Egypt

The Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East’s collection of Egyptian antiquities was acquired mostly from dealers in Cairo in 1902, at the same time that the Museum was preparing to move into its new building at 6 Divinity Avenue, which opened to the public in early 1903.

The pieces from Cairo consisted largely of amulets and small figurines made of faience and funerary figurines (ushebtis) of faience, pottery, and stone. Among the more striking pieces were a wooden boat model dating to about 2000 BCE, a faience New Year’s flask, and several statues.

Curator David Gordon Lyon, himself a professor of Assyriology, was particularly interested in collecting examples of ancient writing. He therefore acquired a number of Egyptian inscriptions at this time as well. This group of inscribed objects, most of which are funerary or memorial stones, is probably the most significant part of the collection.

At the same time that Lyon was purchasing objects to display in the new museum building, Egyptian archaeologist George Reisner was at the beginning of his long career excavating on behalf of Harvard and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Though Reisner’s academic appointment was in Harvard’s Semitic Department, which was closely associated with the Museum, none of Reisner’s discoveries found their way here — though many did come to Harvard’s Peabody Museum, just across the street.

Nevertheless, HMANE benefitted from the work of other excavators in Egypt. In 1901-02 Theodore Davis gave a cartonnage mummy case and two wooden mummy coffins to the Museum, along with several fragmentary canopic jars. These came from burials found in the vicinity of Deir el-Bahri and the Valley of the Kings.

HMANE’s largest Egyptian monument is part of a carved limestone door jamb from the Temple of Amun at Karnak. This door jamb, consisting today of three joined fragments, was acquired by John Lowell, Jr., son of the early industrialist Francis Cabot Lowell, at Karnak in 1835, shortly before his early death in India in 1836. The Lowell family donated it to the Peabody Museum in 1878 and in 1916 it was transferred to HMANE.

In the 1930s a Harvard-sponsored expedition to Serabit el-Khadim in Sinai, the location of an Egyptian turquoise mining settlement in the 2nd millennium BCE, gave its share of the finds to HMANE. Included were several Egyptian stelae and two early alphabetic West Semitic inscriptions, as well as numerous fragmentary objects in pottery and faience.

Also in the 1930s, the Museum bought a collection of small Egyptian bronzes — deities, animals, and small animal coffins — from the family of Rev. Edward Everett Hale, prominent Boston minister and author.

More recently, in 2019 the family of Henry G. Fischer — one of the greatest American Egyptologists — offered a teaching collection to Harvard University built from the late Fischer’s personal collection. Many of the objects were officially deaccessioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and acquired by Fischer, who at the time headed the Met’s Egyptian Department. These 150 objects from all periods of Egyptian history have been a significant addition to HMANE's collection.