WALTERS-EG
Walters Art Museum (Egyptian) · statue
Statue of Tef-ib
Description
<p>Tombs sometimes contained more than one statue representing the owner. The statues were usually inscribed with the owner's name and titles, and they served as a focus for funerary rituals. These examples, belonging to a man named Tef-ib, are unusual in that they represent the tomb owner while also bearing inscriptions referring to the four sons of Horus, who protected the internal organs of the deceased. These deities were also identified with the north, south, east, and west, and the statues may have been placed in the tomb in accordance with these directions. The differing facial features of these statues (including Walters 22.10, 22.12, 22.13) suggest that they were made by more than one artist. Notice as well, the sizes of the four figures differ as well as their wigs.</p><p>For the latest information about this object, <cite><a href='https://purl.thewalters.org/art/22.11' rel='external'>Statue of Tef-ib</a></cite>, visit the Online Collection of the Walters Art Museum.</p>
AI image analysis GPT-5.4-nano
Machine-generated from the object's image on Jul 2026. Not curatorial; treat deities, names, and signs below as the model's best reading, not authority.
Front-facing small Egyptian-style statue of a standing figure wearing a striped headcloth and a plain shendyt-like skirt, with a vertical column of hieroglyphs on the front.
The object shows a nude-to-torso standing human figure with a wig or headcloth rendered in light and dark stripes covering the hair and ears, and a straight posture with arms relaxed at the sides. The figure wears a simple skirt (shendyt or similar garment) depicted by painted bands and a white/pale panel across the front of the legs and skirt area. A vertical inscription column in black-painted hieroglyphs runs down the front of the skirt/panel. The statue is made of carved wood and retains traces of polychromy: pale/cream ground for the skin and torso, dark paint for facial hair/accents, and darker/blue-black for the inscription. The base is a separate rectangular block painted in reddish-brown at the top/front edges. No clear royal cartouche or name is legible from the image; the hieroglyphs appear devotional/identificatory rather than a clearly identifiable royal titulary. No Greek, Coptic, or Arabic text is visible.
royal
unknown (likely Late Period to Ptolemaic based on style of small wooden painted statuette; cannot be confirmed from image alone)
good
Materials
carved woodpolychrome paintpainted hieroglyphsrectangular base block
Signs
Vertical column of black-painted hieroglyphs ×20
Visible text
"Vertical black-painted hieroglyphs on the front panel; individual signs not confidently legible at this resolution."
Inscriptions (1)
Inscription #1
English description
[Translation] ""The revered before Imesti, the domain-superintendent, Itf-ib, engendered by Itf-ib, the blessed, lord of reverence.""
Connections
Deities
Horus
Cross-references (2)
- Walters-AccNum 22.11 tier-2
- Walters-id 27426 tier-2
Similar inscriptions · by content embedding
About this record's data
- From the source institution — accession, description, dimensions, and dating are as catalogued by Walters Art Museum (Egyptian).
- AI-inferred — the image-analysis panel (deities, names, signs) is machine-generated and may be wrong.
- Approximate location — most map points are plotted at the site centroid, not the exact findspot.
- Inferred links — cross-references marked with a match method other than explicit-source-field were matched by us, not stated by the source.