Scattered Finds Archaeology, Egyptology and Museums Alice Stevenson Scattered Finds Scattered Finds Archaeology, Egyptology and Museums Alice Stevenson Canada in the Frame Copyright, Collections and the Image of Canada, 1895–1924 Philip J. Hatfield First published in 2019 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Available to download free: www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press Text © Alice Stevenson, 2019 Images © Copyright holders named in captions, 2019 Alice Stevenson has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as author of this work A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. This book is published under a Creative Commons 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Stevenson, A. 2019. Scattered Finds: Archaeology, Egyptology and Museums London, UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/111. 9781787351400 Further details about Creative Commons licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ ISBN: 978-1-78735-142-4 (Hbk.) ISBN: 978-1-78735-141-7 (Pbk.) ISBN: 978-1-78735-140-0 (PDF) ISBN: 978-1-78735-143-1 (epub) ISBN: 978-1-78735-144-8 (mobi) ISBN: 978-1-78735-145-5 (html) DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111. 9781787351400 v Acknowledgements I first conceived of this book during my postdoctoral research in the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford between 2009 and 2012. Towards the end of my contract, funding from an anonymous benefactor and support from Michael O’Hanlon allowed me to undertake a pilot project to develop a grant proposal for the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). This was to look more closely at the history of finds distribution from British excavations in Egypt to museums worldwide. I feel enormously fortunate to have been able to spend my early career at the Pitt Rivers Museum, an institution that has shaped my own thinking and practice. I am especially grateful to Jeremy Coote, Dan Hicks, Alison Petch and Chris Morton, together with the University of Oxford’s early history of anthropology research group, for discussions over the years. With backing from John Baines, the application to the AHRC was successful, and the ‘Artefacts of Excavation’ project was funded between 2014 and 2017. By that time I had taken up the curatorship of UCL’s Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, and a full-time post- doctoral researcher, Emma Libonati, took on responsibility for a key element of the project: digitizing and uploading archives from the Petrie Museum to a newly created online resource, the Artefacts of Excavation website, hosted by the University of Oxford’s Griffith Institute (http:// egyptartefacts.griffith.ox.ac.uk/), initially designed by our part-time researcher Sarah Glover. Volunteer Alix Robinson, meanwhile, digitized the finds distribution archives of the Egypt Exploration Society, with help from Carl Graves, and Emma Libonati once again took on the arduous task of making these accessible on the website. The site is intended to provide information that might help identify material excavated in Egypt by British organizations in museum collections worldwide. Additionally, it provides an overview of the scope of distribution, the history, politics and significance of which are analysed in this book. I am hugely grateful to John Baines for his unwavering support for the project, as well as to Emma Libonati for the many long hours spent provisioning the website with such a considerable amount of material, identifying destination names in the archives, and ensuring that the project’s conference, held at UCL in April 2016, was such a success. It was Emma who first suggested the term ‘object habit’ for this symposium, a concept that I have developed further in this book. Emma also contributed to research on the history of objects sent to Italian institutions, discussed in Chapter Three. vi Thanks are due to the staff (past and present) of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology at UCL: Debbie Challis, Pia Edqvist, Anna Garnett, Tracey Golding, Helen Pike, Maria Ragan, Briony Webb and Alice Williams. Towards the end of the project, additional assistance was received from Massimiliano Pinarello and Heba Abd El Gawad. Similarly, the project could not have succeeded without the help of the Egypt Exploration Society – Carl Graves, Chris Naunton and Cedric Goebell – and the staff of the Griffith Institute in Oxford – Liam McNamara, Francisco Bosch-Puche and Cat Warsi. A steering committee, including Liam McNamara, John Taylor and Alison Petch, was especially helpful in the early stages of the project’s development. In undertaking the research for this book I have been in correspondence with dozens of curators and archivists at institutions ranging from the USA’s White House and Britain’s Royal Palaces to universities in Japan and local museums in Cornwall. Special mention, however, goes to Ashley Cooke, Carl Graves, Faye Kalloniatis, Margaret Maitland, and Campbell Price, who were always exceedingly generous