Shabty of the Chief Steward Pedi-neit
Description
Object Label: Shabties were included in tombs to perform agricultural work in place of the deceased in the afterlife. Many of them are inscribed with Chapter 6 of The Book of the Dead, which says they will dig irrigation ditches, cultivate crops, and carry sand. Others only bear the name and title of the owner. The earlier examples included here are inscribed in ink while in the later examples the text is part of the mold, which clearly saved labor. Shabties and scarabs, beetle-shaped amulets associated with rebirth and the sun god, are the most common Egyptian antiquities to survive to modern times. Caption: Shabty of the Chief Steward Pedi-neit, ca. 595–589 B.C.E.. Faience, 5 1/4 x 1 3/8 x 1 1/4 in. (13.3 x 3.5 x 3.2 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 37.213E. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)
AI image analysis GPT-5.4-nano
Machine-generated from the object's image on Jul 2026. Not curatorial; treat deities, names, and signs below as the model's best reading, not authority.
A small, turquoise-blue glazed ushabti/shabti figure stands with a mummiform body and hands positioned across the chest, wearing a wig and a collar and holding arms close in a typical funerary pose. The front body is covered with horizontal bands of incised hieroglyphs beneath the figure’s upper register.
The object appears as a freestanding shabti/ushabti figure: a human-like, mummiform body with a distinct wig/headdress, a broad collar at the neck, and arms held inward across the upper chest. The lower torso and legs are rendered with a vertically elongated form and are divided into multiple horizontal registers of incised hieroglyphs. The hieroglyphic text is present but too unclear/low-resolution to confidently transcribe specific signs. No clearly legible cartouche or royal name is visible at this scale. The surface shows a light blue/green glazed appearance consistent with faience; minor chips/wear are visible near the base and on the body. No Greek/Coptic/Arabic text is evident in the image.
Cross-references (2)
- BKM-Accession 37.213E tier-2
- BKM-Object 3988 tier-2
About this record's data
- From the source institution — accession, description, dimensions, and dating are as catalogued by Brooklyn Museum — Egyptian, Classical, Ancient Near Eastern Art.
- AI-inferred — the image-analysis panel (deities, names, signs) is machine-generated and may be wrong.
- Approximate location — most map points are plotted at the site centroid, not the exact findspot.
- Inferred links — cross-references marked with a match method other than explicit-source-field were matched by us, not stated by the source.