Servant Statuette

Wooden servant statuette depicting a man striding while leaning slightly forward. He wears a white apron on his ochre-painted body that comes down below the knees; the hair on the back of his head and the contours of his wide-open eyes on his severely damaged face are painted black. The arms, once attached to the trunk with dowels, are now lost. This type of statuette can be considered as a funerary equipment characteristic of elite burials from the late Old Kingdom to the early Middle Kingdom. Be they stand-alone or group figures, the servant statuettes depicted a range of activities carried out in the fields, in the granaries or in workshops of various kinds, and the wide range of goods they produced served to ensure a continued supply for the tomb owner in the afterlife. This piece also serves to illustrate the chief characteristics of mass production: the torso, carved from a single piece of wood, is thin and columnar in shape, and the relative position of the striding legs is merely indicated by a deep, vertical incision on the lower body. Such a stock body could be easily transformed into a variety of worker figures by attaching the appropriate arms to it. However, the opposite also holds true: in the absence of the arms, it is no longer possible to determine what activity the figure once performed. Although this statuette’s place of origin is unknown, very similar figurines were found most of all in the cemetery of Sedment and a few other Middle Egyptian sites.