The ushabti was a funerary figurine used in ancient Egyptian religion. The Egyptological term is derived from Ancient Egyptian: wšbtj, which replaced earlier šwbtj the nisba of šwꜣb "Persea tree". Ushabtis were placed in tombs among the grave goods and were intended to act as servants or minions for the deceased, should they be called upon to do manual labor in the afterlife; the figurines carried a hoe on their shoulder and a basket on their backs, implying they were intended to farm for the deceased. They were written on by the use of hieroglyphs found on the legs, they carried inscriptions asserting their readiness to answer the gods' summons to work. The practice of using ushabtis originated in the Old Kingdom of Egypt, with the use of life-sized reserve heads made from limestone, which were buried with the mummy. Most ushabtis were of minor size, many produced in multiples – they sometimes covered the floor around a sarcophagus. Exceptional ushabtis are of larger size. Due to the ushabti's commonness through all Egyptian time periods, world museums' desire to represent ancient Egyptian art objects, the ushabti is one of the most represented objects in Egyptology displays.

Produced in huge numbers, along with scarabs, are the most numerous of all ancient Egyptian antiquities to survive. The term shabti applies to these figures prior to the Twenty-first Dynasty of Egypt, but only after the end of the First Intermediate Period, only to those figurines inscribed with Chapter Six of the Book of the Dead. Otherwise, they might better be defined by the generic term "funerary figurines". Shabtis were servant figures, it was necessary for the owner's name to be inscribed on an ushabti, along with a phrase sending them to action, written in the hieratic script. The shawabti were a distinct class of funerary figurines within the area of Thebes during the New Kingdom; the term ushabti became prevalent after the 21st Dynasty and remained in use until the Ptolemaic Kingdom. It is thought by some that the term ushabti meant "follower" or "answerer" in Ancient Egyptian, because the figurine "answered" for the deceased person and performed all the routine chores of daily life for its master in the afterlife that the gods had planned for them, although it would be difficult to reconcile this derivation with the form shawabti.

Ushabti inscriptions contain the 6th chapter of the Book of the Dead, translated as: Illumine the Osiris, whose word is truth. Hail, Shabti Figure! If the Osiris be decreed to do any of the work, to be done in Khert-Neter, let everything which standeth in the way be removed from him- whether it be to plough the fields, or to fill the channels with water, or to carry sand from the East to the West; the Shabti Figure replieth: "I will do it, verily I am here when thou callest".. In rare cases different chapters of the Book of the Dead are written. Furthermore, ushabtis mention the name and the titles of the owner, without the spells of the Book of the Dead. Before being inscribed on funerary figurines, the spell was written on some mid-Twelfth Dynasty coffins from Deir el-Bersha and is known today as spell 472 of the Coffin Texts. Mentioned first in spell 472 of the Coffin Texts, they were included in the grave goods of the dead as small figurines since the reign of Mentuhotep II of the 11th Dynasty.

Some think that they may have symbolically replaced human sacrificial burials, called retainer sacrifices, a somewhat improbable theory as centuries had passed between the last known sacrificial burials and the appearance of the ushabtis. They were distinguished from other statuettes by being inscribed with the name of the deceased, his titles, with spell 472 of the Coffin Texts or the speech of the ushabti figure found in Chapter Six of the Book of the Dead. In the 18th Dynasty during the reign of Akhenaten, the figurines were inscribed with an offering addressed to the sun disk, rather than the traditional speech of the ushabti figure; the ushabti was believed to magically animate after the dead had been judged, work for the dead person as a substitute labourer in the fields of Osiris. From the New Kingdom onwards, it was referred to as servant. From the 21st Dynasty on, ushabtis became numerous in graves. In some tombs the floor was covered with a great many ushabti figurines. At times, several hundred ushabti were placed in a deceased Ancient Egyptian's tomb, but pharaohs had more of these servants than commoners, king Taharqa had more than a thousand.

