Egyptian material diaspora: the journey of a marl bowl

Narrated by Sophia Dibbs

 Bowl from Naqada.  
​Accession number: 99.685  Museum of Fine Arts, no date. 

Glancing through the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ (MFA) online catalogue of its Art of Ancient Egypt, Nubia, and the Near East collection, one could easily miss object number 99.685: a rather humble and unassuming marl bowl. 

As one of 65,000 objects within the collection, this everyday piece spends most of its time locked away in storage. Instead, the Egyptian galleries display intricately-painted sarcophagi, canopic jars that were once filled with organs, and gold statues of deities. 

Yet, it is through exploring the object biography of this plain-seeming culinary vessel from the predynastic Naqada II period, 3650–3300 B.C that we can trace the influence of European colonialism on the production of heritage and archaeology.

Excavated in 1898-99 from the grave site of Abadaya (also known as Ballos), at the behest of the infamous Egyptologist Flinders Petrie and the Egyptian Exploration Fund, the bowl’s life trajectory post-excavation was guided by European colonial powers. 

Located in upper Egypt, sandwiched between Alexandria and Port Said, and known in the ancient past as the Land of the Reeds, Abadaya was a fertile land, generously dotted with grave sites from both the Old and New Kingdoms. Along with the bowl, it is here where many significant Egyptian artefacts were unearthed, leading to the field’s expansion of knowledge of these periods and civilisations. 

Undoubtedly however, when those souls were laid to rest with their possessions, they had not an inkling that they would be disturbed by archaeologists from the Northern Hemisphere some few thousand years later. Nor were they likely aware that the contents of their graves would end up scattered across North America, the United Kingdom, Australia and central Europe. 

While British excavation teams were largely leading the exports of Egyptian antiquities across the globe, other European colonial powers such as France and Germany were also profiting from the colonial boom in excavations around the turn-of-the-century. 

The next stage in the bowl’s biography was its marking: the moment in which it transitioned from its original context to become an object considered historically worthy of recognition by the excavation team. Using Petrie’s groundbreaking method for cataloguing artefacts, his wife Hilda and fellow team member Beatrice Orme labelled the bowl in white paint with the marking ‘R112’ to indicate tomb number and location. 

The baking heat of the Egyptian sun quickly dried the markings before the objects were packed up. 

The bowl then embarked on a long journey from northern Egypt up to the East Coast of the United States. Once arrived on American soil, the object was sent to Egyptologist Arthur C. Mace who acted as a facilitator for it to be accessioned into the MFA’s collection in October 1899 in exchange for the Museum funding some of the expedition. 

The Egyptomania that had swept across Europe from the time of Napoleon had begun to take hold in America during the latter part of the nineteenth century, fuelling museums such as the MFA to seek out Egyptian objects. 

In travelling with the bowl from its place of origin in the Lands of Reeds, through the process of its excavation and marking, to its long journey across the North Atlantic Ocean and up towards the Boston harbour, we have seen how colonial contexts of archaeology and the European assumption of rights to Middle Eastern and North African heritage led to the great diaspora of Egyptian material cultural heritage. 

But will the FMA be the bowl’s last stop? For an object that has already existed for thousands of years, it seems likely that its story is not yet finished…