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Scottish boy digging for potatoes found 'masterpiece of Egyptian sculpture' on his school grounds. How did it end up there?
Live Science ^ | November 24, 2023 | Sascha Pare

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 ...


TOPICS: History; Science; Travel
KEYWORDS: antiques; egypt; europe; godsgravesglyphs; scotland; scotlandyet
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To: SunkenCiv
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.

The boy ought be concerned about "the curse"... /s

21 posted on 01/30/2024 6:37:00 AM PST by logi_cal869 (-cynicus the "concern troll" a/o 10/03/2018 /!i!! &@$%&*(@ -)
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To: ryderann

The conch shell and monkey remains will definitely be a puzzler.

“ shell and monkey bones were buried for ceremonial purposes to mark the solstice… “ will be the learned opinion of archaeologists.


22 posted on 01/30/2024 8:19:46 PM PST by Redcitizen
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To: Redcitizen

Oh...that’s really good.


23 posted on 01/31/2024 1:06:10 AM PST by ryderann
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