtesy of https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ museums-static/digitalegypt/abydos/abydostombhoraha.html |
During the Fourth and Fifth Dynasties, we begin to see
stone servant figures being included in the tombs of the elite. These are usually
made of limestone, which can be painted and represent single figures either
grinding grain or brewing beer, less common are ones baking or doing butchery.
Occasional ones are shown stone working or producing pottery. By far, the largest corpus are
those relating to food production, which leads to the conclusion that these
were being produced to aid the deceased in having sustenance for the afterlife.
Figure 2 is an example of a butcher found in the tomb of Ny-kau-Inpu at Giza
thought to date from the Fifth Dynasty. The statue is in its original state
with the exception of the knife, which has been restored. This figure shows a
high standard of craftsmanship as the gap between the legs and the arms has
been made, something that is hard to do when working in stone when one slip of
the chisel could ruin the whole piece.
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| Fig. 2: OIM 10626, courtesy of The Oriental Institute of Chicago |
The stone figures were
gradually replaced by wooden ones, which were easier to manufacture. Not only
were servant figures included in the tomb, but also wooden statues of the tomb
owner, which could be used to house the kꜣ
(an aspect of the soul), should anything happen to the body. W688 is one
such and is shown in fig. 3. Luckily, Ken and Sam Powell have located the
missing leg and base and the item has been sent to Cardiff University Conservation Department for restoration. The Egypt Centre actually has over 100 elements from wooden servant figures, including the figures, numerous arms, legs, bases and oars, which are in the process of
being painstakingly matched
up.
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| Fig. 3: Wooden figure of a tomb owner (W688) |
Moving into the First Intermediate Period, dozens of these
figures could be found in a single burial and groups of figures began to be included.
The quality of the workmanship varies greatly from really exquisite figures
such as W434 (fig. 4) to
more basic examples like W436 (fig. 5) as the masses began to believe
that an afterlife was available not only to the king and the elite. Although
the most popular figure groups related to food production, many burials
included models of boats, which through magic would enable the deceased to
travel in the afterlife. These may enable the deceased to undertake a
pilgrimage to Abydos, the cult centre of Osiris, and may also be connected with
the journey of Ra across the sky in his two boats—one for the night and one for
the day—in which he would be accompanied by the deceased.
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| Fig. 4: Finely carved tomb figure (W434) |
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| Fig. 5: Crudely carved tomb figure (W436) |
Some of the Middle Kingdom tomb models are very
elaborate indeed. Perhaps the best known are those from the tomb of Meketre
discovered by Herbert Winlock at Thebes in 1920. Although the tomb had been robbed, these
models survived as they had been placed in a separate room that the robbers had
missed. The models were split between the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New
York and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo where they can be seen. Figure 6 is the
model granary, but others can be seen by visiting https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/545281.
I really would urge you to take the time to have a look, the workmanship and
detail is outstanding and would have enabled Meketre to enjoy all the comforts
of his earthly life in the next, even including his garden.
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| Fig. 6. Model granary MMA 20.3.11, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art |
The next part of the lecture focused on shabtis,
ushabtis, and shawabtis. This was particularly eye-opening to me as I was
familiar with the different terms, but like, I suspect, many of my fellow
students, did not realise that the terms were not quite so interchangeable and
meant, if albeit slightly, different things. They were first introduced around
2100 BCE in the First Intermediate Period and continued to be popular until the
end of Pharaonic Egypt, only ceasing to be used in Roman times (Janes 2002; Schneider 1977; Stewart 1995). Shabti is used to name those
from the late Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom. Shawabti is also from the New
Kingdom but more specifically occasionally in the Seventeenth Dynasty and in
particular the Nineteenth Dynasty at Deir el-Medina (fig. 7). Ushabti refers to
those from the Twenty-first Dynasty to the end of Ptolemaic times. The
etymologies for the words are an interesting subject in themselves. šbty or šwbty are used for all three. The word for food or meals is šꜣbw,
to command or appoint is šꜣ, and wšb to answer, so it is not hard to find
a connection. Another alternative is šwꜣb,
meaning Persea tree, but as no figures have been found made from this wood
it is harder to see this link (Taylor 2001, 115–117).
