Ushabti
The Egyptological term is derived from ๐ ฑ๐๐๐๐ญ๐พ wลกbtj, which replaced earlier ๐ท๐ฏ๐๐๐ญ๐พ ลกwbtj, perhaps the nisba of ๐๐ฏ๐๐ญ ลกw๊ฃb "Persea tree".
The term shabti applies to these figures prior to the Twenty-first Dynasty of Egypt, but only after the end of the First Intermediate Period (c. 2181โ2055 BCE), and really only to those figurines inscribed with Chapter Six of the Book of the Dead.
If the Osiris [name of the deceased] be decreed to do any of the work which is to be done in Khert-Neter, let everything which standeth in the way be removed from him โ whether it be to plough the fields, or to fill the channels with water, or to carry sand from the East to the West.
[8] Mentioned first in spell 472 of the Coffin Texts, they were included in the grave goods of the dead as small figurines since the reign of Mentuhotep II of the 11th Dynasty.
[citation needed] They were generally distinguished from other statuettes by being inscribed with the name of the deceased, his titles, and often with spell 472 of the Coffin Texts[5] or the speech of the ushabti figure found in Chapter Six of the Book of the Dead.
In the 18th Dynasty during the reign of Akhenaten, the figurines were inscribed with an offering addressed to the sun disk Aten, rather than the traditional speech of the ushabti figure.
At times, several hundred ushabti were placed in a deceased Ancient Egyptian's tomb, but pharaohs had considerably more of these servants than commoners, and king Taharqa had more than a thousand.
Ushabtis were mostly mummiform, but during the Dynasty XVIII reign of Thutmose IV, they began to be fashioned as servants with baskets, sacks, and other agricultural tools.
The level of standardisation varied, a compositional and morphological study of faience ushabtis suggested that mass-production is an oversimplification of a complex process that may more accurately be described as batch-processing.
