The Meaning of Menial Labor

"Servant Statues" in Old Kingdom Serdabs

Bibliographic Data

ID10959800
AuthorsAnn Macy Roth (corresponding author)
Year2002
Volume39
Pages103
Publication date2002-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of the American Research Center in Egypt (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0065-9991 • E-ISSN: 2330-1880
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/40001151
OpenAlexW2319761672
LanguageEN
Citations received7

Serdabs, the inaccessible chambers adjoining elite tomb chapels of the Old Kingdom period, were built to hold of the tomb owner, members of his family, and other dependents.1 In the late Fourth Dynasty, and more commonly after the middle of the Fifth Dynasty, serdabs also began to include small depicting people performing everyday tasks, most often some aspect of food preparation, such as grinding grain and straining beer. James H. Breasted, Jr., in the title of his Egyptian Servant Statues, 2 gave the conventional designation for these which assumes both their identity and their function. They are generally thought to have represented anonymous servants and to have insured that the dead person in whose tomb they were found would have servants in the afterlife to prepare food and do other work for him. Because of the humble tasks they are shown performing, these have often been compared with the sacrificed workers found around royal and elite tombs of the First Dynasty, with the wooden figures of workers depicted in early Middle Kingdom models of estate workshops, and with the shabtis that develop in the later Middle Kingdom. The nature and purpose of these Old Kingdom however, have never been questioned or fully investigated. A careful assessment of the tasks depicted, the archaeological context in which the appear, and the texts that are inscribed on a few examples suggests that these had a more complex purpose than merely to supply labor. For this reason, these will here be referred to as serving statues, which is a more neutral term than servant statues in that it does not presuppose the identity of the people depicted or the purpose of their representation.3

Art · Epistemology · Kingdom · Meaning (existential) · Servant · Ancient Egypt and Archaeology · Archaeology and Historical Studies · Engineering · Geology · Philosophy

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub