Building and Exhibiting the Collection The Brooklyn Museum of Art began collecting Egyptian antiquities around 1902. Its holdings now include large-scale sculpture and reliefs, first-class examples of the personal arts, and important archaeological and historical works from the Predynastic (circa 4400–3100 B.C.) to the Roman and Byzantine Periods (30 B.C.–A.D. 642).   The Brooklyn Museum’s collection developed out of three sources: excavation, purchases, and gifts. In exchange for its contribution to the early fieldwork of the Egypt Exploration Fund (later the Egypt Exploration Society)—a British organization that sent archaeological expeditions to Egypt—the Museum received objects excavated from a number of sites in Egypt and Nubia. From 1906 to 1908, the Museum conducted its own expeditions to a number of Predynastic Period (circa 4400–3100 B.C.) and Early Dynastic (circa 3100–2675 B.C.) sites. The Museum assisted in an expedition to the Delta site of Mendes by the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, along with the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago from 1964 to1980. In the early years of archaeological activity in Egypt, the Museum retained most of what it found, but the Egyptian government later exercised its right to keep excavated material. Some antiquities continued to be given to the Museum through “archaeological division,” a process allowing the excavating institution to retain pieces not claimed by the Egyptians. The Museum’s ongoing archaeological activities at the Temple Precinct of Mut at Karnak are described in Current Curatorial Staff and Activities.   In the first decade of the twentieth century, the Museum acquired antiquities from the private collection of Armand de Potter, a French emigrant to the United States who collected antiquities during the 1880s and 1890s while conducting tours to Egypt. Later, the important collection of the pioneer American Egyptologist Charles Edwin Wilbour (1833–1896) was donated to the Museum in stages in 1916, 1935, and 1947. Wilbour’s heirs also donated his professional library to the Museum, and established a financial endowment in his memory in 1931. The Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund supported the creation of the Wilbour Library of Egyptology—one of the most comprehensive libraries on Ancient Egypt in the world—as well as the Museum’s department of Egyptian, Classical, and Ancient Middle Eastern Art (ECAMEA). Elizabeth Riefstahl (1889–1986), the first Wilbour Librarian and Associate Curator, contributed significantly to the library’s development.   In the 1930s, the Belgian Egyptologist Jean Capart (1877–1947; Advisory Curator, 1932–1938), and The Brooklyn Museum's Director Philip N. Youtz (1895–1972; Director, 1933–1938) established a policy that the Museum’s “purchases of Egyptian objects should be confined in all cases to items of exceptional interest.” Later department heads emphasized the additional criterion of high aesthetic value, although this policy did not preclude the acquisition of objects to illustrate other aspects of Egyptian civilization. John Cooney (1905–1982; Curator, 1947–1963) arranged the loan of the Egyptian collection of the New-York Historical Society to the Museum in 1937 and its purchase in 1948. This included several older collections, most notably that formed by Henry Abbott (1807–1859), and numbered over two thousand objects, allowing Brooklyn to illustrate fully the entire history of ancient Egyptian art.   The first major public exhibition of Egyptian art objects at Brooklyn opened in May 1933, when Wilbour’s collection and certain other Egyptian antiquities were installed in a newly renovated gallery on the Museum’s third floor. It was the first of what would eventually become nine galleries of Egyptian art ranging from the Predynastic Period through the Roman and Byzantine Periods. While the New- York Historical Society collection was still on loan, it was displayed in its own gallery, but once these objects were acquired in 1948, the department began to arrange objects from all sources into chronological galleries.   After 1948, the department grew primarily through the acquisition of individual works from private donors, the art market, and, on occasion, other museums. Many of the acquisitions were made by Bernard V. Bothmer (1913–1993) who came to The Brooklyn Museum in 1956 as Assistant Curator, succeeded Cooney as Curator in 1963, and served as Chairman of ECAMEA from 1977 until his retirement in 1982. Bothmer acquired a number of works from the Late Period, a field of Egyptian art history in which he was a pioneering scholar. Museum collections are not static; they continue to grow through new acquisitions and as new research sheds light on previously acquired objects. Special exhibitions introduce new ways of presenting and looking at Egyptian art. ECAMEA has mounted a number of groundbreaking exhibitions, including: Pagan and Christian Egypt: Egyptian Art from the First to the Tenth Century A.D. (1941), the first exhibit of so-called Coptic art in the United States; Egyptian Sculpture of the Late Period (October 1960–January 1961), the first exhibition to define and analyze art from Dynasty 25 (circa 760–656 B.C.) to the Ptolemaic Period (305–30 B.C.); Akhenaten and Nefertiti (1973), an exhibition that provided a framework for dating and analyzing the art of the Amarna Period (1352–1336 B.C.); Africa in Antiquity (1978), the first exhibition anywhere to present the remarkable creative achievements of Egypt’s neighbor to the south, ancient Nubia; and Cleopatra’s Egypt: Age of the Ptolemies (1988), an exhibition that examined the history of Egyptian art from a time when Egypt was home to both Egyptian and Greek civilizations.         Back to Introduction Current Curatorial Staff and Activities Excavations at the Temple Precinct of the Goddess Mut Publications