Shabtis God’s Wive Shepenwepet I

It has been hypothesized that Shepenwepet I was buried in the plundered tomb no. 17 at Medinet Habu. The excavations in this area did yield shabtis, but the published reports do not indicate that any of them can be securely connected with the God’s Wife herself. Rudolf Anthes mentions a group of very small shabtis, yet he does not associate them with Shepenwepet I. Since the finds in Berlin were largely lost as a result of the Second World War, I fear that any shabtis of Shepenwepet I must be regarded as lost, or not yet discovered

Research and documentation

Rudolf Anthes played a key mediating role in bringing Uvo Hölscher’s Medinet Habu excavations to publication. Drawing on his own field experience in 1931/32 and 1932/33, he later helped reconstruct and systematize the results for the multi‑volume series The Excavation of Medinet Habu.

Hölscher, already of advanced age when the fieldwork ended, was unable to cope with the sheer scale of the complex and its documentation, so much material remained only as notes and sketches. Anthes, as a younger colleague with first‑hand knowledge of the site and access to the archives, reordered and interpreted these records, making a substantial contribution to the final published volumes and to the reconstruction of contexts that Hölscher himself had not been able to complete.

1951 On dating the Burials in the Chapels by R. Anthes pg. 25

In order to clarify what the excavation records actually say about the shabtis from the area of the God’s Wives at Medinet Habu, I briefly summarise the relevant passages and museum entries here. This makes it transparent which pieces can be securely linked to a documented find spot, and which attributions in later literature or catalogues go beyond what the original reports state

Anthes 1951: “Characteristic of these destroyed burials are the large quantity, the rough execution, and the small size of the ushabtiu. They occurred in masses, occasionally up to more than four hundred of the same type in the same burial. Many are of a poor quality of greenish fayence, but more frequently they are made of baked clay with or without a blue wash. They are all crudely modeled. Most of them are 4–6 cm. high, but the inscribed ones are 7–10 cm. They are all of Petrie’s Twenty-second Dynasty types.“

A note on the same page:
“17. I am indebted to my friend Jaroslav Černý for dating the hieratic. Some of the ushabtiu are now in Chicago (No. 15760, from Tomb 8; Nos. 15767–73, from Tomb 17).”

E15767 – 7.9 cm Overseer- no photo
E15768 – 5.7 cm Overseer- no photo, lower part missing
E15769 – 8.1 cm Worker Inscribed – no photo, same description as E15770, no uraeus mentioned
E15770 – 8.2 cm Worker inscribed – Djedptahiufankh
E15771 – 8.1 cm Worker inscribed – no photo, same description as E15770, no uraeus mentioned
E15772 – 8.1 cm Worker inscribed – no photo, same description as E15770, no uraeus mentioned
E15773 – 8.0 cm Worker inscribed – Djedptahiufankh

1954 The Excavation of Medinet-Habu, pg. 19

In his 1954 publication on the Medinet Habu excavations, Hölscher does not make any explicit connection between Shepenwepet I and the shabtis found in Tomb 17. The shabtis from this burial chamber are described as crude, uninscribed green faience figures, and cannot, on the basis of the excavation report itself, be securely attributed to Shepenwepet I.

From the report: “The burial chamber, designated as Tomb 17, is almost intact and is particularly interesting because of its stone vault (see pp. 29 f.). Tomb-robbers had broken in above the blocked doorway, destroying and plundering, so that very little was left of the original contents. Some inlays from the wooden coffin were found, including numerous pieces of lapis lazuli and a glass eye with lead mounting and imbedded gold wire (Chicago 15710–14, 16296).

There were also, according to Anthes, fifty-seven crude uninscribed ushabtiu of greenish fayence (4.5–5 cm. high), as well as twenty-one ushabtiu of the type which we designate as overseers; a sacred eye; some small blue beads, including cylinders, balls, rings, and double rings (Chicago 15057 and 15079); and various other small objects.”

It should be noted that there is a slight tension between the different publications by Anthes. In a 1951 discussion of the ushabti corpus from Medinet Habu he explicitly refers to a small group of inscribed ushabtis now in Chicago (Nos. 15767–73) as coming “from Tomb 17”, on the basis of the field documentation. In the 1954 volume on the post‑Ramesside remains, however, the description of Tomb 17 itself mentions only a set of small, crude, uninscribed green faience ushabtis and overseers, without integrating these Chicago pieces into the published inventory of the burial chamber