A Private Collection of Ancient Egyptian Stone Vessels

                          US private antiquities collection                     
   

A recent Limitless You Tube channel segment by Matt Beall featured alt.history YouTuber Dan Richards, but the main interest for me was not him, but a fleeting view of the podcaster's personal collection of Egyptian stone vessels, a couple of items from which have previously been mentioned on this blog. These trophies are proudly spread out, inexplicably, on some bad taste patterned tablecloth with pink glitter (?) scattered around them. There are also some pottery vessels there too it seems. I had no idea that Mr Beall could have so many of these items. The two then discuss (of course, given the company present) the potential use of (tomographic scans of) these vessels as "evidence" of some mythical "lost ancient technology". In that context, it becomes just as relevant as before to ask what documentation there is of where these come from. For how many of the ones in this collection is there any decent documentation of collection history (and legal export), let alone where they were dug up and how secure that context was. Also I wonder what the government and people of Egypt and Sudan will think seeing this collection - in particular learning how many of them were acquired after 2011. Of course that's the ones that are not outright fakes... Some of them are rather smaller than they should be for the type and too oddly proportioned. I also noted a couple made of very similar looking stone, suggesting the products of a modern factory coming onto the market in the period of time this buyer was buying, rather than odd vessels from different ancient assemblages from different places and dates which would have given greater heterogenity.

 

I am not going to engage here with the other points made by Mr Richards.