The Cabinet of Egyptian Sculpture

A small collection of Egyptian antiquities represented an entirely new section in the Hermitage collections. It was made up mainly from the collections of Castiglione, Countess Laval and Duke Maximilian of Leuchtenberg. On display here are huge granite sarcophagi (6th century B.C.), a basalt group of Amenemheb with his wife and mother (14th century B.C.) and canopic jars (for the internal organs of a mummy). In 1852 the Academy of Sciences obtained an Ancient Egyptian statue of the goddess Sekhmet-Mut that had been brought back from Egypt by the Russian traveller Abram Norov in 1837. In the remote past this lion-headed goddess, together with 574 similar statues, had adorned the temple of the goddess Mut in Thebes. Norov wrote, "Of all these statues, cast down and smashed, I found only one left whole and decided to purchase it and take it to my native north."

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