Seventy-one years ago, a schoolboy in Scotland was digging potatoes as punishment and discovered an ancient Egyptian statue, the first of a collection of ancient Egyptian statues and works of art buried on the grounds of his school. Now researchers have finally discovered how the artifacts reached the British Isles.

Between 1952 and 1984, several ancient statues were discovered in the grounds of Melville House, a stately building in County Fife that housed soldiers during the Second World War and later served as a boarding school. Each new discovery was reported by teachers and students to museum curators and experts, and the statues were determined to be ancient Egyptian artifacts, but no one could figure out how the statues got there.

“This is a fascinating collection that adds to the mystery surrounding its origins in this country,” Margaret Maitland, chief curator of the Ancient Mediterranean at National Museums Scotland, which houses many of the objects, said in a statement. said.

The ancient collection includes a nearly 4,000-year-old statue head carved from red sandstone, which Maitland describes as a “masterpiece of Egyptian sculpture” and a statue dating back to 3000 B.C. and 30 BC before the Romans took over Egypt as a province.

A total of 18 ancient Egyptian objects were found buried around Melville House; this is the only work of its kind to be officially declared and described in Scotland. Now, for the first time, researchers have uncovered the story of how they got to the manor and were buried there.

“The excavation and research of these finds at Melville House has been the most extraordinary project of my archaeological career, and I am delighted to now be able to tell the full story.” -Elizabeth Goring, former Curator at the Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh (The statement stated that it is currently located in the National Museum of Scotland.

In 1984, a group of teenage boys from Melville House visited Goring at the museum and brought back an Egyptian bronze figurine that one of them had found using a metal detector in the schoolyard. Goring did some digging and learned that two more Egyptian objects—a sandstone head and a bronze figurine of an Apis bull—had turned up on the site in 1952 and 1966, respectively.

Goering excavated the site and discovered a number of other ancient artifacts, including the upper half of a glazed ceramic figure depicting the goddess Isis breastfeeding her son Horus, and a ceramic tablet featuring the Eye of Horus.

Previous attempts to determine the provenance of these items had failed, but researchers now believe they were brought by Alexander Leslie-Melville, Lord Balgonie, the young heir of the House of Melville, who traveled to Egypt in 1856 and died a year later. . return to England

According to the description, Balgoni may have acquired the collection during his travels; because at that time, consuls and antique dealers often sold antique works to foreigners. After Balgoni’s death, family members probably moved the belongings to the annex, which was later demolished, and forgot about them.

“The discovery of ancient Egyptian artefacts buried for over a century in Scotland is testament to the scale and complex history of 19th-century antiquities collecting,” Maitland said. “Examining and identifying such diverse artifacts was a fascinating challenge.”