Shawabty of Queen Madiken

This is a shawabty of Queen Madiken. The female figure wears the queen's vulture headdress over the tripartite wig. The arms are not crossed, the hands are opposed. In each hand the figure holds a hoe. In addition the left hand holds a cord to a seed bag which is slung over the left shoulder. There are seven horizontal lines of incised text encircling the body. The text is framed and there is a blank column up the center of the back dividing the back of the text. The text is painted black. This mummiform shape does not have a back pillar or base. The object was broken in three pieces and three chips and is not mended. The bottom of the face is chipped. A large chip is missing from the top right side of the head. The hands are chipped off. There are three chips missing from the back of the feet. The ancient Nubians included shawabtys in their tombs only in the Napatan Period, about 750–270 B.C. These funerary figurines are based on Egyptian shawabtys, but differ from them in many features of their iconography. For instance, the known Nubian examples are only from royal tombs. Also, they have unique texts, implements, poses and are known to have the largest number of shawabtys included in one tomb. Their function, it is assumed, was the same as that of the Egyptian shawabty, namely to magically animate in the Afterlife in order to act as a proxy for the deceased when called upon to tend to field labor or other tasks. This expressed purpose was sometimes written on the shawabty itself in the form of a "Shawabty Spell," of which versions of various lengths are known. Shorter shawabty inscriptions could also just identify the deceased by name and, when applicable, title(s). However, many shawabtys carry no text at all. The ideal number of such figurines to include in a tomb or burial seems to have varied during different time periods.