Overseer Shabti of Nauny

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Almost 400 small funerary figures known as shabtis were found with Nauny’s burial. These can be seen as avatars, meant to carry out agricultural labor on Nauny’s behalf in the afterlife. Of the 393 shabtis discovered, 355 were workers and 37 were overseers like this one. Recognizable by their long kilts and the flails that they hold, the overseer figures were meant to supervise the worker shabtis (see for example 30.3.26.10) that worked on Nauny’s behalf in the afterlife. On the back pillar, Nauny is named as as a king’s daughter and called an “illuminated Osiris,” transformed through the process of mummification and identified with the principal god of the dead, then reanimated by the light of the sun god as he traveled through the Netherworld each night. Nauny’s shabtis were divided between seven boxes. Five of these, with their shabtis, were given to The Met, while two were sent to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

Egyptian Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met collection of ancient Egyptian art consists of approximately 30,000 objects of artistic, historical, and cultural importance, dating from about 300,000 BCE to the 4th century CE. A signifcant percentage of the collection is derived from the Museum's three decades of archaeological work in Egypt, initiated in 1906 in response to increasing interest in the culture of ancient Egypt.

Metropolitan Museum of Art