Digital Lunch Seminar: Egyptian Shabtis in Focus

Digital Lunch Seminar Series

Unravelling the Secrets of the Ancient Masters: Egyptian Shabtis in Focus

Stelios Aspiotis and Leah Mascia

In ancient Egyptian culture, shabtis were funerary figurines, acting as magical substitutes for the deceased owners when the gods requested them to undertake menial tasks in the afterlife. First appeared during the early Middle Kingdom in the 11th Dynasty (ca. 2124–1981 BCE), shabtis could be made in a variety of materials (stone, wood, clay, etc.), but were most frequently composed of Egyptian faience, i.e. vitrified quartzitic sand, and were decorated with various textual and figural elements. Despite the heterogeneity of the depicted motifs, shabtis were sharing common features, namely an unglazed mineral-based core and an outer glazed surface with a characteristic colour. Thus, studying the production process of faience shabtis in addition to their design and painted hieroglyphs can provide valuable information about the mineral-phase composition of the core and glaze, the applied glazing technique and the firing conditions of these Egyptian objects. However, the cultural and historical significance of shabtis often prohibits invasive sampling, necessitating non-destructive and non-invasive analytical methods that are sensitive to both chemistry and crystal structure. As such, Raman spectroscopy, X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy, and computed tomography (CT) scanning are increasingly becoming popular in the scientific community and have been successfully applied for the determination of structure, elemental composition, firing conditions and hidden subsurface structures of painted and enamelled objects.

In this talk, we will present the results of a multidisciplinary and multi-analytical analysis of two Egyptian shabtis dated between the 10th and 6th centuries BCE, which are part of the Ancient Art and Antiquities collection of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe (Hamburg, Germany). In particular, the following points will be discussed: (i) their design, their texts, and figural motifs as well as the context of production of these historical objects and (ii) how the combination of CT scanning, XRF and Raman spectroscopy can determine the inner structural characteristics of shabtis, their mineral-phase composition, the elemental composition of the glaze and the glazing technique to produce them.