Shawabty of Queen Nasalsa

This is a shawabty belonging to Queen Nasalsa. The female figure wears the queen's vulture headdress over the tripartite wig but the vulture's head is broken off. This mummiform shape does not have a back pillar or base. There are typically seven horizontal lines of incised text encircling the body but only three remain. The text is framed and there is a narrow blank area up the center of the back. The text is painted black. Here the hands are opposed and the arms are not crossed. 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. The feet and four lines of text are missing. The nose is also missing and the chin and right hand are chipped. There is a small, deep indentation on the back of the right arm. 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.