Digital Lunch Seminar Series

Unravelling the Secrets of the Ancient Masters

Egyptian Shabtis in Focus

Stelios Aspiotis, Olivier Bonnerot, Samaneh Ehteram, and Leah Mascia

Monday, 24 November 2025, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm CET
Online lecture

In ancient Egyptian culture, shabtis were funerary figurines, typically in the form of miniaturised mummies, that accompanied the deceased in their tombs. Appearing during the 11th Dynasty of the Middle Kingdom (c. 2000–1550 BCE), shabtis could be made from a variety of materials (stone, wood, clay, etc.), but were most frequently composed of Egyptian faience, i.e. vitrified quartzitic sand, and were decorated with various pictorial elements and hieroglyphs. Despite the heterogeneity of the depicted imagery, shabtis shared common features, namely an unglazed mineral-based core and an outer glazed surface with a characteristic colour. Thus, studying the production process of faience shabtis in addition to their design and painted hieroglyphs can provide valuable information about the mineral-phase composition of the core and glaze, the glazing technique used, and the firing conditions of these Egyptian objects. However, the cultural and historical significance of shabtis often prohibits invasive sampling, necessitating non-destructive and non-invasive analytical methods that are sensitive to both chemical composition and crystal structure. As such, Raman spectroscopy, X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy, and computed tomography (CT) scanning are increasingly popular in the scientific community and have been successfully applied to determine the structure, elemental composition, firing conditions, and hidden subsurface features of painted and enamelled objects.

In this talk, we will present the results of a multidisciplinary and multi-analytical analysis of two Egyptian shabtis dated to the 10th and 6th centuries BCE, which are part of the Ancient Art and Antiquities collection of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe (Hamburg, Germany). In particular, the following points will be discussed: (i) the design, sociocultural features, and figural motifs characterising these historical objects, and (ii) how the combination of CT scanning, XRF, and Raman spectroscopy can determine the inner structural characteristics of shabtis, their mineral-phase composition, the elemental composition of the glaze, and the glazing techniques used to produce them.

Please register to attend: