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Servant Statuette

Place of production Egypt
Date 2118-1837 BC
Object type tomb equipment
Medium, technique Wood, gessoed, painted
Dimensions

19.7 × 3 × 2 cm

Inventory number 84.158-E
Collection Egyptian Art
On view This artwork is not on display

Wooden servant statuette depicting a striding man. He wears a white apron on his brick-red painted body that comes down below the knees; the plastically modelled hair and the area around the eyes on his severely damaged face still retain traces of the original black painting. The arms, once attached to the trunk with dowels, are now lost, and the lower parts of both legs were broken off. This type of statuette can be considered as a funerary equipment characteristic of elite burials from the late Old Kingdom to the early Middle Kingdom. Be they stand-alone or group figures, the servant statuettes depicted a range of activities carried out in the fields, in the granaries or in workshops of various kinds, and the wide range of goods they produced served to ensure a continued supply for the tomb owner in the afterlife. This piece displays the features of mass production typical of the times following the end of the Old Kingdom: the torso, carved from a single piece of wood, is flat, thin, and columnar, and the relative position of the striding legs is merely indicated by a deep, vertical incision on the lower body. Such a stock body could be easily transformed into a variety of worker figures by attaching the appropriate arms to it. However, the opposite also holds true: in the absence of the arms, it is no longer possible to determine what activity the figure once performed. Although this statuette’s place of origin is unknown, very similar stick-like figurines with a comparable suggestive look were found most of all in the cemetery of Sedment and a few other Middle Egyptian sites.

This record is subject to revision due to ongoing research.

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