Aaru

Aaru, the "Field of Reeds," is the ancient Egyptian paradise, and its most revealing feature is how earthly it is. It was imagined not as a realm of disembodied bliss but as an idealized mirror of the Nile valley: fertile fields, abundant harvests, flowing water, and the pleasures of the good life continued forever. To reach it the dead had to pass the ordeal of the Duat and the judgement of Osiris, at which the heart was weighed against the feather of Maat (truth); only the "justified" (maa-kheru) entered.

Because paradise was a working landscape, one might be called upon to labour in its fields, and this practical anxiety produced one of Egyptian religion's most characteristic objects: the shabti, a small mummiform figurine placed in the tomb by the dozen or the hundred, inscribed with a spell so that it would answer the call and do the work in the owner's stead. Aaru thus reflects a distinctively Egyptian vision of the afterlife: not escape from the world but its perfection, the familiar life of field and family made eternal and secure, with even its chores anticipated and provided for.

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.