with the information that they shared about the collections and archives they look after. Thanks are due to Lawrence Berman of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and Adela Oppenheim of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for assistance during a research visit in April 2015; to Anlen Boshoff, Esther Esmyol and Lambert Vorster for assistance in South Africa during research visits in 2014 and 2017; to the University of Kyoto for the invitation to participate in their symposium in February 2016, and to the museum staff at the University for the opportunity to study the University’s collections there; and to Prince Lawerh and Irene Morfini for help in the National Museum of Ghana during a research visit in September 2017. Brian Weightman and Meg Wilson were very generous in sharing transcriptions of the archives at the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow, and Christina Donald helped with explorations of the collections at the McManus Museum and Art Gallery’s stores in Dundee. For assistance identifying further archival sources, museum objects and references I would like to acknowledge Louise Allen, Maura Anderson, Brigitte Balanda, Yekaterina Barbash, Stephanie Boonstra, Michael Carver, Chris Davey, Josh Emmitt, Ben Harer, Angela Houghton, Sue Giles, Imogen Gunn, Gabrielle Heffernan, Maarten Horn, John J. Johnson, Gina Laycock, Steven Lubar, Jennifer McCormick, Samantha Masters, Peter Morris, Mark Norman, Alessandro Pezzati, Nathan Schlanger, Jon Schmitz, Sarah Scott, Paul Smith, Angela Stienne, Veronica Tamorri, John Taylor, Ross Thomas, Amara Thornton, Carolyn Thorp, Alexandra Villing, Marianne Weldon and Martha Zierden. vii My own linguistic inadequacies have left me indebted to more able colleagues who have translated texts from various corners of the globe. For help with Japanese sources I am very grateful to Kento Zenihiro, Noriyuki Shirai, Hyung Il Pai, Ryan Botta, and especially to Tomoaki Nakano. I would like to thank Chloe Ward for French translations, Elizabeth Wood for German, Anlen Boshoff for Afrikaans, and Heba Abd El Gawad and Ahmed Mekawy Ouda for Arabic. Several individuals kindly commented on earlier chapter drafts and shared references, unpublished papers and archival sources. I am grateful for their expertise and advice: Tine Bagh, John Baines, Wendy Doyon, Heba Abd El Gawad, Thomas Gertzen, Daniela Picchi, Christina Riggs, Kathleen Sheppard, Stephen Quirke and Alice Williams. My final thanks, as ever, goes to my husband Paul. He has been my soul companion and support throughout my career, and I dedicate this book to him. viii Contents List of figures ix Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Trinkets, Trifles and Oddments: The Material Facts of History (1880–1914) 25 Chapter 2: Collecting in America’s Progressive and Gilded Eras (1880–1919) 69 Chapter 3: International, Colonial and Transnational Connections (1880–1950) 105 Chapter 4: A Golden Age? (1922–1939): Collecting in the Shadow of Tutankhamun 145 Chapter 5: Ghosts, Orphans and the Dispossessed: Post-war Object Habits (1945–1969) 181 Chapter 6: Legacies and Futures (1970–) 217 Conclusion 253 Appendix A: Legislation relating to the excavation and export of Egyptian antiquities 259 Appendix B: Ancient Egyptian chronology 261 Bibliography 263 Index 297 ix List of figures Introduction Fig. 0.1 Advertisement for Thomas Cook Nile tours, circa. 1890–1. Courtesy of the Thomas Cook Archives. 7 Fig. 0.2 Photograph of archaeological finds in a dig-house courtyard at Abydos, circa. 1900. Courtesy of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, UCL. 8 Fig. 0.3 Photograph of Hilda Petrie at Abydos, circa 1903. Courtesy of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, UCL. 12 Fig. 0.4 Egyptian shabti acquired from the Egypt Exploration Fund by Sir Henry Rider Hagaard around 1900, now in Liverpool’s World Museum (museum number 56.22.603). Courtesy of National Museums Liverpool, World Museum. 15 Fig. 0.5 Photographs of Egyptian work teams on site at Egypt Exploration Fund excavations at Abydos, 1911–12. Courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society, (ABNeg.11.0240). 19 Chapter 1 Fig. 1.1 Lower part of a seated royal statue of a Hyksos king of the mid-second millennium BC at Bubastis 1888–89, with Egyptian workmen in background. Courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society (BUB.NEG.15). 26 Fig. 1.2 Foundation deposit from the pylon of the sanctuary of Amun-Ra, built under Ptolemy II Philadelphu (285–246 BC), photographed by Flinders Petrie in 1885. Courtesy of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, UCL (PMAN 2680). 27 Fig. 1.3 Landscape around Tanis after a rainstorm. Photograph taken by Flinders Petrie February 1884. Courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society (DE.NEG.193a). 31 x Fig. 1.4 Acknowledgement certificate dated 1904 from Bankfield Museum for objects presented by the Egypt Exploration Fund. The vignettes illustrate the dense, universalist displays of world culture UK municipal museums aspired to in the early twentieth century. Courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society (DIST 21.36). 