Table of Contents
Manufacture
One hot day in the waning years of the twenty-seventh dynasty of Egypt, the faience workshop of the Temple of Ptah in the great and ancient city of Memphis hummed with activity. Slaves carried water and stoked the fires under the great kiln, apprentices blistered their hands on their grinding stones, crushing limestone and quartz pebbles in into fine powders, and a multitude of skilled craftsmen bent over their individual work, each having dedicated his life to become a master in his own medium.
One of these was the baba, the faience maker. He came from a family of great craftsmen, and he and his father and grandfather had all plied their craft at the Temple of Ptah. It was his father who had taught him how to mix the faience, how to blend the limestone and quartz powders together with ashes of desert plants and acacia gum to bind the mixture, how to vary the quantities of copper powder to make different shades of color in the final product. Beside him, his apprentice carefully placed small amounts of the various powders into brass scales, determined to copy his master’s measurements exactly. The baba smiled; it had been long since he required the use of the scales- after many years he knew the powders and their measurements like he knew his children. Little by little, he added water to the mixture, working it with his hands until it thickened into a thick, sticky, black paste. He instructed his apprentice to fetch a mold as he kneaded the paste expertly, a skill he had picked up watching his wife knead dough into bread. The clay mold was impressed with the image of a small, mummified man, arms folded across his chest, lappet on his head and the royal plaited beard adorning his chin.
As he pressed the paste into the mold, the baba remembered his grandfather telling him about these special little figures they called shabtis; how since the days of the old kings, craftsmen like them had carved and consecrated shabtis out of clay, stone, wood and faience, how the spells carved into the figures’ legs came from the Book of the Dead, and how after they were finished, would be placed in the tombs of great people and travel to the land of the dead with them, where they would serve the deceased for all eternity. Long ago, before his time, the baba’s grandfather had told him as he sat on the old man’s knee, watching him carve out a small pillar on the back of a shabti in its mold to ensure it would stand upright in its resting place, these magical little servants had only graced the tombs of the great kings, the gods-on-earth. Those shabtis were special and craftsmen took pride in making them each unique. Things were different now, the baba thought as he carved a back pillar, just as his grandfather had done, on his own shabti figure before him. This particular shabti was part of an order for a gang of four hundred to grace the tomb of a relation to the High Priest of the Temple of Hathor, and they would all come from the same standardized mold.
The back pillar done, the baba removed the shabti from its mold and handed it to the scribe working next to him who began carving the shabti spell into the still-soft molded paste with his stylus; the scribe used a standard spell, urging the shabti to work for its new owner faithfully in the afterlife. He made sure to leave room at the top of the inscription for the deceased’s name to be filled in later; they hadn’t been given it when the order came through. The scribe handed the shabti to the baba’s apprentice, who went to lay it amongst the others to dry before firing. On his way, the workshop painter’s cat wound its way through the apprentice’s legs in its pursuit of an offending mouse, tripping the boy up and causing him to thrust out his hand to a near-by table to stop himself from falling. Though he saved himself, he looked down to see that the shabti in his hand was not so lucky, the soft clay having been slightly broken across the legs where it made contact with the table. With a panicked look over his shoulder to ensure his master had not seen, the apprentice quickly pinched the broken clay back together and smoothed the seam with his fingers. Satisfied that no one would be the wiser, apprentice made a dash for the drying racks and gently placed the shabti amongst their ranks. Once dry, the slave working the kiln would throw some lime on its floor and there place all the little figures. As they baked, their black grainy finishes would turn as shiny and blue-green as the twisting waters of the Nile river that flowed past the city, visible from the workshop window, and the finished shabtis would know sunlight only a little while before they were sealed beneath the earth for over a thousand years.
____________________________
Shabtis, like the one described in the story above were almost exclusively made (and they were made by the thousands in ancient Egypt) by teams of skilled craftsmen in workshops attached to temples and palaces. (Stewart: Egyptian Shabtis, 40) Memphis, 31 kilometers south of the confluence of the White Nile and the Blue Nile, was the economic and artistic center that monopolized shabti manufacture and distribution. (Schneider: Shabtis: An Introduction to the History of Ancient Egyptian Funerary Statuettes, 244) From its founding, the city touted Ptah, the Egyptian god of creation, artisans and craftsmen as its patron. As a result, the Temple of Ptah had one of the greatest workshops of funerary accouterments throughout ancient Egyptian history; in fact it is possible that Memphite workshops attached to great temples like Ptah’s were where the tradition of shabtis as they came to be understood originated. (Verner: “In the Shadow of Memphis” Abusir: Realm of Osiris, 5) That tradition dates back to at least the Middle Kingdom (2055 BCE- 1700 BCE), in which shabtis were primarily made of clay, limestone or faience. During this time and as the tradition continued into the New Kingdom (1600 BCE – 1100 BCE) and the Third Intermediate Period (1100 BCE – 728 BCE), shabti forms were varied and diverse; figures depicting both sexes were equally common, and each of those figures was likely to have distinguishing features, including sculpted wigs and outfits of common every-day Egyptian clothing. The Third Intermediate Period brought a new kind of faience and with it, a new style of shabti. After the Kushite Period in the twenty-sixth dynasty (664 BCE- 525 BCE), shabti’s were increasingly produced en masse using standardized forms in clay molds, the new standard form being uniformly male, faience, mummiform-style, and usually depicted in a tri-parted wig known as a lappet. (Schneider: Shabtis, 245) During this time, shabti’s were ordered by potential buyers in groups or “gangs” of four hundred and one, this being considered an appropriate amount of servants to bring to the afterlife.
