I soon realised that if you want to know all there is to know about the items you collect, its best to specialise in a specific area. I decided to concentrate on shabtis for various reasons: you can usually find out the ancient egyptian owner by the glyphs and even get to know what this person did for a living over 2000 years ago or whom he was married to, name of mother and father and so on.
Furthermore, in view of “value for money” shabtis are very good as well. Shabtis usually consist of large pieces of faience, which is much more expensive for other ancient Egyptian pieces such as cups, udjat-eyes and so on (reason being that shabtis are very common on the market).
Finally, since many shabtis were made for the same person, it is likely that one for the similar ancient owner is published as part of a museum or private collection, which makes it more easy to find a reference for the shabti you just collected or wanted to collect.

Now, with the help of a fantastic Dutch hieroglyph teacher, Huub Pragt, I learned the basics of reading glyphs and by reading almost every shabti book there is, talking to almost every shabti dealer and contacting many fanatic shabti collectors world-wide I am confident in saying to have successfully specialized in shabtis enough to master this website for shabticollections.