Center for Early Cultures Evening Talk with:
Elaine Sullivan
Department of History, at UC Santa Cruz
Selling Saqqara: Millionaires, Museums and the Commodification of Egypt’s Cultural Heritage
5:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Thursday, April 30, 2026
Humanities Gateway, Rm. 1002
In February of 1903, an employee of the University of California stood in a fire-proof, custom-designed iron building on the Berkeley campus, and opened a large shipping case filled with one object: a two-ton stone lid of an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus. The only detail listed on the accession form was the name of the donor: William Randolph Hearst, the son of the millionaire widow Phoebe Hearst, one of the primary patrons in the 1890s of the University of California and a major donor for the university’s first museum. The object had been excavated only three years earlier by the Egyptian state’s official Service des Antiquités (antiquities service) in the tomb of an elite official at the ancient cemetery of Saqqara, and it was officially the property of the state.
How had Hearst acquired this object? How and why did Egypt’s Service des Antiquités sell monuments abroad while they simultaneously worked to stop looting and limit the export of Egyptian cultural objects at home? What does this history reveal about the entanglements between colonial actors, U.S. and European museums, foreign millionaires, and state agents in the sale and export of Egypt’s material past? This talk will use the sale and export of the lid of the sarcophagus of Psamtek to explore a little-known aspect of the history of collecting in Egypt during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.