The shabti of the Van Buren collection (who’s story is told above) is dated by the collection as having been made sometime between the seventh and fourth centuries BCE. While I agree this is most likely true, the collection also mislabels the shabti as being Ptolemaic, when its probable date of origin falls slightly earlier in the time of the Late Period (728 BCE-305 BCE). I base this on its form, complete with back pillar and single-column hieroglyphic feature made popular in the Late Period, as well as the greenish-blue tint of the faience, consistently implemented in that time. (Stewart: Egyptian Shabtis, 42) I place it in Memphis as by the Late Period, shabti manufacture was entirely monopolized by northern cities, with Memphis at the lead. Although it is possible this shabti was made in Cairo or Giza, Memphis was the center around which all shabti culture revolved, and its workshops –particularly attached to the Temple of Ptah- produced thousands of shabtis every year. (Wegner and Wegner: “Ancient Memphis: The City of the Sphinx”, 118) It is impossible to place it exactly amongst these cities, as at the time of its making there were no distinguishable differences between each city’s style of manufacture, but it is safe to assume it was made in one of these northern metropolises, Memphis probably the safest bet of all.
A shabti’s manufacture process using the type of faience at large in the Late Period, (a semi-glass faience “in which the body is a fused vitreous mass,” (Noble, 435)) included the mixing of a gritty silica core (the most common silica available being crushed quartz pebbles), sodium bicarbonate (limestone), copper oxide and a binding agent (acacia gum) with water. A baba or “faience maker” would have had to be a master chemist, knowing exactly how much of each ingredient to add, as well as how to bind it together into a moldable paste using water. Adding too much moisture will cause the paste to lose its shape once out of the mold, and too little will result in a cracked finish. (Noble: “The Technique of Egyptian Faience”, 436) The baba’s contribution would have been the most time consuming, but the manufacture of shabtis was primarily an effort of collaboration. Apprentices and slaves would keep the workshop running smoothly, and while the baba prepared the faience and pressed it into the mold, he would have relied on scribes to add the hieroglyphic detail. Painters would complete the finished product after its final firing, adding in the names of whoever the figures would accompany into death. My baba was a gifted craftsman from a long familial tradition of working shabtis, and through him and his trade it is possible to see the changing attitudes towards the craft and the shabtis themselves.
The mishap involving the apprentice was my own little imagining as to how this particular shabti could have come to be broken across the “legs” later on in its life. Of course it is possible that this break had nothing to do with a clumsy apprentice and a hungry cat, but if there was some sort of flaw or weakness in the broken area before its firing, the shabti would have been much more likely to separate in this particular place when met with force. It is impossible to tell. But when imagining the Ptah Temple workshop as it must have been -a busy and cluttered hub of craft, full of confusing activity, noise and heat- it is not such a hard thing to believe.
Original Use
The High Priest of the Temple of Hathor’s mother-in-law had picked a very inconvenient time to die. The festival of Hathor approaching rapidly, he had never been busier organizing the lesser priests and priestesses, preparing rituals, arranging tribute. Of course the old lady had chosen this chaotic time to travel to the next world leaving him with the responsibility of arranging a funeral befitting her status of one of the city of Memphis’s wealthiest noblewomen. He half suspected she died deliberately at this time only to make his life more difficult, just as he knew this was her motivation in demanding that the funerary goods and crafts that would accompany her to the afterlife be made at the workshop attached to the Temple of Ptah, even though it would have been much easier to commission them from the craftsmen working in Hathor’s temple over which he presided. It was in Ptah’s workshop where he stood now, inspecting the funerary goods he had ordered: textiles, canopic jars, spices, and various mummified animals were among the items that would be placed in his mother-in-law’s grave, along with a gang of four-hundred-and-one blue faience shabti figurines, whose spirits would slave for her in her long eternal rest. The High Priest did not envy them. He picked one from the gang and inspected in closely. Fine craftsmanship, sure enough, though he thought he could just see a slight flaw in the legs. It would have to do, though; the funeral procession was waiting to carry the old lady’s mummified body to be laid to rest in the great tombs outside the city, and he was already running late. He paid the priest of Ptah’s temple the previously agreed upon price for the shabtis, not only for the value of the craftsmen’s labor but also for the labor of the shabtis themselves. He did not want to take any chances; he was sure that if the shabtis did not perform their labors in the afterlife to satisfaction because he had not paid enough for their services, the old woman would haunt him forever.
