Ancient Egyptian decorative figurine statue

That is the title for this little bust on eBay.

Five inches isn't that small. 

It's larger than most of the shabti statues, the statues of little helpers in afterlife. 

If you had hundreds of shabti to help run your estate in the afterlife, then you'd have shabti overseers as well, to organize the other shabti. 

What a racket.

The statues cannot be too large so they don't overwhelm the Chia pet rams arranged in a row as sphinxes. Check em out, Checkemouters, Flickr [luxor rams]

The little replica Egyptian statues are arranged in heaps as if shaken by earthquakes and sunken as Alexandria was. Duckduckgo images [sunken alexandria]

So my aquarium is similar to both Luxor and Alexandria sunken. 

The pump output creates a current overhead. The spaces between the Chia rams offer different degrees of relief from the current based on their position and the other things clustered around them and over them. I'm still adding things to make more hiding places and rest areas and the plants are still growing around them. 

I can stack things up around the Chia rams to create a real mess. 

Only a few statues on eBay are suitable for this. Most are rather cheesy. Most are painted bright colors. They don't look like they've been lost underwater for two thousand years. But when I saw this one I didn't even have to think. Just buy it. 

It's a fairly good copy. Although simplified. And as usual the face isn't exactly right.

They don't say in the description that this is Meritamun, Ramses' daughter by his chief wife, Nefertari. 

Some places describe Meritamun as Ramses' chief wife. 

I saw the real statue in the Ramses exhibition in Denver decades ago and when I walked up to the real statue I was blown away. She was a true beauty. An extremely privileged individual. And you can tell by the statue that she was love with a love that is intense. 

One of the things about being a pharaoh is you marry all the best women in the country and all the countries that want to hook up with you. Nefertari was the hottest woman in Egypt. So of course her daughter is going to be bee-you-tea-full. Knock down drop dead gorgeous. And she was. How could it be otherwise? 

No need to idealize the beauty of Meritamun. No. This was real. 

The museum didn't mention it, the museum guide didn't mention it, and all the pages describing this statue don't mention, and the eBay description doesn't mention, they all neglect to mention her necklace says "beautiful" a hundred times. 

[nefer gold]

It's so obvious. It's right there. It veritably slaps you in the face. Yet nobody mentions it. 

Those little gold dangling things are the hieroglyph "nefer" meaning beautiful, good, pure. Her mother's name has the word "Nefer" in it. And her necklace writes the word in gold a hundred times. 

Come on!

Meritamun was so beautiful her jeweler says it a hundred times.

Is that beautiful or what? 

Here's the real statue.

Anyway, to the bottom of the aquarium with you.