Shawabty

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Shawabtys, or funerary figurines, were placed in tombs to act as substitutes for the deceased if called upon to labor in the fields in the afterlife. Even kings and queens, who never did such work, felt it necessary to equip their burials with these small mummiform statuettes. Nothing distinguishes a royal shawabty from a private one except the king's names enclosed in cartouches and occasionally a royal headdress.

The name, Shawabty, may have derived from a verb, wesheb, meaning, “to answer”. These funerary figurines have many different spellings, such as: Ushabti, Ushabty, Shabti, and Shawabti. Other spellings were used in specific times or places. The spelling ‘Shabti’ was used until the end of the New Kingdom (1075 b.c.), ‘Ushebti’ was used through the Third Intermediate, Late, and Ptolemaic Period (1075-30 b.c.), and ‘Shawabti’ was restricted geographically to Deir el-Medina and other areas of Thebes.

The Shawabtys replaced the small, un-inscribed wax and clay figurines of the First Intermediate Period (2130-1980 b.c.). These new figurines were made of wood, stone, terracotta, bronze, or glass. Most of them were made of faience, which is a glazed non-clay ceramic material with small amounts of lime, and either natron or plant ash. Faience could be blue-green, white, yellow, red, brown, and black.

Magic permitted the deceased to avoid all disagreeable labor therefore the Shawabtys were buried in the tomb to perform the agricultural work required in the afterlife. Initially, the figurines were believed to be a substitute for the deceased which is why they were fashioned as mummies but in the 18th Dynasty during the reign of Tuthmosis IV they began to be fashioned as servants with baskets, sacks, and other agricultural tools. Most were inscribed with the speech of the Shabti figure found in Chapter Six of the Book of the Dead, “Illumine the Osiris Ani, whose word is truth. Hail, Shabti Figure! If the Osiris Ani be decreed to do any of the work which is to be done in Khert-Neter, let everything which standeth in the way be removed from him- whether it be to plough the fields, or to fill the channels with water, or to carry sand from the East to the West. The Shabti Figure replieth: I will do it, verily I am here when thou callest”.^[1] In the 18th Dynasty during the reign of Amenhotep IV the figurines were inscribed with an offering addressed to the sun disk, Aten, rather than the speech of the Shabti figure found in Chapter Six of the Book of the Dead.

From the Middle Kingdom until the late 18th Dynasty (1980-1295 b.c.) tombs would contain the number of Shawabtys which would correspond to the number of servants the master owned. At the end of the New Kingdom it became customary to bury quite large numbers of Shawabtys. Some tombs contained as many as 401, with 365 of those representing each day of the year along with 36 overseer Shawabtys to represent the 36 groups of stars that changed every ten days. The overseers were fashioned with whips and the entire “gang of shawabtys” would be kept in special chests located inside the tombs. There was such high demand for the figurines that they became mass produced and were relatively inexpensive leaving them to be the most numerous of all ancient Egyptian antiquities.