The funeral procession was a grand affair. Every family member from here to Cairo had shown up to pay their respects, and of course to see the funeral itself. Funerals were not just occasions to mourn; they were opportunities to demonstrate wealth and status. As a rich and influential man, the High Priest of the Temple of Hathor was expected to impress. He felt he rose to the occasion admirably; aside from the multitude of relations, he had employed over a hundred professional mourners to follow the sarcophagus as it was pulled along by a team of oxen, along with dozens of dancers, musicians, and priests from practically every temple in the city. One of these included of the highest priestesses of Temple of Hathor, who walked on one side of the sarcophagus playing the role of the goddess Nephthys. On the other side walked his own wife playing the role of the goddess Isis. Following just behind the sarcophagus was his daughter; in her arms she carried one of the many boxes containing the four-hundred-and-one shabtis. Upon reaching the tombs, the High Priest took the lead, performing the final spells that would ensure that everyone of the grave goods, the shabtis in particular, would perform their duties admirably for their mistress on her journey through the next life. The old lady was laid in her tomb, surrounded by her possessions, her pets, her organs preserved in canopic jars, and four hundred and one little blue faience servants. When they sealed the tomb, the High Priest and his family were comforted in knowing that they had left their mother and grandmother in good hands, and that she would be well cared for as she traveled across the sky and into the next life. Her body, her riches, and all the little shabti statuettes, however, remained under the ground in the darkness; they would not see the sky for over a thousand years.
_____________________________
The difficulty in analyzing the use of the shabti figure in the context of Late Period Egyptian culture is that its purpose was not one of practicality or utility or even artistic showmanship, but rather one of symbolic intent and spiritual belief. A shabti was made specifically to be placed in the ground; from its manufacture to its burial, the shabti would only be in contact with living people for a short time- a few days at most. Before that its only use was to be shown in funeral processions as symbols of the wealth and status of the deceased and their family. (“Funerals in Ancient Egypt.” Australian Museum) As status symbols, the correct number of shabtis in a traditional funeral procession (four hundred and one) could demonstrate the devotion of family members to their deceased relative, and more importantly, how wealthy that family was. (Stewart: Egyptian Shabtis, 21) So important to the funeral’s performance to the public were these statuettes, they were usually carried by close members of the family; in the above scenario, I gave that honor to the High Priest’s daughter. (“Funerals in Ancient Egypt.” Australian Museum) I included the grandeur of the funeral and its role as a familial and communal focal point in the story of the shabti I study in order to show the social uses of shabtis as status markers. However while the social uses were most likely present in the minds of the people participating in funerals, they were only secondary to the intended purpose of shabtis in the spiritual lives of the ancient Egyptians.
Shabtis were highly symbolic creations. They were made not to act as what they were, which in this case is little faience statuettes; they were made to act as representatives of imagined mystical servants that were thought to cater to the needs of deceased peoples in the Egyptian conception of an afterlife. The spirits of the shabtis were considered very much alive, so much so that payment for their making was understood to be a contract between three parties: the craftsmen, who brought the shabtis to life, the clients, who paid the craftsmen for their work, and the shabtis themselves, who were contractually bound to work for the client (or whomever he or she intended their use for) in gratitude for being given life by the craftsmen, who in turn equated the quality of their work to the quality of the post-mortem service their creations would supply, which in turn was directly related to how much they had been paid. (Silver: “What Makes Shabti Slave?”) The spiritual agency of these figures then had great effect on their usefulness as afterlife servants in the minds of the people purchasing them; this is why I included the High Priest’s anxiety to ensure that appropriate payment was made for the shabtis, lest he face supernatural repercussions.
To a contemporary scholar studying shabtis, their practical use is somewhat unimpressive. Physically speaking, shabtis were made, presented in funerals, and then placed in the ground where they stood dormant, unseen, and motionless for up to thousands of years. They no more performed menial tasks for the corpse in the tomb with them than the corpse actually rode in a boat across the sky to the afterlife. To the minds of the people who made and purchased shabtis, their use was entirely focused in the symbolic and spiritual realm. The work of shabtis was all metaphysical, the statuettes themselves were only vehicles of the spiritual potential of spell-work and belief in an afterlife in which servants would be a necessity. The work of the little faience statues was to represent the Egyptian’s belief in the afterlife, in services that would be rendered in that afterlife, and to reassure the family of the deceased that their loved-one would be well-looked after in what they believed waited beyond death.
Deposition
For over a thousand years after the tomb’s door was sealed shut, the shabti stood vigilant beside its four hundred companions, tucked away in a large chest adjacent to their mistress’s sarcophagus, guardians to her spirit. The tomb itself laid empty and silent, its interior undisturbed. As Egypt changed over the centuries, the old gods Osiris, Isis, Ra, Hathor, and Ptah fell from greatness into pagan antiquity. Christianity and Islam replaced them, and the tombs of the long-past civilization lay neglected, the dead forgotten- until, that is, the treasures buried with them piqued the interest of the living.
