THE EGYPTIAN ROOM.
The contents of this room were chiefly collected between the years 1828 and 1833, by a Scotch gentleman, Mr. Robert Hay. After his death they were purchased by Mr. C. Granville Way, of Boston, and presented to the Museum in 1872. Several fine pieces of sculpture, collected in Egypt in 1835 by the late Mr. John Lowell, the founder of the Lowell Institute, have been added to this room by the gift of Mr. Lowell’s heirs. The valuable and interesting casts from bas-reliefs and statues are the gift of General Charles G. Loring, the director of the Museum, to whose zeal and efficiency the institution owes so much of its usefulness.
The room is finely lighted by large windows, and General Loring, who is much interested in botany, generally keeps here a few fine specimens of tropical plants, especially such as belong to Egypt. Thus, on the occasion of my last visit, I had the pleasure of seeing there a fine specimen of the papyrus plant waving its graceful fans in salute to Pasht and Amenophis, hard by. The giant figure of Amenophis III., the Memnon of the Greeks (1500 B. C.) is a cast from the granite original in the British Museum. Near it is the statue of Pasht, the Cat-headed, in black granite, with the cartouch of Amenophis III., and there are also several blocks of red granite, probably portions of a throne, with a few fragments of sculpture—the colossal head of a king, pieces of the lid of a sarcophagus in green basalt, and two capitals cut out of sandstone, showing the lotos and papyrus forms. In the center of the room are several mummy cases, and in glass cases are disposed mummied heads, skulls, hands and feet, with mummies of animals, the cat, the dog, the dog-faced ape, the hawk and the ibis. In one of these cases is a hand still bearing a ring on the fourth finger. The remaining cases contain very interesting specimens of mummy-cloth of various dates and quality, one of the most important being a robe of justification supposed to be worn in the trial of the deceased before Osiris. It is sixteen feet in length by six feet nine inches in width, and has a fringe. The remaining contents of this room consist of various objects gathered from the tombs and from the mummy cases in such number and variety as to make it impossible to describe them in the narrow space at my command. But while there can be no doubt as to the value of the collection as a means of study in a field of wide interest and importance, it may be said, so far as art is concerned, the Way collection is of less value than the Abbott collection in the Historical Society of New York City. Each collection, however, supplements the other in a most interesting way, and taken together, they enable a student to make a fair beginning in the study of Egyptian antiquity.