43 Fig. 1.5 The Qurna burial group, in situ , shortly after discovery. Courtesy of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, UCL (PMAN 2851). 45 Fig. 1.6 Distribution grid from 1901, organizing the dispatch of artefacts from royal second dynasty tombs at Abydos to museums around the UK. Courtesy of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, UCL (PMA/WFP1/D/9/9.1). 47 Fig. 1.7 Photographic view of Amelia Edwards’s study at her home, The Larches, in Bristol. Courtesy of the Principal and Fellows of Somerville College, Oxford. 51 Fig. 1.8 Photograph of Hilda Petrie’s sister, Amy Urlin, in the mess room of the Abydos dig-house, circa. 1903. Courtesy of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, UCL. 59 Fig. 1.9 Photograph of Beatrice Orme in Egypt in the early years of the twentieth century. On the back of the photograph is written ‘The best length for a skirt in Egypt!!’. Courtesy of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, UCL. 59 Chapter 2 Fig. 2.1 Photograph of a statue of Ramesses II (museum number 87.111) excavated by Petrie’s team at Tell Nebesheh as displayed in the original Museum of Fine Art building on Copley Square, Boston in 1903. Photograph © 2018 Museum of Fine Arts Boston (Negative number E15692). 71 Fig. 2.2 Photograph of University of Pennsylvania’s exhibit at the 1893 Columbian World Exposition taken by Jas. H. Crockwell, Salt Lake City, Utah. Courtesy of Penn Museum (image #174642). 73 Fig. 2.3 Photograph of material received by the University of Chicago in 1896 from the Egypt Exploration Fund’s work at the Ramesseum. Courtesy of the Oriental Institute, Chicago. 77 xi Fig. 2.4 Photograph of one of the press cuttings in Amelia Edwards’s scrapbook taken from the Daily Graphic , 11 January 1890, showing Edwards lecturing in New York. Courtesy of the Principal and Fellows of Somerville College, Oxford. 80 Fig. 2.5a & b Front and back of a ‘tomb card’ from EES Abydos excavations, 1908–09. Courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society (AB.TC.E.0011). 92 Fig. 2.6 Photograph of payday at Balabish, March 1915. Courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society (BAL.NEG.10). 95 Fig. 2.7 Pectoral and necklace of Queen Sithathoryunet with the name of Senwosret II (c. 1887 BC) (museum number 16.1.3a, b) excavated by the British School of Archaeology in Egypt team at Lahun in 1914. Creative Commons Zero (CC0) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 98 Chapter 3 Fig. 3.1 Glyptotek Museum conservator ‘Elo’ with mummy (museum number AE1425), excavated by the British School of Archaeology in Egypt at Hawara in 1911. Archive photo held by Royal Library and Courtesy of Tine Bagh, Glyptotek Museum. 115 Fig. 3.2 Photograph of the interior of McGill University’s Redpath Museum, circa 1893. Through the open door of the museum hall is the room devoted to archaeological and ethnological material. Courtesy of Notman Photographic Archives, McCord Museum of Canadian History, Montreal (view 2604). 121 Fig. 3.3 Roman era terracotta figurine excavated in 1908–09 by Flinders Petrie’s teams at Memphis. Described by Petrie as ‘Indian’. Courtesy of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology (UC8932). 129 Fig. 3.4 Photograph of antiquities displays inside the Exhibition Hall at Kyoto University’s Faculty of Letters, circa 1923. Courtesy of the University of Kyoto. 131 Fig. 3.5 Letter from University of Tokyo acknowledging the donation of antiquities from the Egypt Exploration Fund’s 1906–07 excavation seasons. Courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society (EES.DIST.28.10b). 134 xii Chapter 4 Fig. 4.1 Relief carving showing Akhenaten and Nefertiti, found during the Egypt Explorations Society’s 1926–7 excavations at Amarna. Courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society (TA.NEG.26-27-073). 149 Fig. 4.2 Report in the Australian Sunday Times of Lord Carnarvon’s death and treasure for museums, 20 May 1923. Reproduced with permission of the Griffith Institute, University of Oxford. 152 Fig. 4.3 Predynastic ceremonial mace-head excavated at Hierakonpolis in 1897–8 (museum number AN.1896-1908/E3632-a), reconstructed by Ashmolean restorer W. H. Young. Image © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. 159 Fig. 4.4 (i) Plaster cast of a Badarian ivory figurine made by Ashmolean restorer W. H. Young now in the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology (museum number UC19638); (ii) a second copy of the same figurine from the National Museum of Scotland, shown here with Young’s trademark signature, NEOS, inscribed on base (museum number A.1926.722). The original is in the British Museum (museum number EA59648). 160 Fig. 4.5 Amarna vase (museum number AN.1926.109-a) restored by the Ashmolean Museum’s restorer W. H. Young. Image ©Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. 