The first time someone broke into the shabti’s resting place happened a little over one-thousand-and-one-hundred years after the high priest of Hathor laid the final spell on its doors and sealed them for what he assumed would be forever. The intruder was no one of import, just one of the many Egyptian Arabs who, in the fifteenth century (CE), under the rule of the Mamluks, tried his hand at treasure hunting. He slipped into the tomb, murmuring magical incantations that he had read would protect him from the spirits of the deceased and guide him to the treasure. To his mind, they must have worked, for when he held his torch aloft he was greeted with piles of jewels, incense and gold. By the time he had filled his bag with the necklaces and bracelets alone, there was no room left for the rest of the wonders, including the box of little blue mummified men in the near the sarcophagus. No matter, he thought. They were not so nearly valuable as what he already had; he could live comfortably for years on this one sack-full. He left the tomb and the shabti behind, and such was his excitement at his newfound wealth he did not take the time to close the door properly, leaving it standing slightly ajar.
As years crept by, the door was pushed open further and further by the harsh winds; when the storms blew (which they did often), desert sand swept across the floor of the tomb. By the time the second round of plunderers came, about a hundred years after the first, the floor was covered in six inches of the stuff. These thieves were more efficient than the last. This was no simple adventure in treasure hunting; this was their business. Egypt was changing in the sixteenth century, foreigners were coming to the country in flocks, all with a hunger for Egypt’s ancient past. Most of the thieves’ attention was focused on their true prize: the mummy itself. A mummy like this would bring in quite the profit from a European traveler who sought to exploit its medicinal purposes. While his compatriots hauled the mummified corpse from its coffin and dragged it into the light for the first time in nearly two thousand years, the leader observed the tomb. Some of the more valuable treasure was already gone, not surprising since they had found the door open. But there was one thing that caught his attention: a huge chest filled with hundreds of little identical blue statues of mummies. Faience, a pretty color, not gold, but certainly marketable. If their European buyer was willing to pay for a real mummy, maybe he’d also be interested in a few dozen clay ones. He gave the orders for two of his men to start packing the statues into their bags, and quickly. One took that order a little too seriously, and as he stuffed more and more statues into his sack, one slipped through his fingers: it caught the edge of the chest in the exact place where, over a thousand years before, a clumsy potter’s apprentice had dropped it on a table before it was fired. That weakness caused the shabti to break at the legs, landing in two pieces on the sand at the thief’s feet. He bent to pick up the pieces, but the leader barked at him not to bother. A broken statue was useless to them, especially when they had hundreds of others. He kicked the pieces into a corner and urged his men to keep working. After they left, the shabti lay abandoned in that small dark corner. A week after the robber’s left the tomb, a huge desert storm swept over Memphis. Sand filled the room, covering the shabti and hiding it from view. Over the next three hundred years a few more looters would come and go, but the shabti stayed hidden under the sand, ignored and useless. Until, that is, one cool night in 1810, when two young girls slipped quietly through the crumbling ruins of the tombs in the old cemetery.
___________________________________________________
The deposition of the shabti is a complex matter, as technically, it had two depositions. The first was what authors Rosemary A. Joyce and Joshua Pollard would call “intended structural deposition.” (Joyce and Pollard: “Archaeological Assemblages and Practices of Deposition”) This is when, in my narrative, a high priest of the Temple of Hathor placed the shabti, along with four hundred others, in the tomb of his mother-in-law to serve the purpose of providing her with servants in the afterlife. Thinking of the entire contents of the tomb as an archaeological assemblage, the shabti was first deposited in said assemblage as part of a pattern of intentionally associated materials; in this case the association is grave goods. Its second deposition happened, in my narrative, over a thousand years later, in the sixteenth century, when a tomb-robbing incident rendered the statue broken and lying forgotten in a corner of the tomb. This is an example of “unintended structural deposition”, in which the structure of its deposition was an unintentional consequence of a sequence of human actions: in this case, a quick-working thief dropped the shabti, resulting in its being broken, and his boss kicked the statue into a corner where it remained until its excavation three hundred years later. (Joyce and Pollard: “Archaeological Assemblages and Practices of Deposition”) The thieves’ objectives were not to break the shabti or intentionally place it in the corner, these actions were simply consequences of the thief’s, pressured desire to work quickly on the part of which resulted in clumsiness and the shabti’s breaking, and the boss’s pragmatic desire to move the shabti out from underfoot. Everything that happened in between the first deposition and the second deposition was an important step in the sequence of events that caused the shabti’s ultimate deposition before its excavation.
