Overseer Shabti
Unknown · Twenty-first Dynasty, 1069-943 BC (attributed on style)
A small figure ten centimetres high, glazed in the intense blue that Egyptologists call Deir el-Bahari blue, stands among the troop of funerary servants displayed here. Unlike the mummy-shaped workers around him, the overseer wears the kilt of the living and holds a whip, the badge of his authority over the gang. The faience is a glazed quartz paste, fired so that the copper in the glaze turned this deep colour. Look at the difference between his dress and the wrapped bodies of the ordinary shabtis.
Shabtis were magical substitutes who answered for the dead when they were called to work in the fields of the afterlife. By the Twenty-first Dynasty, around a thousand years before Christ, tombs contained whole regiments of them, divided into gangs of ten under a foreman. This one comes from the royal cache at Deir el-Bahari, the tomb where the priests of Amun hid the mummies of the New Kingdom pharaohs, discovered in eighteen eighty-one. It entered the Louvre in nineteen forty-eight with material formerly held by the Musée Guimet.
Did You Know? A full set of shabtis numbered three hundred and sixty-five workers, one for each day of the year, and thirty-six overseers like this one to keep them in line.
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