A boy digging for potatoes in the grounds of a Scottish school thought he had found nothing more exciting than a strangely shaped vegetable. Instead, the object turned out to be an ancient Egyptian masterpiece created thousands of years earlier. That unexpected discovery in Fife was only the beginning. Over the following decades, schoolchildren would uncover more Egyptian antiquities buried around the grounds of Melville House, as per a report by The Guardian.
By the time archaeologists began investigating the finds, 18 Egyptian objects had been discovered on three separate occasions, leaving one extraordinary question behind: how had pieces of ancient Egypt ended up buried in a Scottish estate?
How did the first Egyptian treasure appear? In 1952, Melville House was occupied by Dalhousie School. A schoolboy was helping a gardener dig up potatoes as a punishment when he came across a bulbous object in the ground.
At first, he thought it was simply another potato. It was anything but.
A teacher took the discovery to the then Royal Scottish Museum, now National Museums Scotland. There, the museum’s distinguished Egyptologist Cyril Aldred examined it and recognised its importance.
The object was the head of a red sandstone statue from the mid-12th Dynasty, dating to about 1922-1855 BC. Its quality suggested that it had been produced in a royal workshop.
The discovery was remarkable enough on its ow
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