161 Fig. 4.6 Object card from Egypt Exploration Society’s 1931–2 Tell el-Amarna excavations showing an object selected for the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum. Courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society (TA.OC.31-32.443). 164 Chapter 5 Fig. 5.1 Bomb damage in Liverpool Museum. A member of the auxiliary fire service carrying a ceramic coffin lid from Garstang’s 1906 excavations at Esna on 4 May 1941. A seated statue of the lioness-headed goddess Sekhmet is visible in the background. Courtesy of National Museums Liverpool, World Museum (16.11.06.403). 182 xiii Fig. 5.2 The former Stepney Borough Natural History Study Museum in London’s St George in the East cemetery. Photograph © Alice Stevenson, 2017. 193 Fig. 5.3 Example of a pre-war display at the Ashmolean Museum, 1939. Image © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. 197 Fig. 5.4 Diorama commissioned by Cyril Aldred to illustrate late Predynastic king Scorpion performing an agricultural ceremony © National Museums Scotland (V.2013.68). 197 Fig. 5.5 Photograph of an architect’s model showing part of a proposed new building for the Pitt Rivers Museum, designed by Pier Luigi Nervi, Powell and Moya, circa 1967. Courtesy of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (photograph number 2008.74.5). 204 Fig. 5.6 Outside the National Museum of Ghana. Photograph © Alice Stevenson, 2017. 206 Fig. 5.7 ‘Save the monuments of Nubia’: Ghanaian stamps dated 1963. Photograph © Alice Stevenson 2017. 209 Chapter 6 Fig. 6.1 Beads made of meteoric iron by Diane Johnson. Courtesy of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, UCL (museum number UC80628–9). 233 Fig. 6.2 Modern Egypt project display in the British Museum, 2017. Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum. 235 Fig. 6.3 Poster advertising the 2013 ‘Afro-combs’ exhibition. Reproduced with the kind permission of The Fitzwilliam Museum and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge. 244 INTRODUCTION 1 Introduction Statues of ancient Egyptian rulers and their gods can be encountered in the grandiose galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Manhattan’s traffic-choked Fifth Avenue. More humble grave goods, excavated from tombs along the Nile, can be found in homemade cabinets in a South African barn at the end of a dirt track road. Several hundred artefacts made of pottery, stone and metal are displayed in the wood-panelled vitrines of one of Japan’s oldest universities, while a single, 5000-year- old ceramic vessel is tucked away in a shed in a quiet Cornish village. Scattered between national museums, public schools, masonic lodges, royal palaces, universities and auction houses are hundreds of thousands of archaeological finds from Egypt. Some are unassuming fragments, others are monumental works of art. All were caught up in a massive network of financial sponsorship and patronage for British archaeological fieldwork that propelled these things far from the cemeteries, temples and towns from which they had been excavated. Over the course of a century, an estimated 350 institutions across twenty-seven countries in five continents benefited materially from these excavations. And this excludes the waifs and the strays: those small ‘duplicate’ items that became personal gifts, diplomatic concessions or quietly procured souvenirs. Taken together, no other endeavour in world archaeology is comparable in terms of its scope and material legacy. The history of this material diaspora can be told from any number of perspectives. Most accounts that have touched on this story have done so from the point of view of specific archaeological sites – in an effort to reconstruct them – or else from the perspective of particular institutions – in order to explain the origins of their collection. No study has attempted to take a holistic view of the practice as a historical phenomenon, one intimately linked both to the development of archaeology as a discipline and to the museum as an institution. The most common departure points for these histories have been the establishment of the London-based Egypt Exploration Fund (EEF) in 1882 and the career of one of its most prominent field directors, the unconventional archaeologist Sir William SCATTERED FINDS 2 Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853–1942). Both are key to accounts that link objects and people across the globe, but they are no more than colourful threads in a complex tapestry. A more fully textured history must incorporate a much wider cast of characters, in a greater diversity of contexts, than has been acknowledged before. This book is an attempt to relocate this narrative and to do so with greater sensitivity to the historical conditions that enabled and shaped the nature of Egyptian archaeology in the field, in the museum and in many spaces in between. In other words, it is what anthropologists have called a ‘multi-sited’ project, which allows for ‘the layering of partly incommensurable experiences in different places through time, and tracing the connections and disjunctions between them’. 