I had my first thief enter the tomb in the 1400’s as part of a massive Arab treasure-hunting trend in medieval Egypt, in which guidebooks were written containing instructions on finding tombs and spells for warding off the spirits of the dead, and many tombs were depleted of their valuable treasures. (Fagan: The Rape of the Nile: Tomb Robbers, Tourists and Archaeologists in Egypt, 42) Though he had no direct contact with the shabti, he played an important role in its ultimate deposition: he left the door open. After tombs such as this were opened in the medieval era, nature took its toll on them. Many temples and tombs were completely buried in sand that swept in from fierce desert storms; in my narrative, this action laid the first groundwork for the shabti’s second deposition by putting a thick layer of sand on the floor for it to be dropped on one hundred years later. (Fagan: The Rape of the Nile: Tomb Robbers, Tourists and Archaeologists in Egypt, 40.)
My second grave robbers fulfill two purposes. First, they demonstrate the repeated disturbances to the tomb, as was common for most ancient Egyptian tombs in the Middle Ages. Second, they were the ones who (unintentionally) deposited the shabti for the final time. After 1516 CE, when Egypt came under the rule of the Turkish Empire, the country’s doors were flung open to the first large wave of European visitors. These foreigners had an insatiable desire for mummified flesh, as it was believed to have powerful medicinal properties. As a result, a large trade emerged surrounding the looting and selling of mummies. (Fagan, The Rape of the Nile: Tomb Robbers, Tourists and Archaeologists in Egypt, 45.) In my narrative, the mummy-hunters decide to take the shabtis that had been left by other looters as an afterthought. This, along with the fact that it became broken in the process, is my reasoning for the shabti being left behind in the tomb so easily. After that, nature once again played its role in the shabti’s deposition; in my imagination, a huge sandstorm left it buried, which is why it was left for a young girl and her sister to find three hundred years later. All of these instances, happening over the course of nearly two thousand years, resulted in the ultimate deposition of the shabti, and they were all themselves, the result of direct human desires and their outcomes. The High Priest of Hathor desired that his mother-in-law’s body be laid to rest according to his culture’s standards of a decent burial, resulting in the shabti’s first deposition. The first thief to enter the tomb never even touched the shabti, but his leaving the door ajar allowed for natural causes to create the statue’s soon-to-be resting place. The clumsy grave robber desired to get as much treasure into his bag as he could, resulting in the shabti’s breaking and becoming useless to his boss, and the boss desired to get the shabti out of his way, resulting in his kicking it to where it would remain for the next three hundred years, buried in sand. Thus, the shabti’s first deposition was part of a planned assemblage, while it’s second deposition was structured by a sequence of causes and effects driven by human desires over the course of centuries.
Reuse
All was dark and peaceful as two sisters slipped quietly through the crumbling ruins of the tombs in the old cemetery of the once great city of Memphis one cool night in 1810 CE. They knew the place well; for generations, their family had lived in the ramshackle village built around and within the ancient tombs of Memphis. They had lived here all their lives, in the shadow of the crumbling old temple that had stood so tall and important in the ancient days. Their great-grandfather had built the house where they lived with their parents using stones stolen from that temple, and from the many surrounding tombs. But they was not after stones this night; they sought smaller and much more profitable prizes.
Five years beforehand, in 1805, when the elder sister was just ten years old, the current pasha, Muhammad Ali, had taken hold of Egypt after the departure of the French armies of Napoleon, and he held it still with an iron grip. His massive taxes and labor drafts had sent peasants like her and her family to the brink of poverty. Fortunately, he introduced another thing to the Egyptian people that would save them from starving: Westerners. In the brief time he was in Egypt, Napoleon had piqued Western interest in Egypt’s ancient pagan past. Now Muhammad Ali nurtured that interest, opening Egypt’s doors to thousands of foreign visitors, all desperate to take home some of that long-forgotten history left buried in the sand.
That was what brought the two sisters to the doors of a dilapidated tomb that night; the treasures inside would pull a fine price on the market, newly inflated with demand for anything to do with the ancient past. The girls worked together, pulling the door to the tomb open; the eldest entered first, feeling carefully around the door and threshold for traps. The inside of the tomb was cold and dank, the scent of musk hanging heavy in the air. The younger sister held a light aloft, and they could see that others had been here before. A stone sarcophagus stood empty, its heavy lid broken on the floor, surrounded by equally boxes that had been looted of all their contents. The eldest sister sighed; they had been beaten to it, probably by one of her neighbors. There were not many of the peasant farmers in this area that did not keep grave robbing as a sideline. She nodded to her little sister to look around; there may still be something of value worth taking she thought. They overturned empty boxes and dug through loose sand, bringing up a couple of empty bottles and what looked like a piece of a mummified cat. While her little sister took out a knife and began carving away some of the strange pictures decorating the walls, something in the corner caught the eldest girl’s eye. She squatted down to inspect it and saw in the dim light, it was a little blue man. She smiled; she knew what she was looking at: one of the little clay statues those old pagans put in their tombs to keep them company in death, pretty in color and popular amongst western buyers. She wondered why the other looters had left it behind, and stopped wondering when she picked up the little statue and saw that it was broken at the legs. They must have decided a broken statue wasn’t worth taking while they made off with a boxful of identical ones. She dug through the sand a bit more and, a quick prayer of thanks on her lips, unearthed the missing feet of the statue. She gazed at the broken pieces; they wouldn’t be too hard to glue back together, and then surely some European would be interested in buying it. She wondered why the Western foreigners were so enamored with things like this. They were idols, relics of a shameful pagan past before the coming of the true faith of Allah. Perhaps the Westerners didn’t mind because they didn’t believe in the true God, either. She shrugged. If these foreigners wanted to waste their money on idolatrous nonsense, who was she to stop them? She stuffed the pieces into her bag and called out to her sister. There were many other tombs to search, and the night was still young. Tomorrow, they bring their finds to the market in the city and sell them to one of the merchants who catered to the Western visitors’ curious tastes. The little statue was a good find; she knew she would get a good price for it. She didn’t know what the statue meant to Westerners, and why it seemed to mean so much, and she didn’t particularly care. What it meant to her and her family was food on the table, and that was enough.
