Osiris and Thoth in the Valley of Caracas: The Circulation History of Two Egyptian Objects in Late Nineteenth-Century Venezuela.

Two Egyptian antiquities were examined in the Repository of Archaeology of the Museum of Natural Sciences of Caracas. Through Antonio Guzmán Blanco, former president of Venezuela, Venezuelan ethnologist Gaspar Marcano sent one of them from Paris in early 1889. When it arrived in Caracas, German-Venezuelan naturalist Adolfo Ernst, the newly appointed director of the National Museum, acquired it for this collection. This piece is a bronze statuette of Osiris, and another, also submitted by Guzmán Blanco himself, is a Thoth amulet. Both items reflect the cultural trend of South American elites in obtaining exotica in general, as European privileged people did, and Egyptian objects in particular, at the same time the British Empire controlled Egypt, and the fascination for the past of this North African country reignited in European lands again. These pieces resemble those made in the Late Period and Ptolemaic Period (c. 7th–1st BCE). This pair of items deposited in the Museum of Natural Science of Caracas adds a second public collection in Venezuela that houses ancient Egyptian material. Along with confirming the existence of these two Egyptian objects, it constitutes a new record for a public Egyptological collection for Latin America and the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]