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Ushabtis were funerary figurines placed in
tombs among the grave goods and were
intended to act as substitutes for the
deceased, should he be called upon to do
the manual labour in the afterlife. They
were used from the Middle Kingdom
(around 1900 BC) until the end of the
Ptolemaic Period, nearly 2000 years later.
Ushabtis were believed to magically
animate after the dead had been judged,
and work for the dead person as a
substitute labourer in the field of Osiris.
This is why they sometimes carry hoes, to
execute the hard manual labours
mentioned in Chapter VI of the Book of the
Dead: “whether it be to plough the fields,
or to fill the channels with water, or to
carry sand from the East to the West”.
Egyptian faience is a type of heated quartz
ceramic displaying surface vitrification
which creates a bright lustre of various
colours, with blue-green being the most
common. Although faience should not be
considered as a category of pottery, as it
doesn’t contain any clay and instead
contains the major elemental components
of glass (silica, or silicon dioxide, or quartz,
the primary constituents of sand), faience
is frequently discussed in studies relative to
ancient pottery. Notably, faience is though
considerably more porous than glass and
can thus be cast in molds to create vessels
or objects. Egyptian faience was widely
used for objects of smaller dimensions from
beads to figurines and statuettes and
faience artefacts have been unearthed in
both elite classes and lower classes urban
and funerary contexts. It was the most
common material for the creation of
scarabs and other forms of amulets,
including ushabti figures, cosmetic articles,
bowls and drinking cups and it was
frequently employed in the production of
ancient Egyptian jewellery, as the glaze
made it smooth against the skin. Egyptian
faience was both exported widely in the
ancient world and produced in a number of
local workshops in numerous locations, and
exported faience articles have been
retrieved in Mesopotamia, in numerous
localities around the Mediterranean basin
but also in northern Europe as far away as
Scotland.
- (ES.8526)
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