__________________________________________________________
The reuse of this particular object –the faience shabti– is a complicated matter, as it is a grave good, and was never meant to be reused, according to its original purpose. Had the Late Period people who buried this shabti with a dearly departed loved one had their way, the little servant would have stood silent in that tomb for all eternity. (Dabbs and Zabecki: “Abandoned Memories: A Cemetery of Forgotten Souls?”, 218) However, as Egypt underwent drastic changes over the centuries, and the ancient religion of the pharos fell to Islam, the meanings and uses of grave goods like shabtis shifted to meet the needs of the people who still lived in close proximity with the remnants of the ancient Egyptian culture they believed belonged a long-dead and sacrilegious tradition of belief.
By the time I estimate that this shabti left its intended resting place, grave robbing and looting were part of a subsistence method long-practiced by the peasants of Egypt. Since the end of the Twentieth Dynasty (ca. 1070 BCE) professional thieves and starving peasants alike have been raiding the tombs of the Ancient Egyptian elite for treasures and artifacts selling, stones for building, and even mummies for ingredients in medicinal concoctions. (Fagan: The Rape of the Nile: Tomb Robbers, Tourists and Archaeologists in Egypt, 47) However, it was Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 and defeat of the Malmuks, the Ottoman warrior class that had ruled Egypt since the sixteenth century, that gave grave goods like shabtis new purpose as valuable antiquities on a market targeted at westerners enchanted by the idea of Egypt’s ancient past. (Waxman: Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World, 48) He brought with him an army of “savants” and scientists intent on unearthing the material culture of ancient Egypt for the glory of his new French empire, though he never saw its realization. He and his army were routed out of Egypt by the English in 1799, beginning a six year period of political upheaval that ended with a Albanian-born commander in the Turkish army named Mohammed Ali seizing power and becoming the de facto ruler of Egypt known as the pasha. (Fagan: The Rape of the Nile, 71) His rule, which lasted from 1805 to 1849, was a period of great change; according to Brian Fagan in The Rape of the Nile: Tomb Robbers, Tourists and Archaeologists in Egypt, his desire for international influence caused him to “open up the Nile Valley not only to merchants and diplomats but also to the casual tourist and antiquities dealer.” (Fagan, 72) This new market for antiquities meant that grave goods like shabtis, whose original use had for hundreds been rendered obsolete by Egypt’s adoption of Islam, had a new kind of value to the people of Egypt: they were valuable collectibles and archaeological materials that for many peasants in cities like Memphis –“a Holy Grail for Egyptian archaeology” (Wegner, 123)- meant an escape from the poverty that resulted from the higher taxes and labor drafts of Muhammad Ali’s rule. (Fagan, The Rape of the Nile, 72)
Muhammad Ali’s rule (1805-1849) was a time of massive incidents in grave robbing from ancient cemeteries like the one attached to the ruins of the Temple of Ptah, usually by the peasants whose villages were often built within and using materials from these tombs. (Wegner: “Ancient Memphis: The City of the Sphinx”) Since the faience shabti of the Van Buren collection was most likely looted (as this was the most common means by which the Egyptian grave goods found their way onto the antiquities market) it is very likely that the date of its looting would fall somewhere within the aforementioned time period. (Waxman: Loot, 51)The looters in my speculation are two teenage girls whose family, like most of the peasant class during Muhammad Ali’s rule, suffered financially from his tax impositions and decided to supplement their family income by taking grave goods out of cemeteries and selling them to antiquities dealers and merchants, who would in turn sell them to western travelers, collectors, and scientists. It would have been unlikely that my two girls (hardly seasoned grave-robbers, but more thieves of opportunity) would not be the first to enter the tomb this particular shabti was placed in. In fact, since the mummy-fields of Memphis had long been a site for intense looting, it stands to reason that the Van Buren shabti would be among the scraps (broken or barely-valuable objects) left behind from a long history of theft from this particular tomb for my two young scavengers to find. (Fagan: The Rape of the Nile, 47) Nineteenth century Egyptian peasants, like my two girls, cared very little for the sanctity of these graves; since the rule of the Mamluks began in the sixteenth century, Egypt had been a strictly Muslim country, and most peasants thought of the monuments and graves of their ancient ancestors as belonging to a idolatrous pagan past. (Fagan: The Rape of the Nile, 123) This is important to remember as it was this attitude, coupled with a growing Western interest in Ancient Egyptian culture that created the shabti’s new use. The looter of 1810 and the original users of the Late Period did not look that this statue the same way. To the latter, it was a funerary attachment, meant to perform symbolic labor. To the former, the shabti had a much more tangible and economic use. Westerners could use it either as a collectible item of cultural value or as an artifact to study as part of the growing scientific interest in Egyptology amongst nineteenth century European intellectuals. To the looter, (and my looters especially) the shabti meant income; it was a trade good. This shabti’s reuse then, had nothing to do with its originally intended function. Instead, it’s meaning was reworked and its body revalued within the framework of the nineteenth century international antiquities market, where it was used as a commoditized symbol of ancient Egyptian culture.
