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, 595–589 B.C.E.. Faience, 5 3/8 x 1 1/2 x 1 1/8 in. (13.7 x 3.8 x 2.9 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 37.212E. (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 Egyptian shabti (mummiform figure) standing upright with a painted/colored face and a clasped-limbs posture, inscribed with lines of hieroglyphs on the torso and legs.
The image shows a single small faience figurine shaped as a shabti: a human-like head with a nemes-like headdress is worn, and the figure stands with both arms held forward at chest level, one hand over the other. The torso and legs are covered with closely packed, horizontal bands of incised hieroglyphic text, running across the front from just below the shoulders down toward the feet. The feet are separated in a conventional shabti stance with a distinct base/foot outline. Surface coloration appears predominantly pale/greenish-grey (suggesting the catalogue’s faience), with some darker traces in the facial features and at the top of the feet; the background is a neutral studio setting with a black backdrop. No clearly readable cartouche, royal name, or deity determinatives are legible at this resolution.
Cross-references (2)
- BKM-Accession 37.212E tier-2
- BKM-Object 3987 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.