Dows Dunham Recollections of an Egyptologist

King Haker torso. Dynasty 29. Black granite.
29.732.
The other purchase I vividly recall was even more remarkable. One day
in 1929 a gentleman came into the office with some snapshots of several
pieces of Egyptian sculpture that he was thinking of selling. He told me
that they had been in the garden of his home for many years, and he
wondered whether they might be of interest to the museum. Although
the photographs were not very good, I thought the pieces looked
worthy of inspection, and I arranged to go to the owner’s house and
look at them. There were six objects, ranging in date from the Eighteenth
to the Twenty-ninth Dynasty. The latest was the torso of a
finely modeled royal statue in black granite inscribed with the name
of King Haker, a little-known king who ruled just prior to the Ptolemaic
Period.
None of these sculptures were complete, but all were of considerable
archaeological interest. They were quite desirable for the museum, and
we eventually acquired all of them. (The three most important of these
objects were published by me in the journal of Egyptian Archaeology,
15 [1929], 164-166.) When I asked the owner how he came to have
them, he told me a very unusual story. During the American Civil War
a Yankee ship captain trading in the Mediterranean put in at Alexandria
prior to returning to America with a half-empty ship. There he acquired
these objects, and he put them aboard as curiosities to serve as
ballast. As he approached the American coast his ship was captured by
the Confederate forces, who took it into New Orleans, where the
sculptures were placed in the customshouse. After the defeat of the
Confederates, the present owner’s father was appointed collector of
customs at New Orleans, and when he returned to New England he
brought the sculptures with him and placed them in his garden.
Neither father nor son had any special interest in or knowledge of Egyptian
art, and the latter was ready enough to turn them over to the
museum.
Now and again a day of serious work in the department would be
enlivened by some strange or comical event. The following episode
concerns the largest object in the Egyptian collection, the fourteenton
granite sarcophagus of King Aspelta of the Kushite Dynasty, which
was excavated by our expedition at Nuri in the Sudan in 1918. It was
brought to the museum with great difficulty and installed in its present
location, in front of the lecture hall, in 1923. A special pier to
support it had been constructed in the basement, for no normal floor
in the building could have carried such a weight.
The entire sarcophagus is covered both inside and out with inscriptions
and reliefs, all of which had to be carefully recorded for publication
in the report that I prepared on the site of Nuri (Royal Cemeteries
of Kush, vol. II, 1955). To permit me to copy the inscriptions on the
inside of the sarcophagus and lid, the latter, weighing four tons, had
to be raised up on blocksj I could then crawl into the box from a step
ladder and work inside with the aid of a drop light. Here I spent many
days, quite invisible to the people walking about the area. I was frequently
amused by the comments of the passersby who could not see
me hidden within the sarcophagus, and who sometimes wondered
aloud as to its nature.
One day I heard two female voices speculating in this way in French,
and saying, “Qu’est-ce que c’est que cette boite Cnorme?” I simply
could not resist the temptation to reply: “C’est le sarcophage d’un roi
ancien.” Dead silence. I quite expected a scream in reaction to what
must have sounded like a voice from the dead. Not at all; in a moment
50