Acquisition
It would be nearly a hundred years after the two young girls stole the shabti away from its tomb that the little figure would find another resting place, far from Egypt, and only after changing hands several more times. After the fateful night in 1810 that they took the two broken pieces of the shabti from the tomb, the two thieves did not keep their discovery for long. The morning after, they took the shabti, along with a few other small items they found in the various ransacked tombs of the old graveyard in Memphis to the market in the center of the city. The market was alive with noise and activity, merchants with all kinds of wares to sell shouted at the people milling about the stalls, buyers argued and negotiated with vendors, but the two young girls sought out a different kind of transaction. They slipped through the stalls to the alleyways, where they would meet a man who handled transactions for their buyer: an antiquities dealer looking for looted goods to sell to foreigners. He bought most of the items looted by the people of the girls’ shanty community in the old cemetery, and all the people there knew him and his business well. After paying the girls for their finds, the dealer’s man brought them back to his employer for inspection. There was not much there, and most of the objects were broken or faded; the dealer picked out the ones most likely to sell immediately and ordered the rest be placed into storage in one of his smaller warehouses. One of those placed in the warehouse was the little broken shabti. There the shabti pieces would sit, collecting dust for a little over twenty years, before the antiquities dealer ran into some trouble with the local law over some smuggling charges, and decided to liquidate his remaining merchandise before fleeing the city.
The shabti was sold cheap to another dealer, along with hundreds of other small or broken artifacts, to a merchant on a caravan headed for Cairo. Upon arrival, the shabti was once again placed in storage and out of sight for several decades. It was not until a fire broke out in the Cairo merchant’s main warehouse around 1890, destroying most of his antiquities, that the shabti would get its chance to be sold. With little else to sell, the Cairo merchant’s son, who had taken over his father’s business five years previously, turned to the smaller, seemingly less valuable wares kept in storage to make up for the lost merchandise. The shabti might go for something, he decided, if it was whole. He carefully glued the pieces back together as best he could before placing it amongst his remaining wares on the market. It spent several years being passed over before the shabti was finally sold in 1897. A woman, an American scholar by the name of Helen Griggs, who had spent her adult life collecting antiquities from the Mediterranean, already had a personal collection of several shabtis, and decided that this one would make a fine addition. The shabti remained with her for a little over twenty more years, first in Cairo and then shipped back to her permanent collection in her home city of Boston. As she settled more into her life in Boston, after amassing a huge collection of various antiquities, Griggs began contemplating where her treasures should go. She decided many of them should be given as gifts to institutions of learning, and in 1918 she donated nearly a dozen shabtis to the Smith College Art Museum. Seven years later, the shabtis lay in the storerooms of the museum when another collection was donated. Mr. Albert W. Van Buren, archeologist and avid collector of Greek and Roman antiquities, donated his own personal collection to the museum in 1925, and happenstance would have it that for several years they were stored right next to Helen Griggs’s shabtis. Several times the two different donations were taken out for display and placed back in storage over the years, and in one instance, the little broken shabti that had begun its journey in Memphis was mislaid into Van Buren’s collection. By the 1970’s, it was considered a permanent part of the collection, and remains so to this day.
___________________________________________
For this portion of the shabti’s life, I wanted to highlight the various ways and times in which artifacts from ancient Egyptian looting sites passed hands and ownership throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, what Brian Fagan called “Egyptology’s golden age.” (Fagan: The Rape of the Nile, 234) During this time, the economic relationships between looters, dealers, and foreign archaeologists and collectors were complex, varied, and far-reaching; local dealers in particular lead precarious lives as they often ran into trouble with the law. (Fagan: The Rape of the Nile, 140)That is why I had my shabti pass through several hands and travel up the Nile to Cairo, as well as enduring several hardships, such as the liquidation of the Mempis merchant’s stock and the fire in the storeroom of the Cairo merchant.
