Shabti of Shedsuhori

Mold-made "worker" shabti of blue faience. The figure is mummiform, with a slender cylindrical body from which the head, arms, hands, and feet emerge. The tripartite wig (longer in the back than in the front) is colored a solid purple-black, and crude eyes and eyebrows have been painted on the small face. The wrist are crossed over the chest, and each hand holds a hoe in dark purple-black paint. An inscription down the center of the body and legs and running onto the top of the feet reads "The illuminated, Osiris Shedsuhori, true of voice." Two ropes in paint emerge from beneath the wig in back and hang down, ending in a basket at the level of the buttocks. Cross-hatching inside the rectangle representing the basket indicates its fibers.

This unassuming-looking shabti is in fact part of an excavated assemblage from the "Bab el-Gasus," a cache of 153 burials of members of the powerful Amun priesthood during the early First Millennium B.C. Other elements of Shedsuhori's assemblage include a nested coffin set (now in Athens),and an Osiris shroud, two funerary papyri, and two shabti boxes (all now in Cairo). Additional titles on his papyri identify him as a God's Father of Amun, Overseer of the Double Granary, and Great Scribe of Amun-Re. A number of additional shabtis from what would have originally been a set of around 400 are now in various museums and private collections around the world.