The Carlos is planning some changes in the Egyptian galleries, including putting several “new” objects on display. One object, a funerary cone (1999.001.101) acquired from the Niagara Falls Museum in 1999, will be on view for the first time in almost twenty years. Funerary cones are made of ceramic and were installed above the entrances to private tombs in Thebes during the New Kingdom (ca. 1539–1077 BCE). On the faces of the cones are stamped hieroglyphs giving the names and titles of the tomb owner and sometimes a short offering formula. Each tomb would have been decorated with dozens, even hundreds of identical funerary cones.
Due to their small size, funerary cones were a popular item for 19th and early 20th-century tourists to bring home from Egypt. The Carlos cone was originally brought from Egypt to Canada around 1865 by Sydney Barnett, who had been traveling in Egypt with Dr. James Douglas (1800–1886). Dr. Douglas was a name I knew well from my work on the Niagara Falls Museum collection (see my blog from May 2025), but he had always sat on the periphery of my research. While I was working to translate the text of our funerary cone and locate the tomb it came from, I found that the Metropolitan Museum of Art has a funerary cone (90.6.251) from the same tomb that had been donated to their collection by the son of Dr. Douglas in 1890.
Dr. Douglas was a Scottish surgeon. While working in Honduras in 1823, Dr. Douglas became ill with yellow fever. After seeking treatment in Boston, Dr. Douglas decided to visit friends in Canada before returning home to Scotland. His trip across the border was interrupted by the closure of the Erie Canal, and he ended up settling in Utica, New York. As a professor of anatomy, Dr. Douglas understood the educational value for medical students that came from human dissection. However, in the 1820s such practice was restricted by United States law. After robbing not one, but two graves in Utica to obtain human specimens for dissection, Dr. Douglas was forced to flee to Canada to avoid criminal prosecution. In Canada, Dr. Douglas established a good reputation for his work which continued to include human dissections – legally this time.
Due to lingering health issues, Dr. Douglas spent winters abroad in Egypt. From his travels, including his trip with Sydney Barnett, Dr. Douglas amassed a collection of Egyptian antiquities which were donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art after his death. I thought we had heard all the stories about the Niagara Falls collection, but learning about Dr. Douglas and his career reminded me that my work is never really done.
