In the years 1860-1861, Captain, now General Sir R. Murdoch Smith, R.E., and Commander E. A. Porcher, R.N., carried out a series of excavations on the site of Cyrenè, and discovered a considerable number of sculptures in marble, and an admirable bronze portrait head, among the ruins of the temples of Apollo, Dionysos and Aphroditè, and elsewhere.
The excavations which were carried on at Ephesus by the late Mr. John Turtle Wood,[32] for the British Museum, began in 1863, and were continued till 1874, the site of the great temple of Artemis not having been determined before the spring of 1870. Besides excavating the site of the temple, Mr. Wood obtained inscriptions and sculptures from the Odeum, the great Theatre, and the road to the temple of Artemis.
The site of Naucratis in the Egyptian Delta was discovered by Mr. W. M. Flinders Petrie, and was excavated, partly by the discoverer, and partly by Mr. E. A. Gardner, at the cost of the Egypt Exploration Fund in the years 1884-6.[33] The most important objects found were fragments of pottery, but there were also some architectural remains, and archaic statuettes of interest.
In 1889 and 1891, various sculptures, including a head of Eros from Paphos, and a large capital with projecting bulls' heads from the Cyprian Salamis, have been presented by the Cyprus Exploration Fund.
Besides the proceeds of the systematic researches enumerated above, the collection of sculpture has been frequently increased during the present century with the specimens collected by private travellers in the East. Thus in 1818, H. Gally Knight (1784-1846), an antiquarian and writer on the history of architecture, with N. Fazakerly, presented a statue from Athens.[34] In 1820, J. P. Gandy Deering (1787-1850), an architect who had taken part in the Dilettanti Expedition to Ionia of 1811, presented sculptures that he had discovered at Rhamnus in Attica.[35] In 1839, Colonel W. M. Leake, an eminent traveller and topographer (1777-1860), presented several Greek sculptures.[36] A small collection of reliefs, and of architectural fragments from Athens and elsewhere, was purchased from H. W. Inwood, the author of a treatise on the Erechtheion.
In 1861, the fifth Earl of Aberdeen presented a collection which had been formed in Greece in 1801 by George, fourth Earl of Aberdeen, a connoisseur, known to his contemporaries as "Athenian Aberdeen."[37] In 1864 a collection of sculptures was purchased which had been formed by Percy Clinton Sydney Smythe, sixth Viscount Strangford (1783-1855), formerly Ambassador to the Porte, and which included the "Strangford Apollo."[38]
Amongst purchases that have taken place from time to time we may also mention that of the Apollo[39] from the collection of the Comte de Choiseul-Gouffier in 1818. In 1864 several Græco-Roman sculptures[40] were purchased from the Farnese Collection at Rome. The museum of the Duc de Blacas, purchased in 1867, contained the head of Asclepios from Melos, and the relief discovered at the same time.[41] For the numerous cases not here mentioned in which sculptures have been acquired by donation or bequest, the reader is referred to the pages of the catalogue.
Finally, it may be observed that not a few sculptures in the British Museum have been found under peculiar circumstances in this country. Such specimens have been brought to England by travellers, whose collections have afterwards been broken up, lost or neglected, and have been rescued by chance from warehouses, gardens, or masons' yards.[42]
[1] For the history of the collections in the British Museum, see Edwards, Lives of the Founders of the British Museum; Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, introduction.