1 Such an approach is valuable when attempting to navigate a course between sweeping imperial and colonial endeavours in Egypt, on the one hand, and smaller scale institutional politics and personal relationships, on the other. Drawing on case studies that are geographically and chronologically divergent in this way serves as a foil to shallow claims that there exists some sort of vague ‘eternal fascination’ with the land of the pharaohs when, historically, Egyptian material culture has occupied a considerably more vexed position. 2 Depending on circumstances, archaeological finds could be burdensome, contested or of marginal interest. Widespread distribution did not necessarily reflect an inherent interest in Egypt’s past. Instead, it actively constituted particular geographies of knowledge or power, and it is by examining the passage of artefacts through alternative trajectories that it becomes possible to identify how such interests were cultivated in the first place. Object Habits Central to my argument is the concept of the ‘object habit’, a shorthand for referring to an area’s or a community’s attitude to things, affecting what was collected, when and why. 3 It takes into account factors that influenced the types of things chosen; motivations for collecting; mechanisms of acquisition; temporal variations in procurement; styles of engagements with artefacts; their treatment, documentation and representation; and attitudes to their presentation and reception. These practices emerge not only within the museum or out in the field, but also, significantly, between the two within the wider world. It is not my intention to theorize objects themselves. 4 My interest is in how people engaged with them, and in the worldviews that were INTRODUCTION 3 reflected and constituted by their presence. Furthermore, I want to be able to say something about the ways in which the dividends of archaeological fieldwork shaped conceptions of the past, and how such things were brought into dialogue with the present. In this framework, ancient Egyptian material culture is not only the product of long-gone societies, but it is also a result of more recent cultures of collecting. There is nothing revolutionary in these lines of thought. That objects do not simply illustrate history, but also generate it, is the mainstay of a considerable body of cultural and critical theory. In this vein, the discourses expounded in this book owe a major debt to the biographical approaches instigated by the anthropologists Arjun Appadurai and Igor Kopytoff. 5 Three decades of scholarship have built upon their insights into object biographies, and have resulted in several productive analytical frameworks for understanding how museum collections form. 6 These include the model of the relational museum developed at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, 7 and sociological investigations inspired by Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory (ANT). 8 Such models have brought into relief the shifting value of artefacts throughout their life-courses, and they highlight how museums operate within extensive networks that link collecting in the field with institutions. However, instead of examining the ways in which a single institution drew into itself complexes of people and things, my analysis encompasses a transnational system of exchange that cross-cuts a multitude of organizations and fields of relations. Situating the distribution of finds within the full agency of the world also has the effect of re-conceptualizing the relationship of the museum to international fieldwork. There is a common misconception that ‘museums have always been, and continue to be, a relatively peripheral player in archaeological motivation’. 9 I disagree. While it is tempting to envisage such dispersals as a linear transmission of objects from the field to the museum, throughout this book are numerous examples of how excavation and curatorial practices are informed by related practices of knowledge. This study therefore complements other histories of archaeology that have sought to triangulate museums and colonial fieldwork. 10 It is clear that both arenas of activity ultimately impinged upon each other in highly complex ways. ‘These worlds’, as Chris Wingfield has commented, ‘have never been quite as distinct as they might appear’. 11 Not only were such routes of transmission not linear, they were also far from flat. Artefacts travelled along paths determined by wealth, cultural authority and social opportunity. In this context it is striking just how many women enthusiastically championed organizations like SCATTERED FINDS 4 the EEF. Consequently, the historical prospects for women to become involved in the archaeological process forms a key theme for discussion at several points throughout this book. The project of recognizing women’s contribution to archaeology has usually proceeded by identifying those pioneers, the ‘trowel-blazers’, who participated in or led excavations. 