The Brooklyn Museum has two of these very fine shabti figures, made for a woman called Sati who appears to’ve been nobody special according to her titles (just Mistress of the House) but clearly possessed of great wealth given the quality of the shabtis.
The two pieces are close enough that it feels like you could play “spot the difference”, so I was briefly worried that I’d captioned one with the wrong accession number in my photo gallery! But the texts are different, the tools are different, and the backgrounds are different.
The base material of the shabti is faience, mostly glazed white. The decoration has been added as coloured paste inlays, rather than just painted on the surface of the piece. It must’ve been very time consuming to make, and so very expensive. As well as rather beautiful. 🧵 1/2
#ancientEgypt #egyptology #shabti