Cristina Guidotti - Shipping Documents and Correspondence Related to Lot V, Seite 1 : ... The French Egyptologist Georges Daressy compiled a first list of the entire material called A.List, in which however he assigned a number to a whole set of finds (often consisting of several coffins) belonging to just one person. Another list, called B.List, was drawn up by Eugène Grébaut and Urbain Bouriant, Director of the Archaeological Mission of the French Institute in Cairo. B.List contained many more numbers than Daressy’s A.List since all the coffins nested inside one another were considered. Furthermore, once the material arrived in Cairo, a further number was assigned to it — the number of the Journal d’Entrée of the Giza Museum — before being donated to several nations worldwide. In fact, in 1893, the Egyptian Government decided to organize a lottery among the leading representatives of foreign nations who had arrived in Egypt to celebrate the new Khedive Abbas II Hilmi. The lottery prizes were the finds discovered in Bab el-Gasus. The amount of material was indeed so huge that the storage rooms of the Cairo Museum (then in Giza) were not able to accommodate all of the finds, but only the most important and better preserved objects. Each lot consisted of 4 or 5 coffins and other finds from the tomb of Bab el-Gasus. A total of 17 lots were awarded to France, Austria, Turkey, Great Britain, Italy, Russia, Germany, Portugal, Switzerland, the United States, Holland, Greece, Spain, Sweden/Norway, Belgium, Denmark and the Vatican City State. ... |