NEW KINGDOM, LATE 18TH DYNASTY, CIRCA 1323-1295 B.C.

For a period in the late 18th-19th Dynasties, shabti figures wearing the dress of daily life were introduced. They showed the owner as a person dressed in the fashion of the day for a wealthy Egyptian of the New Kingdom – heavily pleated garments, shawls, skirts, duplex wigs and sandals. Sometimes even the earlobes would have a slight depression to indicate the earrings that they would have worn. Instead of holding agricultural implements in their crossed arms, as with other shabtis, they often held divine attributes, as can be seen on the present lot. The decision to depict this type of everyday dress may have developed from the new ideas of religious iconography which emerged during the reign of Akhenaten. At his Jubilee Temple in Thebes the Osiris pillars show Akhenaten with arms crossed, holding divine symbols or royal insignia, the lower part of his body clothed in the dress of everyday life. From the end of the New Kingdom the shabti in everyday dress became the usual format for the overseer shabti. Holding a whip they would have commanded the mummiform worker shabtis. For similar shabtis wearing the costume of the living cf. H. D. Schneider, Shabtis, II, Netherlands, 1977, pp. 80-85, nos 3.2.5.1 – 3.2.5.16, pls 30-32.

D. L. Hayes explains the role of the Egyptian vizier: 'In the New Kingdom, to perhaps an even greater extent than in the preceding periods, the co-ordinator and mainspring of the pharaoh’s government was his vizier, an exceedingly busy official who seems to have exerted at least supervisory control over every branch of the national administration. Under King Thutmose III the duties of the vizier were divided on a geographical basis between two great functionaries, a Vizier of the South and a Vizier of the North; but during the first five reigns of the 18th Dynasty a single Vizier managed the affairs of both Upper and Lower Egypt' (W. C. Hayes, Scepter of Egypt, vol. II, The Metropolitan Museum, New York, 1959, p. 56).