A Recycled Stick Shabti in Ipswich Museum, England

Abstract

Among the Egyptian objects in the Ipswich Museum, Suffolk is a crudely fashioned wooden statuette almost certainly a shabti that bears two quite different sets of inscriptions, one written in hieratic and another in more regular hieroglyphs. Its history can only be guessed, but there is good reason to believe that it was made sometime in the late 17th or early 18th Dynasty and then re-used very much later, as the following investigation will attempt to show. Measuring 28.9 cm high, 6.9 cm (max) wide, and 7.3 cm in depth the statuette bears the accession number R. 1992.89.40 (fig. I)1. Regrettably, the museum's object register provides no information about its provenance or the route by which it entered the collection. Many objects in the museum did come ffom excavations of the Egypt Exploration Fund and British School of Archaeology in Egypt, but no link with either has been found for R. 1992.89.402. The statuette represents a rudimentary mummiform figure fashioned by an adze or chisel ffom a single piece of wood with coarse strokes that has produced a multi-faceted surface which displays little or no smoothing. No painted decoration is visible other than traces of a black substance, pitch or resin perhaps, thinly covering much of the surface, most prominently on the back. The figure was once wrapped ffom head to foot in linen, fragments of which stili adhere firmly to its surface in several places (see fig. 1). The species of timber has yet to be scientifically identified, but ffom its fairly pale yellowy colour and grain pattern it resembles one of the native Egyptian trees, perhaps sycamore fig or tamarisk3.