Shabti of Queen Henuttawy
Third Intermediate Period, Dynasty 21, reign of Psusennes I (about 1039–991 BCE)
Ancient Egyptian
Theban Tomb 320, First Royal Cache, Deir el-Bahri, Thebes (now Luxor), Egypt
Faience; 11.7 × 4.8 × 2.2 cm (4 5/8 × 1 7/8 × 7/8 in.)
The Art Institute of Chicago, purchased with funds provided by Henry H. Getty and Charles L. Hutchinson, 1894.618
This shabti, a figurine left in the tomb to perform labor for the deceased, is typical of those of Dynasty 21 with its cursory modeling, a heavy coating of blue glaze, and very short inscription. It was made for Queen Henuttawy, whose name appears in a cartouche on the front.[1]1
The figure is schematically modeled. There is little suggestion of the contour of the woman’s body and feet, and few indications of her gender, such as breasts. Her arms are well defined, her chin pointed, and her eyebrows are defined with dark pigment. A uraeus disrupts the line of the wig on her brow. Her mouth is barely visible. Black paint, which was applied over the shabti and then fired a second time, was used to detail the wig, the cosmetic lines, the eyebrows, the collar and bracelets, the hoes held in each hand, and the seed bag on the middle of her back.[2]2
Additional Views of Cat. 40
Side of cat. 40.
Back of cat. 40.
Side of cat. 40.
Because this figurine was made in an open mold, the back is flat and lines have been cut into it with a tool to delineate the arms and the outline back of the wig. The faience used in this period was large-grained and friable and it could not produce crisply molded details. The heavy, dark blue glaze—known as “Deir el-Bahri blue” because it was used for many figurines from Deir el-Bahri—owes its intense color to the addition of cobalt to the faience mixture. The only known sources of cobalt are in the Western Desert near the Dahkla and Kharga oases.[3] This type of glaze is very heavy and helped maintain the integrity of the poor-quality faience. Although the form of the figurine is not especially attractive, it reflects considerable investment in time and resources since these were made by the hundreds for each burial.3
The vertically oriented text on the body reads: the “illuminated one, the Osiris, Henuttawy.” “Illuminated” is a reference to the rays of the sun that restore the deceased. This example lacks the titles King’s Daughter or King’s Wife that appear on other shabtis made for Queen Henuttawy.[4]4
Henuttawy was probably a daughter of King Ramesses XI (reigned about 1099–1069 BCE), who ruled from Piramesse in the Delta.[5] She came south to marry Pinudjem I, a High Priest of Amun at Thebes, one of a line of clerics who had created their own rival power base. The marriage created a dynastic link between northern and southern Egypt. Her name, which means “mistress of the Two Lands,” refers to her role in the unification of north and south. One of her sons, Menkheperre, became ruler of the south, and another ruled as King Psusennes I from Tanis in the north, solidifying the unification of the country under a single family.5
This shabti came from the First Royal Cache at Deir el-Bahri (Theban Tomb 320), a rock-cut tomb that was probably built for the High Priest of Amun Pinudjem II but was later used to safeguard the mummies and funerary equipment of twenty kings and queens of the New Kingdom and ten other high priests and their families.[6] The tomb is said to have been discovered in 1871 or 1875 by a member of the Theban Abd el-Rassul family, who were famous tomb robbers.[7] When the family began to sell objects from the cache on the local antiquities market, their superior quality and the royal names inscribed on them immediately raised the suspicion that the el-Rassuls had made an important discovery. In 1881, Émile Brugsch of the Bulaq Museum (from whom the Art Institute purchased objects) took possession of the tomb and within a few days had cleared the mummies, coffins, and nearly six thousand other objects, including about four thousand shabtis, among which were two boxes of shabtis belonging to Henuttawy.[8] After the material was taken to the museum in Cairo, some of it was dispersed to museums and collections throughout the world. Since 2021, Henuttawy’s mummy and coffin have been in the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Cairo.[9]6
For more on shabtis and ushabtis, see About Shabtis and Ushabtis.7
Provenance
Found in TT320, Deir el-Bahri, Thebes, Egypt. Reverend Chauncey Murch (1859–1907), Luxor, Egypt; sold to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1894.8
Publication History
Thomas George Allen, A Handbook of the Egyptian Collection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923), 68, 70.
9
- Queen Henuttawy is also referred to by her full name, Duahathor-Henuttawy, and by the modern designations Henuttawy Q and Henuttawy A. The modern names were once thought to belong to two different individuals. See Kenneth A. Kitchen, The Third Intermediate Period in Egypt (1100–650 BC), 2nd ed., with supplement (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1986), 537–38.
- Hans D. Schneider, Shabtis: An Introduction to the History of Ancient Egyptian Funerary Statuettes with a Catalogue of the Collection of Shabtis in the National Museum of Antiquities at Leiden (Leiden: Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, 1977), 1:235.
- Harry M. Stewart, Egyptian Shabtis (Princes Risborough, UK: Shire, 1995), 42; Paul T. Nicholson and Ian Shaw, eds., Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 111, 198.
- See Jacques-François Aubert and Liliane Aubert, Statuettes égyptiennes: Chaouabtis, ouchebtis (Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient, 1974), pl. 27, fig. 59 (shabti with the title King’s Wife); pl. 27, fig. 60 (shabti with the title King’s Daughter). She bore many other titles as well that are attested on her coffin and elsewhere. On these titles, see Kitchen, Third Intermediate Period, 50.
- Queen Henuttawy’s genealogy has been reevaluated over the years. She was once thought to be the daughter of King Smendes, but now the consensus is that her father was Ramesses XI. See Kitchen, Third Intermediate Period, 49–52. For the old and new schemes, see ibid., 534, 536–39.
- The assumption that the tomb was built for Pinudjem II is based on the location of his coffin at the far end of the narrow, rock-cut tomb. Andrzej Niwiński, “The Bab El-Gusus Tomb and the Royal Cache in Deir el-Baḥri,” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 70 (1984), 77.
- Andrzej Niwiński, 21st Dynasty Coffins from Thebes: Chronological and Typological Studies (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1988), 24–27. The date of the original find of the tomb by the el-Rassul family is unclear. Niwiński says it was 1875 (ibid., 24). Jason Thompson says the tomb was discovered “ten years earlier [than 1881]” (hence, in 1871). Jason Thompson, Wonderful Things: A History of Egyptology, vol. 2, The Golden Age: 1881–1914 (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2015), 8.
- Aubert and Aubert, Statuettes égyptiennes, 141. For an inventory of sixty-nine known examples inscribed for Henuttawy, see Glenn Janes, Shabtis, a Private View: Ancient Egyptian Funerary Statues in European Private Collections (Paris: Cybèle, 2002), 113–14.
- Mummy and coffin of Henuttawy, Cairo, Egyptian Museum, CG 61090. From 1902 to 2021, the mummy and coffin were housed at the Egyptian Museum.
Emily Teeter, “Cat. 40 Shabti of Queen Henuttawy,” in Ancient Egyptian Art at the Art Institute of Chicago by Emily Teeter and Ashley F. Arico, ed. Ashley F. Arico (Art Institute of Chicago, 2025), https://doi.org/10.53269/9780865593213/55.
© 2025 by The Art Institute of Chicago. This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license: creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
