This is the story of a remarkable mystery that has lasted more than 70 years, when at Melville House, a 17th century house located in the council of Fife (Scotland) and which has been used over the years as a school or as a training center for Polish soldiers, pieces from Ancient Egypt began to appear.
The finds were concentrated between 1952 and 1984, a period in which up to 18 objects were discovered, including the head of a statue that was described by specialists as an authentic "masterpiece of Egyptian sculpture." Most are in the collection of the National Museums of Scotland, but no one knew where they came from. Until now.
According to doctors Elizabeth Goring and Margaret Maitland in an article to be published in the journal Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, these pieces are the only objects from ancient Egypt formally declared as hidden treasure in Scotland.
Goring's first contact with this surprising case was in 1984, when she had just been appointed curator of the then Royal Scottish Museum (now the National Museum of Scotland). A group of teenagers who went to class at Melville House brought him a bronze Egyptian figure to identify.
One of them had found her with a metal detector in the grounds of this magnificent stately home commissioned by the first Earl of Melville in 1697. After consulting with her colleagues, the researcher learned that this was not the first time something like this had happened. and that history had already been repeated on two other occasions.
In 1952, Melville House was occupied by the private school Dalhousie Castle. One day a boy was digging up potatoes as part of a punishment and discovered a fine red sandstone statue head from the mid-12th Dynasty of Egypt, which he initially mistook for a tuber.
Fourteen years later, a boy participating in a jumping exercise during a physical education class landed on a bronze votive statuette of an Apis bull sticking out of the ground. The professor, who turned out to be the same person who had found the sandstone head in 1952, took the object to the museum for identification.
So many discoveries could not be coincidental. So Dr. Goring studied the site and discovered another series of objects, ranging from the top of a fine figure of the goddess Isis nursing her son Horus to part of a plaque bearing the Eye of Horus.
After the excavation, all the work focused on establishing who those objects belonged to, but nothing conclusive could be proven, so the finds were treated as hidden treasures and assigned to the Royal Museum of Scotland. The magnificent bust can still be seen in the Ancient Egypt gallery.
“Excavating and investigating these finds at Melville House has been the most unusual project of my archaeological career and I am delighted to now tell the full story. “Discovering ancient Egyptian objects in Fife is clearly unexpected, and subsequent research to establish the origins of the collection has left more mysteries that may never be solved,” says the researcher.
His main theory is that this collection of works of art was acquired by Alexander Leslie-Melville, Lord Balgonie (1831-1857), heir to the property, who visited Egypt in 1856 with his two sisters to try to improve his poor health after falling ill. during his participation in the Crimean War.
In this period, Egyptian merchants visited tourists' hotels or stopped by on ships to sell antiquities, so it is possible that the objects were brought to Lord Balgonie, who must have been bedridden, or that his sisters assembled the collection. .
Upon returning to the United Kingdom, it is possible that they were kept for a time at Melville House before being forgotten in a room, perhaps due to the pain of the death of young Alexander (who died at just 26 years old), or abandoned as too much of a souvenir. painful experience of that trip to Egypt.
Finally, the building in which they had been deposited was demolished and these objects went unnoticed among the rubble of the building. “This is a fascinating collection, made even more so by the mystery surrounding its origins,” says Dr Margaret Maitland.
“The discovery of Egyptian artefacts that had been buried in Scotland for over a hundred years is evidence of the scale of the collection of antiquities that was assembled in the 19th century and its complex history. It was an exciting challenge to investigate and identify such a diverse range of artefacts, including some notable objects,” she concludes.
