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Brooklyn Museum — Egyptian, Classical, Ancient Near Eastern Art · other

Shabty of the Chief Steward Pedi-neit

Source of record: Brooklyn Museum — Egyptian, Classical, Ancient Near Eastern Art — catalogued by the holding institution. View the original record →

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-4o-2024-08-06

Machine-generated from the object's image on May 2026. Not curatorial; treat deities, names, and signs below as the model's best reading, not authority.

A faience shabti figure inscribed with hieroglyphs.

The artifact is a faience shabti figure, typically used in funerary contexts. It features a mummiform shape with inscribed hieroglyphs down the body. The glaze is a typical blue-green, characteristic of Egyptian faience, and the figure shows signs of ancient craftsmanship with a finely modeled head and inscriptions detailing parts of the Book of the Dead.

funerary New Kingdom good
Materials faience
Signs sarcophagus reed leaf ×3 owl ×2
Visible text "Htp dj nsw Wsire nb jmnt"

Connections

Found at Thebes
Materials Faience

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.