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Paradise Requires Farm Labour, So You Send a Substitute

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Paradise Requires Farm Labour, So You Send a Substitute

The Field of Reeds is agricultural. It is Egypt improved: canals, fields, grain taller than a person, a place where the barley comes in reliably. That is a paradise for a society whose entire life depended on an annual flood behaving well. It also means there is work to do, and the corvee that applied in life was expected to apply there.

The solution is one of the most numerous classes of object in Egyptology. Shabti figures are small mummiform servants placed in the tomb, inscribed with the spell that activates them, in which the figure answers for the deceased when called to plough, to irrigate or to move sand from east to west. The spell is chapter six of the Book of the Dead and it is written on the figures themselves.

The numbers escalated. Early burials have one. Later ones have a set of workers for every day of the year plus overseers to supervise them, so more than four hundred figures in a single tomb, sometimes stored in purpose-made boxes. Museums hold them in the tens of thousands.

It is a very practical piece of theology. The reward is real, the obligation that comes with it is real, and the response is to arrange substitute labour in advance, in writing, at scale.

The quality of the figures tracks the price paid. Royal shabtis are finely modelled in faience with crisp inscriptions; cheap sets are crude, hurried, and sometimes inscribed with nothing legible at all. A tomb's workforce is therefore a fairly direct record of what its owner could afford.

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