The strange tale of Scotland’s buried Egyptian treasures

When a Scottish schoolboy’s spade hit on a reddish object on the grounds of his boarding school in 1952, he thought he had found a potato. He was mistaken: It was a red sandstone sculpture from ancient Egypt.

It was also the beginning of a bizarre series of ancient archaeological finds, resulting in a trove of Egyptian artifacts that made their way to the National Museum of Scotland.

And now, researchers are revealing how the artifacts got to Scotland in the first place.

The strange story took decades to unfold. Between the 1950s and 1980s, students at a boarding school housed in a historic mansion in Fife, Scotland, kept stumbling across ancient objects, including the 4,000-year-old sandstone sculpture, a bronze figurine of a man and other rare artworks thought to date from Egypt’s 12th Dynasty. Research didn’t prove their origins, so they were deemed a national treasure trove and given to Scotland’s national museum.

Now, Scottish curators think they’ve cracked the case. The house where the treasures were found was built in the 18th century and was eventually inherited by Alexander LeslieMelville, Lord Balgonie, who in the 1850s served as an officer in the Crimean War. A portrait from the time is thought by some to be the first photo portraying shell shock, a historic term for what is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder. The war shattered his health, and in 1856 he traveled to Egypt in the hopes its climate would help him heal.

“During this period in Egypt, consuls and dealers would visit hotels or passing boats to sell antiquities, so it is possible the objects were brought to a bedridden Balgonie or that his sisters assembled the collection,” according to National Museums Scotland.

Balgonie was only 25 when he died in 1857. Researchers say they now believe the artifacts might have been associated with his painful loss, put in an outbuilding, and forgotten or abandoned.

Either way, they say, they are spectacular evidence of the gigantic scale of a 19th-century antiquities collection. As the United Kingdom expanded its empire, many of its citizens traveled abroad and plundered ancient troves, acquiring thousands of precious objects via looting, bartering and gifts. Many remain in the U.K.

“It was an exciting challenge to research and identify such a diverse range of [artifacts], including some remarkable objects,” Margaret Maitland, principal curator of the ancient Mediterranean at National Museums Scotland, said in a news release. “The bronze priest statuette is a relatively rare form, while the sandstone statue head is a masterpiece of Egyptian sculpture.”

Researchers will publish the full history of the discoveries in an issue of Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, the museum announced.