Why were so many Ancient Egyptian treasures found in Fife?
Over a roughly 30-year period, lots of Ancient Egyptian treasure has been uncovered at Melville House in Fife — but how did it all get there?
Image: Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs on a wall in the Karnak Temple, Luxor | stock.adobe.com
In 1952, a misbehaving schoolboy at Dalhousie Castle School was given the punishment of having to dig up potatoes in the school grounds. The little miscreant is hardly likely to have even suspected that he was about to make history.
Before long, his spade uncovered what the boy initially mistook for a potato but turned out to be a red sandstone statue head. It was just the first of many Ancient Egyptian treasures to be found on the site over a period of about three decades.
So, how did these relics make it to Melville House, the Scottish property occupied by Dalhousie Castle School? Many possible, compelling explanations have been put forward in attempts to unravel a mystery that has long fascinated Sky HISTORY.
The enigma begins with one small discovery
In 1697, the architect James Smith built Melville House for George Melville, 1st Earl of Melville. Since then, the estate — situated in the coastal county of Fife — has been repurposed multiple times.
During World War II, this stately building provided lodgings for soldiers. However, by the time 1952 (the same year Queen Elizabeth II came to the British throne) arrived, Melville House was a private school.
The sandstone head was taken to the Royal Scottish Museum and found to date from the middle of Ancient Egypt’s ‘12th Dynasty’ period. This made the artefact about 4,000 years old.
The Museum subsequently acquired the head, which is now permanently displayed in the Ancient Egypt Rediscovered gallery at Edinburgh’s National Museum of Scotland. However, many more treasures later emerged where that first one came from…
The mysterious ‘Mr McNie’
By 1966, the boy who discovered the statue head was now a P.E. teacher at the same school. He must’ve felt a strong sense of déjà vu, then, when he realised that one of his pupils had come across a curious statuette.
The pupil in question had been vaulting outside when he landed on the statuette half concealed by soil. The teacher — whose name is recorded as ‘Mr McNie’ — had the Royal Scottish Museum assess the object.
Museum staff identified it as an Egyptian bronze votive statuette depicting a sacred Apis bull. Rejecting the offer to clean the artefact professionally, Mr McNie kept hold of the bull and its whereabouts are now unknown.
How more and more artefacts surfaced
It eventually emerged that there hadn’t simply been a couple of Ancient Egyptian pieces at Melville House. In fact, the estate had kept an entire collection of them.
Dr Elizabeth Goring came upon this realisation in 1984, while working as a curator of Mediterranean archeology at the Royal Scottish Museum. That year, some teenage boys visited the museum to ask her to inspect an extraordinary — and plausibly old — bronze figurine discovered three years earlier.
This figurine of a priest had been detected (with an actual metal detector) at Melville House, by that time a residential school for young offenders. Goring was intrigued to learn that the figurine, like other artefacts from the property, was Ancient Egyptian in origin.
While visiting the Melville House grounds herself to investigate, Goring found various other objects from the era. These included fragments: one of a figurine of the goddess Isis suckling her son Horus and another of a plaque portraying the Eye of Horus.
How did these treasures end up in Fife?
One theory recently posited is that they were acquired in 1856 by Alexander, Lord Balgonie — the estate’s heir — during a visit to Egypt. Balgonie is known to have made this trip in a bid to recover from illness he had incurred while serving in the Crimean War.
He returned from Egypt but passed away in 1857. His family’s grief may have led them to bury the antiquities, which they could also have perceived as harbingers of bad luck. Balgonie had died prematurely at the age of 24, and tales of 'the mummy’s curse' started circulating as early as the 1860s.
A valuable collection of great significance today
Overall, 18 different Ancient Egyptian objects have been recovered from Melville House’s grounds since 1952. Most of the artefacts now form a National Museums Scotland (NMS) collection Dr Margaret Maitland, an NMS curator of the Ancient Mediterranean, describes as 'fascinating'.
In 2023, she observed that 'the bronze priest statuette is a relatively rare form, while the sandstone statue head is a masterpiece of Egyptian sculpture'.
They provide insight into one of the oldest and earliest civilisations — and you can learn about others by subscribing to the Sky HISTORY newsletter.