The antiquities trade that emerged from the 19th century was monumental, though it wasn’t until the later years, primarily the 1880’s through the 1930’s, that the small-artifacts trade began to rise in popularity. (Reid: Contesting Antiquity in Egypt: Archaeologies, Museums, and the Struggle for Identities from World War I To Nasser, 31) Before this most western visitors were interested in large scale-monument recovery, such as the various sphinxes along the Nile River Valley and the zodiac in the Temple at Dendera. (White: “Eighteenth Annual Report of the Council of the Archaeological Institute of America”) Therefore, I had my shabti placed in storage for the earlier part of the century, as it was more likely that such a small and broken artifact would not have held as much interest on the market as larger scores to be had before 1880. It was around this time that the British presence in Egypt began to decline, and American participation in the Mediterranean antiquities trade rose in prominence. (Reid: Whose Pharohs?: Archaeology, Museums and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I.) It was then that I finally had the shabti find a buyer in Helen Griggs. Helen Griggs, unlike all the other characters in this narrative, was an actual person. She is a slight historical mystery, but it is known for sure that she was a lifelong member of the Boston chapter of the Archaeology Institute of America (White: “Eighteenth Annual Report of the Council of the Archaeological Institute of America”) and that in the year 1918 she donated at least seven shabtis to the Smith College Museum of Art. (“Five Colleges and Historic Deerfield Museum Consortium. ‘Collections Database-Smith College’”)
It is quite possible, therefore, that she may have been the buyer of a shabti that ended up in Smith College, as she was clearly well versed in acquiring Egyptian artifacts.
How the shabti then ended up in the Van Buren Collection is a matter of conjecture. What is known is that Albert W. Van Buren, an archaeologist and antiquities collector, was primarily based in Rome and Greece, and although he made some short trips to Egypt, there are very few records of his being interested in collecting Egyptian artifacts. In fact, when he sold his personal collection of antiquities to Professor Warren F. Wright of Smith College in 1925, the shabti that is now a part of it was not a part of the catalogued items, nor any other Egyptian artifacts. (Geffken: “The History of the Collection.” The Collection of Antiquities of the American Academy in Rome, 46) The first indication of when the shabti might have entered the collection is a set of notecards depicting sketches of the items in the collection that was found with it, dated to somewhere from the late 1960’s to the early 1970’s. Therefore, I have placed the shabti as most likely having entered into the collection by mistake, as a part of a curatorial mix-up sometime between 1925 and 1970.
Bibliography
Stewart, Harry M. Egyptian Shabtis. Buckinghamshire: Shire Publications LTD, 1995.
Schneider, Hans D. Shabtis: An Introduction to the History of Ancient Egyptian Funerary Statuettes. Rapenburg: Rijksmuseum Van Oudheden te Leiden, 1977.
Verner, Miroslav. “In the Shadow of Memphis” Abusir: Realm of Osiris. Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 2002.
Wegner, Joseph and Jennifer Houser Wegner, “Ancient Memphis: The City of the Sphinx” The Sphinx That Traveled To Philadelphia. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.
Noble, Joseph Veach. “The Technique of Egyptian Faience” American Journal of Archaeology Vol. 73 No. 4. October, 1969.
“Funerals in Ancient Egypt.” Australian Museum. Australian Museum, October 26, 2015. Accessed February 20, 2017.
Silver, “Morris. What Makes Shabti Slave?” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 52, No. 4/5 2009.
Gillam, Robyn A. “Priestesses of Hathor: Their Function, Decline and Disappearance” Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt Vol. 32, 1995.
Joyce Rosemary A. and Pollard, Joshua. “Archaeological Assemblages and Practices of Deposition” The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, ed. Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudr. 2010.
Fagan, Brian. The Rape of the Nile: Tomb Robbers, Tourists and Archaeologists in Egypt. Westview Press, 2004)
Grajetzki, Wolfram. Tomb Treasures of the Late Middle Kingdom: The Archaeology of Female Burials. University of Pennsylvania Press
Waxman, Sharon. Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World. New York: Times Books, 2008.
Dabbs, Gretchen R. and Melissa Zabecki. “Abandoned Memories: A Cemetery of Forgotten Souls?” Remembering the Dead in the Ancient Near East: Recent Contributions from Bioarchaeology and Mortuary Archaeology. University Press of Colorado, 2014.
Reid, Donald Malcolm. Contesting Antiquity in Egypt: Archaeologies, Museums, and the Struggle for Identities from World War I To Nasser. Cairo: The American University Press in Cairo, 2015
Reid, Donald Malcolm. Whose Pharohs?: Archaeology, Museums and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I. ACSL Humanities Press, 2003.
White, John Williams. “Eighteenth Annual Report of the Council of the Archaeological Institute of America” American Journal of Archaeology Vol. 1, No. 2 (Mar. – Apr., 1897), pp. 69-90
“Five Colleges and Historic Deerfield Museum Consortium. ‘Collections Database-Smith College’”
Geffken, Katherine A. “The History of the Collection.” The Collection of Antiquities of the American Academy in Rome, edited by L. Bonfante and H. Nagy, 29-33, 40-54. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015.