They could represent both the tomb owner, acting, as we have already
seen with the wooden figures, as a reserve home for the kꜣ, and servants. They were not meant to be true likenesses of the
tomb owner but represented him in an idealised divine form and, as such, these
figures were sometimes placed into miniature coffins. They started as figures
made from wax or mud, which were probably wrapped in linen to make them sacred.
Production declined at the end of the Thirteenth Dynasty but was revived at
Thebes towards the end of the Seventeenth when we start to see the stick-like
wooden shabtis known as ‘peg shabtis’ (fig. 7).
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| Fig. 7: Seventeenth Dynasty double shabtis of Tetyankh and Tetiky, Musee de Louvre E32373. Photo courtesy of Musee de Louvre |
The so called ‘Shabti Spell’ (Coffin Text 472; Book of the Dead 6) was often carved on the front of the figures: “O, this/these ushabti(s), if one counts, if one reckons the Osiris (Title and Name) to do all the works which are to be done in the God’s land-Now indeed obstacles are implanted therewith-as a man of his duties, ‘here I am,’ you shall say when you are counted off at any time to serve there, to cultivate the fields, to irrigate the riparian lands, to transport by boat the sand of the east to the west and vice-versa; ‘here I am,’ you shall say.” (Faulkner 1985). I would really like a nice shabti figure that I could call on to do the gardening or the housework! Apparently so did Walt Disney as this was his inspiration for the Sorcerer’s Apprentice featured as part of the 1940 film Fantasia (Ogden 2004, 115).
Ahmose II is the first Pharaoh attested to have his
own shabti, and from the reign of Amenhotep II onwards the numbers in each tomb
began to increase. The material used also became more varied with faience, pottery,
and wood all being known. From the mid Eighteenth Dynasty, closed hands are
routinely portrayed and the number of tools being carried increases to include,
hoes, picks, and seed baskets. Use of a mould enabled them to be quick and
cheaply produced, but they did vary in quality from the excellent ones found
with Tutankhamun (fig. 8) to really awful ones barely recognisable.
 |
| Fig. 8: One of the shabtis found in the tomb of Tutankhamun recently exhibited at The Saatchi Gallery London. Photo by the author. |
As the New Kingdom progressed, they became more depersonalised and viewed increasingly as slaves (Poole 1998). Royal shabtis of the Twentieth Dynasty were often poor and this may be a reflection of the troubled economic times that affected the whole of the Late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean. The numbers increased and a full compliment would now be 365 workers, one for each day, together with an overseer for each 10, and sometimes a further 12, one for each month of the year. The quality continues to decline through the Third Intermediate Period. Figure 9 is a mummiform shabti of the Divine Adoratrice Qedmerut (W1315), dating to the Twenty-second Dynasty, which is made of blue faience with painted black hieroglyphs (Griffin 2017).
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| Fig. 9: Shabti of Qedmerut (W1315) |
Our journey through the evolution of the shabti
continued through the small crude examples of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty to the
return to using stone in the late Twenty-fifth/early Twenty-sixth Dynasty. In the
Twenty-sixth Dynasty, they began to have a back pillar and a base enabling them
to stand. The form from the reign of Psamtek I through to the end of the
Ptolemaic period remained fairly static. They were mostly made of moulded
faience with inscriptions added whilst the material was still soft prior to
firing. The colour was predominately green and they retained the back pillar
and pedestal (fig. 10).
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| Fig. 10: Shabti of the general Ankhwahibresaneith ((W1312) |
This comes to the end of our rapid gallop through
funerary figurines. Next week the topic will be mummification and coffins. I am
thoroughly looking forward to our continued exploration of The Funerary Culture of the Ancient Egyptians!
Bibliography:
Arnold, Dorothea ed. (1999) Egyptian art in the age of the pyramids.
New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Faulkner, Raymond O. and Carol Andrews (1985) The ancient Egyptian
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Griffin, Kenneth (2017) ‘The Ushabtis of the Divine Adoratrice Qedmerut’.
In De la mère du roi à l’épouse du dieu.
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de Karomama – Von der Königsmutter zur Gottesgemahlin. Erste Synthese der
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