Description: Faience mummiform shabti with decayed surface and patchy blue-green glaze with features indicated in black paint - main details of face, headband, implements, basket and vertical column of faded hieroglyphs down front. Has tripartite hair, seshet fillet tied at back of head, carries 2 hoes, seed bag in the middle of back with straps over shoulders. Inscription badly preserved obscuring title and/or name. Cultural Significance: Typical Third Intermediate Shabti of faience, during this period it was usual for burials to include a shabti for each day and overseer shabtis (around 400 being included in a burial) to provide a tomb owner with workers in the afterlife to fulfil their obligations to farm in the afterlife fields. If the shabti originates in the 1900 excavations at Abydos as probably do ECM 158, 159, and 160, the traces of the name visible might fit Nesqashuti (Ranke 179.8) for which the excavation report notes finding shabtis (D. Randall-MacIver & A.C. Mace, El Amrah and Abydos 1899-1901, Egypt Exploration Fund, London 1902, Pl. LIX, 94 & 95) Comparanda: ECM 407, 408; National Museums Liverpool 56.20.526a; British Museum EA24865.
Inscriptions / Translations: Osiris Nes ////
Notes: H. 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 vols., Leiden 1977. Schneider classification: VIIIA2/W19/H1/I5/B13b/Tp7b/P
Note that the provenance might be EEF/ERA excavations between 1880 and first years of 1900, possibly Abydos. It is noted by Nicholas Reeves in his essay in the Egyptian Art at Eton College Exhibition Catalogue that David Randall MacIver sent a consignment of material from the Abydos Excavations (p.4).
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