12 However, there were greater numbers of women involved both in establishing the tenets of the discipline and in the production of archaeological knowledge than these efforts might suggest. This is an oversight attributable not only to sex, but also to the fact that the part of archaeology that many chose to work in, or were restricted to, was the museum. Realigning the position of museums in archaeological histories, as well as in practice, is therefore not simply a disciplinary project, it is equally a feminist one. More specifically, it can be characterized as being sympathetic to third wave feminism, which recognizes that there is never one viewpoint, but multiple perspectives, dependent upon dynamics such as those of class, sex, religion and ethnicity. 13 This stance is appropriate for this work because I aim to engage with a fuller spectrum of interests, concerns and characters (not just female) that variously intersected with the movement of Egyptian antiquities out of the field and into institutions. Moreover, feminist traditions of critical analysis have long emphasized the connection between the social context of research and the nature of knowledge production. 14 In view of these concerns I have tried to be sensitive to diffuse sets of historical contingencies in order to understand the development of institutions and the varied reception of the artefacts acquired by them. And this is where I think the potential of the object habit concept really comes to the fore, namely in its ability to open up what otherwise might become circumscribed and inward-looking areas of enquiry, isolated from parallel and related phenomena in the wider world. Furthermore, the idea of the object habit foregrounds the nature of things – in the widest possible sense – against the grain of studies that are frequently more attentive to the social relationships forged during processes of collecting than to the material prerequisites of those relationships. Museum Studies literature has become more attuned to the properties of things, 15 and this realignment is a reminder that the articles involved in such enquiries need not be limited to antiquities. Archaeological and museum activities produce, manage and interpret a range of materials – photographs, field notes, biological specimens and plaster casts – that are variously implicated in mediations between past, present and future. These too circulated away from field sites alongside antiquities. All have a physicality, be it in their size, weight, fragility, reproducibility, INTRODUCTION 5 ornamentation or condition, that had (and continues to have) direct, and historically dependent, effects at various points in the distribution network. The approach that I take, therefore, constitutes something of a counterpoint to over-determined accounts in which ‘disciplinary’ museums act as powerful ‘purveyors of ideology and of a downward spread of knowledge to the public’. 16 Certainly, museums did act as sites that shaped behaviours and consciousness, but there were additional, external dynamics that conditioned visitors’ and curators’ attitudes to things. In adopting this line of enquiry I have, following several other scholars, favoured a general emphasis on historical and cultural geographical approaches to museums and collections, rather than adopting a stance taken from critical theory. For instance, Michelle Henning has emphasized that museums need to be understood in relation to the wider culture of which they are part, 17 Andrea Witcomb reminds us that museums have always been subject to contradictory influences, 18 John Mackenzie has cautioned that museums function in the real world and scholars should not claim too much for them, 19 and Anthony Shelton has argued that collections are not simply paradigmatic representations subject to particular disciplinary constraints. 20 For Egyptian antiquities specifically, Elliot Colla identifies forms of ‘artifaction’ that were ‘neither single-minded nor centralized’. 21 Instead, he notes that antiquities were subject to ongoing, and often incomplete, processes of recontextualization and reframing. My account of the distribution of finds from British excavations in Egypt seeks to be cognizant of these positions. Chronological and Geographical Scope The fates of archaeological finds are narrated across six chapters organized loosely by chronology and geography, beginning in late Victorian England, and moving across four phases of distribution activity through to the present day. My decision to commence the study in the 1880s is not an arbitrary one, but a deliberate periodization that acknowledges a confluence of trends across political agendas, social mores, intellectual discourses and economic developments that together created the ideal conditions for a fresh reception of Egyptian material. For the century leading up to 1880, Stephanie Moser has charted attitudes to Egyptian antiquities in the British Museum, from their being presented and consumed as enigmatic ‘wondrous curiosities’ 22 towards being appreciated through more historically informed notions of Egypt