In total, 18 artifacts were found buried around Melville House, a stately building in County Fife, Scotland.Image credit: National Museums Scotland
Posted on 01/29/2024 9:35:55 PM PST by SunkenCiv
Seventy-one years ago, a schoolboy in Scotland was digging up potatoes as a punishment when he discovered an ancient Egyptian statue...
Between 1952 and 1984, several antique statues were found on the grounds of Melville House... Teachers and pupils brought each new discovery to museum curators and experts, who identified the statues as ancient Egyptian artifacts, but no one could figure out how they had ended up there...
The ancient collection includes a nearly 4,000-year-old statue head carved out of red sandstone, which Maitland described as a "masterpiece of Egyptian sculpture," as well as several bronze and ceramic figurines dating to between 1069 B.C and 30 B.C., or just before the Romans took over Egypt as a province...
In 1984, a group of teenage boys from Melville House visited Goring at the museum and brought an Egyptian bronze figurine, which one of them had found with a metal detector on the school grounds. Goring did some digging and learned that two additional Egyptian objects — the sandstone head and a bronze statuette of an Apis bull — had previously turned up on the estate, in 1952 and 1966 respectively.
Goring excavated the site and discovered a number of other ancient artifacts, including the top half of a glazed ceramic figurine depicting the goddess Isis suckling her son Horus, and a ceramic plaque bearing the eye of Horus.
Previous efforts to determine the origin of these objects were fruitless, but researchers now think they were brought there by Alexander Leslie-Melville, whose title was Lord Balgonie — a young heir to Melville House who traveled to Egypt in 1856 and died one year later upon his return to the U.K.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
In total, 18 artifacts were found buried around Melville House, a stately building in County Fife, Scotland.Image credit: National Museums Scotland
It was accidently dropped on the way to Stone Henge.
wy69
There’s more of gravy than of grave about it, wherever it came from. /rimshot
My money is on Lord Elgin stashing Egyptian antiquities in Scotland.
Roman Republic - Roman Empire
“Round, Round, I get a round”.....
Peeps travel......
“Round, Round, I get around”.....
Peeps travel......
4,000 years ago, Egyptian tourists in Scotland: let’s bury some figurines and stuff to mess with people in the future.
Maybe they were trying to sell their thatched hut, and their realtor told them to bury a likeness of King Tut in the front yard.
Vikings dropping off souvenirs after a visit to Thebes
Those potatoes had an eye for art...
None seem important enough to support my theory of protection of Museum pieces during WW2.
In a weird twist, perhaps the best treasures to be revealed from ancient times aren't going to found in Egypt.
What if it turns out that the archaeologists in de Nile have been doing it wrong.
That'll teach those NIMBYs.
How did it get there? Maybe it got there by global trading.
An old family cemetery sits on a ridge on my land in NC. The graves are marked with rocks at the head and foot. There’s even a monkey buried there that was brought back by a merchant marine member of the family. Years ago, I put a conch shell up there to mess with the future generation.
Okay, I’ll ask the really silly question;
Why was this boy digging for potatoes on SCHOOL GROUNDS?....................
Theory: Knights Templar of the crusades raided Egyptian pyramids and graves. The isles were reportedly one of the locations where stolen treasure was transported to.
These are “pocket trash” that a rich plundering imperial “Lord Charles” might bring back from Egypt to give little Chuckie to play with, while the onyx bust of Anubis and gold staff of Ra went into his library.
Surplus mummies? They went into the fireplace....good kindling.
Kids are always burying stuff in imaginary ceremonies.
What is precious changes dramatically, not only over time....but also across cultures.
Plundering warriors vs cataloging professors.
Same country. Same language.
Different classes, values and eras.
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