Anyone getting the chance to visit the Archaeological Museum at Pythagorio on the island of Samos in the northeast Aegean region of Greece can hardly miss a box-like ancient Egyptian item exhibited in a specially made glass case close to the museum entrance.
According to its label, the box is a wooden chest that used to contain the “canopic” jars of Lady Taheradenisit (= the land of Isis and Horus, her child), and is dated to 680-600 BCE. It is one of a kind in a museum filled with beautiful but expected-to-be-seen ancient Greek artefacts. How comes an ancient Egyptian object found its way to this particular museum? Moreover, when was this chest separated from its mummy and why? And when were the jars removed from within it? Perhaps tomb raiders split the chest and the mummy in the nineteenth century. Or this was the work of the Egyptian authorities. It is hard to know. The same holds true for the jars. Yet, we happen to know more about the journey of this chest from Egypt to Samos. Here’s the story in a nutshell…
On 30 April 1898, Inspector of Education and Director of the Pythagoreion High school Aristomenes Stergioglides (1848-1904) addressed a letter to the Vice-Roy of Egypt Abbas Hilmi II kindly requesting the donation to the Samian museum of artefacts in double or multiple copies in the museums of Egypt. The Council of Ministers of Egypt viewed the request positively and, on 21 October 1898, Victor Loret, Director of the Museum in Giza, offered Samos the wooden chest in question as well as another 190 ancient Egyptian artefacts.
How could this have ever been possible? How and why did it ever cross the mind of Aristomenes Stergioglides to proceed with such a move? Stergioglides had actually lived in Egypt in his youth, between 1866 and 1869. During that time, he had had the chance to visit many archaeological sites and museums, including the Bulaq Museum. It is these youth memories that seem to have sparked his interest in Egyptian antiquities.
Furthermore, this was not an isolated development in the archaeological affairs of Samos. Starting in 1896, the authorities on the island attempted to reshape the local archaeological regime by introducing a new comprehensive law on antiquities. Samos could do this because, although under the Ottomans, it was autonomous and had the right to promulgate its own laws. The person in charge of drafting this new law was no other than Aristomenes Stergioglides. With certain modifications, the draft law of 1896 was adopted as law no. 887 on antiquities two years later, in June 1898, that is, only a couple of months after the request for artefacts had been submitted to the Egyptian government.
Not just this but the acquisition of an Egyptian collection was part of a broader policy of increasing the collections at the Samian museum. In 1895, the Pythagoreion High school had just become the venue of the archaeological museum of the island when it received all antiquities previously hosted at the Archive of the Principality and all ancient coins from the Treasury. This coincided with a campaign aimed at enriching the museum collections with finds from throughout the island and beyond. A committee was set up with a view to collecting antiquities, the Prince, head of the Principality appointed by the Ottoman Sultan, ordered the mayors of the island to collect all antiquities within the area of their jurisdiction while providing guidance on how to do so, and a number of honorary ephors seem to have been designated. The Principality took one more step in the effort to enrich its collections: it elicited donations from Samians living on the island and abroad. Stergioglides appears to have spearheaded this initiative by being the first to donate his collection of ancient objects. Samians who had migrated to lands far and distant, such as Australia, Vladivostok, Egypt, India, Japan, Zanzibar and South Africa, sent artefacts that created a colourful and particularly diverse collection. It is against this background that one should read the request by Stergioglides for ancient Egyptian objects.
There are, however, a couple of problematic aspects that came along with this donation. The first one has to do with the concept of double or multiple “copies.” Nowadays, it is established that all ancient artefacts are unique. Yet, at the turn of the century, even archaeologists and state administrators in the field of archaeology could be more receptive to the notion of double finds. For example, it was not unthought-of for the Ottoman Empire in those years to allow foreign excavators to keep ancient objects that would be considered doubles, even if this violated the Ottoman regulation on antiquities. Greece too already in its first law on antiquities (1834) acknowledged the possibility of coming across double finds (article 77a), which on occasion could also be considered unimportant and redundant to the Greek museums (article 79). Moreover, fast forward to spring 2024, an archaeologist who saw pictures of the wooden chest for the “canopic” jars of Lady Taheradenisit suggested that what we have considered all along to be an original artefact might actually be a forgery. The designs seemed too crude to this expert to be authentic.
Yet, these two points did not seem to have bothered Aristomenes Stergioglides. His priorities were different, for he actually used this and the other 190 artefacts from ancient Egypt to showcase how ancient Egyptian religion and mythology were to be found at the roots of ancient Greek religion and mythology. In other words, Stergioglides’s goal was predominantly educational – befitting as this would be for a museum that was actually hosted in a school. This was, of course, far from the competition for national glory that we see in the case of the most famous museums of that time, such as the British Museum and the Louvre.
Artemis Papatheodorou
Further readings
Καλπαξής, Αθανάσιος Ε., «Αρχαιολογία και Πολιτική, Τόμος Ι – Σαμιακά Αρχαιολογικά 1850-1914.» Πανεπιστημιακές Εκδόσεις Κρήτης, 1990.
Papatheodorou, Artemis, “Ottoman policy-making in an age of reforms: Unearthing Ottoman archaeology in the 19th and early 20th centuries.” Unpublished PhD thesis, Oxford University, 2017.
Πετράκος, Βασίλειος Χ., «Δοκίμιο για την Αρχαιολογική Νομοθεσία.» Υπουργείο Πολιτισμού και Επιστημών – Τ.Α.Π. – Δημοσιεύματα του Αρχαιολογικού Δελτίου, αρ. 29, 1982.