The Funerary Figures of the Ancient Egyptians

The blog post for this week is written by Vanessa Foott. Vanessa’s lifelong passion is ancient Egypt and for the last five years she has been studying Egyptology at the University of Manchester. She is very excited to be starting their Masters Degree in Egyptology in October so she is practically a professional student! Vanessa has filled her time since retiring from her main career by travelling all over the country attending and also giving talks on Egyptology, representing the Egypt Exploration Society as one of their Local Ambassadors, and writing articles for Nile Magazine. Lockdown has put an end to all the travelling, which is a shame since she was due to be in Egypt at present doing voluntary fieldwork. Luckily, there are a wealth of excellent lectures being held online and she is able to write about one of them today!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Fig. 4: Finely carved tomb figure (W434)

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.

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).

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).

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).

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 Book of the Dead. London: Guild Publishing.

Griffin, Kenneth (2017) ‘The Ushabtis of the Divine Adoratrice Qedmerut’. In De la mère du roi à l’épouse du dieu. Première synthèse des résultats de la fouille du temple de Touy et de la tombe de Karomama – Von der Königsmutter zur Gottesgemahlin. Erste Synthese der Ausgrabungsergebnisse des Tempels von Tuja und des Grabes von Karomama, ed. B. Lurson. Connaissance de l’Egypte Ancienne 18. Brussels: Safran. 145–155.

Janes, Glenn (2002) Shabtis: a private view: ancient Egyptian funerary statuettes in European private collections. Paris: Cybele.

Morris, Ellen F. (2007) ‘Sacrifice for the state: First Dynasty royal funerals and the rites at Macramallah’s rectangle’. In Performing death: social analyses of funerary traditions in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean, ed. Nicola Laneri. Chicago: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. 15–37.

Ogden, Daniel (2004) ‘The Apprentice’s Sorcerer: Pancrates and his powers in context (Lucian, “Philopseudes” 33–36’. Acta Classica 47: 101–126.

Poole, Federico (1998) ‘Slave or double?: a reconsideration of the conception of the shabti in the New Kingdom and the Third Intermediate period’. In Seventh International Congress of Egyptologists, ed. C. J. Eyre. Leuven: Peeters. 893–901.

Schneider, Hans D. (1977) 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 vols. Leiden: Rijksmuseum van Oudheden te Leiden.

Stewart, Harry M. (1995) Egyptian shabtis. Shire Egyptology 23. Buckinghamshire: Shire Publications.

Taylor, John H. (2001) Death and the afterlife in ancient Egypt. London: British Museum Press.

Tooley, Angela M. J. (1995) Egyptian models and scenes. Shire Egyptology 22. Buckinghamshire: Shire Publications.