To assure themselves a comfortable afterlife, Egyptians stocked their tombs with at least one figurine called an ushabti, who acted as a servant in the afterlife. The message carved on each of the figurines explained that if the deceased is called on to do any work in the afterlife, the ushabti will respond with “Here I am” and will do the job. Some tombs had as many as one ushabti for every day of the year and another 36 overseers to keep order. All but the poorest citizens provided themselves with some kind of funerary furnishings. Products for burial and the labor to produce them made up a large industry in Egypt.
Date
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W.M. Flinders Petrie, Kahun, Gurob, and Hawara (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, and co., 1890), p. 19.
Thomas George Allen, A Handbook of the Egyptian Collection (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1923), p. 7, 71 (ill.).
Flinders Petrie, Seventy Years in Archaeology (Sampson Low, Marston & co., 1931), p. 96.
Thomas George Allen, The Egyptian Book of the Dead: Documents in the Oriental Institute Museum at the University of Chicago, Oriental Institute Publications 82 (University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 12-13, 63, 65, 67, 75, 77, 289.
Emily Teeter, “Egypt in Chicago: A Story of Three Collections,” in Millions of Jubilees: Studies in Honor of David P. Silverman, ed. Zahi Hawass and Jennifer Houser Wegner (Conseil Suprême des Antiquités, 2010), vol. 2, p. 303.
Karen B. Alexander, “From Plaster to Stone: Ancient Art at the Art Institute of Chicago,” in Karen Manchester, Recasting the Past: Collecting and Presenting Antiquities at the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 20, fig. 4.
Art Institute of Chicago, Life and Afterlife in Ancient Egypt, Feb. 11, 2022 - present.
Found at Hawara, Egypt, 1881; Amelia B. Edwards (1831-1892), London; given to the Art Institue of Chicago, 1890.
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