About me

Niek de Haan presenting at the International Congress for Egyptologists in Florence in 2015

My serious interest in Ancient Egyptian started after visiting the British Museum many times during a secondment to London in 2003. I then also found out that you can actually, legally, own Ancient Egyptian artifacts in Europe. The collecting started with a gift from my wife Dagmar, consisting of a nice Ptolemaic shabti and has continued based on the ethical standards as laid down by IADA.

I soon realized that if you want to know all there is to know about the items you collect, its best to specialize 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.

Another element that really interests me is the search for parallels and to learn more about the process of the production of these pieces. With detailed parallel studies you might learn more about how they were produced but also about affiliation with others owners, the time period and the location of the tomb.

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. In the process I have made many friends including shabti scholars Glenn Janes (www.shabtis.com) and Dik van Bommel (www.ushabtis.com), Miquel Angel Hectobar and Dr. Sabina Malgora from The Mummy Research Project.

This website has been updated by my friend and Egyptologist Lonneke Delpeut who did an amazing job.

Niek de Haan & Sabina Malgora at the International Congress for Egyptologists in Florence, 2015