The Cleveland Museum of Art has a painted wooden box about thirty centimetres long, made in Egypt around 700 BCE, probably at Thebes. It stands on short legs at the corners. Its two ends rise above the lid in rounded tops, like a pair of headstones. The sides are white, framed in yellow, and divided into columns of hieroglyphs painted in a blue-green that has mostly held. The record says it is inscribed for the lady of the house, Ditamenpaankh, and that it was probably one of a pair made for her.

It held shabtis. These are the small mummy-shaped figures that were put in Egyptian tombs to do the dead person’s work. The idea was that the next world had labour in it, the same as this one: fields to till, banks to water, sand to move. When the dead person was called up for it, a figure would answer instead. The spell that made this work was usually written down the front of each figure, and the line people tend to quote from it is the answer itself. When you are called, “here I am,” you shall say.

By Ditamenpaankh’s time a burial could hold a great many of them, sometimes four hundred or more. This is often explained as one for every day of the year, with overseers to keep them in line. Cleveland has 134 of hers. They are terracotta, most of them between five and seven centimetres tall, with arms crossed over the chest and faces that are mostly a nose. They were pressed into an open mould, and painted blue to look like faience, the glazed material that more expensive shabtis were made of. On some the blue has survived in patches; on others it’s gone to a chalky grey.

The box is the reason I stopped. According to the museum, the spell isn’t on the figures. It was moved onto the sides of the box, where it only had to be written once. The figures I looked at closely have nothing written on them at all.

So 134 figures, each made to say “here I am,” and none of them says it. The box says it for them. The record’s explanation is practical, “thus expediting production,” and I’m sure that’s right. Writing a spell down the front of something five centimetres tall, 134 times, is a lot of work, and the figures were cheap ones made quickly. But the way it worked out is a little like a roll call where one person answers for the whole room.

Then the museum did the opposite. The set came to Cleveland in 1914, bought in Egypt by a collector named Lucy Olcott Perkins and given by the John Huntington Art and Polytechnic Trust. It was numbered 1914.718. The box is 1914.718.1, and its lid is 1914.718.1.b. Then each of the figures got its own number, from 1914.718.2 to 1914.718.135, with no gaps. Each one has its own record, its own measurements and its own photograph against black felt. Somebody inked “14718” on the underside of the box, and somebody else measured every figure.

That includes 1914.718.72. In its photograph it’s a fragment of fired clay, about a centimetre across and half that thick, broken on top, with a little blue still on one side. Its record has the same title as all the others, “Shawabty of Ditamenpaankh.” It’s a whole entry in the catalogue, the same as the box.

I don’t want to make too much of this. The museum numbered them because that’s how you keep track of 135 objects, not to give anyone back a voice, and the people who made them were saving time, not making a point. Nobody did anything wrong in either direction. But I noticed that the two efficiencies run opposite ways. The workshop treated them as a set, one spell for all of them. The museum treats them one at a time.