Some tombs contained overseer or'reis' ushabtis holding a whip, which were responsible for groups of ten ushabti each -. These overseers became rare during the Late Period; the tomb of Tutankhamun had a large number of ushabtis of varying sizes, most were ornate, with hieroglyph statements. They were divided into groups: gold-foiled. Ushabtis were mummiform, but during the Dynasty XVIII reign of Thutmose IV, they began to be fashioned as servants with baskets and other agricultural tools; some ushabtis were ornate in form, in colour, when made of enamel. They were made of clay and stone and early ones were sometimes made from wax. Figurines were

Lanier W. Phillips was a survivor of the wreck of the USS Truxtun off the coast of Newfoundland, a retired oceanographer and a recipient of the U. S. Navy Memorial's Lone Sailor award for his distinguished post Navy civilian career. Phillips was an African American, raised by sharecroppers in Lithonia, GA and who became the US Navy's first black sonar technician. Phillips died on March 12, 2012, at the Armed Forces Retirement Home in Mississippi. While growing up in the segregated South, Phillips witnessed the terror of the Ku Klux Klan and was taught to fear white people. "ever look a white man in the eye.... If you do you'll get a whipping, or maybe lynched," his great-grandmother once warned him. In order to escape the South, Philips joined the Navy in 1941. Although the Navy was still segregated and blacks were confined to duty as mess attendants, Phillips considered this the lesser of two evils. On February 18, 1942 Phillips was aboard the USS Truxtun while it was battered by a severe winter storm.

The Truxtun and the supply ship the USS Pollux were forced onto the rocks of the southeast coast of Newfoundland. Hundreds of men from both ships died. Afraid to leave his doomed ship because he thought he was off the coast of Iceland where he had been told blacks were forbidden to go ashore, Phillips boarded a lifeboat which capsized as it reached land. Exhausted and covered in oil that had leaked from the sinking ships, Phillips collapsed on the beach. Prodded to his feet by a local resident who told him he'd freeze to death if he didn't get up, Phillips was confronted by an experience, new to him: "I had never heard a kind word from a white man in my life." Phillips was taken to a place where the local women were washing oil from the survivors, when they realized they could not scrub his skin white he was afraid their kind treatment would end. Instead a local woman, Violet Pike, insisted that he come home to her house where she nursed him with soup and put him to bed with blankets and rocks she'd warmed on her wood stove.

Profoundly touched and forever changed by the kindness of the residents of St. Lawrence, Phillips went on to become the Navy's first black sonar technician and vowed to do everything in his power to repay the kindness he had experienced donating enough money to St. Lawrence for them to build a children's playground. After giving speeches at schools across the U. S. Phillips was awarded an honorary degree from Memorial University of Newfoundland in 2008 for his efforts to end discrimination. In 2011, Phillips was given honorary membership into the Order of Newfoundland and Labrador for his work in civil rights in the U. S. In 2012 Oil and Water, a play about Lanier's experience in St. Lawrence after the shipwreck and the influence it had on him, was produced by Newfoundland's Artistic Fraud theater company. "PRI's This American Life.

William III of Mâcon known as William IV of Burgundy, was count of Mâcon, count of Auxonne, count of Vienne and regent of the county of Burgundy. He was a younger son of Stephen I, Count of Burgundy, of Beatrice of Lorraine. After the death of his brother, Renaud III, he took control of the county of Burgundy in the name of his niece Beatrice, he was recognized as count by the emperor Frederick Barbarossa by 1152. He died in 1156 while on Crusade in the Holy Land, Frederick married Beatrice and took over the county. William married Adelaide-Pontia, heiress of Lord Theobald of Traves, had the following issue: Stephen II, who succeeded to Auxonne and the title Count of Burgundy, his son was: Stephen III of Auxonne Girard I, who succeeded to Mâcon, Vien. Among his children were: Beatrice of Viennois married c. 1175 to Umberto III, Count of Savoy. Malaspina illegitimate