Although the Hermitage collection of Ancient Egyptian artefacts, containing around 7,500 items, is relatively small in comparison with the Louvre, the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum, it nevertheless encompasses all the principal periods in Egyptian history and includes a number of interesting and important items from Predynastic times (4th millennium BC) to the Roman occupation. The history of the collection is specific, since the Hermitage originally showed no interest in Ancient Oriental, particularly Egyptian, monuments, so that the most fruitful period for collecting in the first half of the 19th century passed it by. In 1825 the Academy of Sciences acquired Francesco Castiglione’s collection (around 1,200 items), which formed the basis of the Egyptian Museum in the Kunstkammer. At that time the Hermitage collection included only a few random Egyptian objects and besides them around 250 scarabs, also purchased from Castiglione. After the New Hermitage opened as a universal public museum in 1852, most of the pieces from the Egyptian Museum were transferred there. By that time the collection of that museum had noticeably increased on account of gifts and items purchased from private collectors. In 1881 the remaining artefacts were transferred from the Kunstkammer and the Egyptian Museum ceased to exist. When the first catalogue of the Hermitage Egyptian collection was published in 1891, it already included 2,509 items.
After the revolution a number of nationalized collections came to the Hermitage and some separate objects were transferred from other institutions as a result of the rationalization of museum holdings on a national level. Most prominent among these were the purchase of the collection of Boris Turayev, founder of the Russian school of Egyptology, and the transfer of Nikolay Likhachev’s collection from the Institute of History. The formation of the collection was more or less completed by the end of the 1930s. Its main weakness is that virtually all the items that came from private collections were undocumented, so in most cases their provenance remains unknown. The only exceptions are materials from the excavations of the Nubian archaeological expedition between 1961 and 1963 in the area submerged by the Aswan Dam. A highlight of the collection is papyri with literary texts from the Middle Kingdom – “The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, “The Teaching for Merikare” and “The Prophecy of Neferti”.
Andrey O. Bolshakov
