Deep inside the Walters Art Gallery, archaeologist Stephen Harvey is directing an excavation. There are no shovels or trowels involved; no sandy, sun-baked pits. But hundreds of ancient Egyptian objects are nonetheless being rediscovered one by one, dusted off and scrutinized.
Harvey is excavating the Walters' storage vaults.
No Egyptologist has ever really done this -- because until Harvey was hired last September, the museum did not employ one.
The Walters long has been renowned for its illuminated manuscripts. It houses a collection of ancient Greek and Roman artworks considered among the best in the nation. And it owns a collection of artifacts from ancient Egypt that is recognized as superb.
But most of it is in the basement.
There are amulets shaped like birds or bulls or antelope; a 4,000-year-old wooden coffin; a tiny stone box that once held a wealthy woman's eye makeup; a glazed ceramic vase shaped like a fish; gods and goddesses in relief; an exquisitely detailed bust of a grumpy old man.
"It just blows my mind what is down here," Harvey says. "They have what is very much a hidden treasure."
The Walters now wants the public to see more of its Egyptian holdings. As part of an $18-million plan to renovate its 1974 building -- a wing of the museum perched on the corner of Centre and Cathedral streets -- it will reinstall its Egyptian artworks as well as its ancient Greek and Roman exhibits.
The renovations, scheduled to be completed in the fall of 2000, represent a chance for the museum to transform its 23-year-old wing into a crowd-drawing showcase for objects spanning more than 5,000 years. Plans include building a hands-on art studio for children, and exhibitions that evoke a feeling of being on an archaeological dig or in an Egyptian temple.
The reinstallation team for ancient art is being led by Walters curator Ellen Reeder, and includes a handful of graduate students as well as Betsy Bryan, professor in the Johns Hopkins University department of Near Eastern studies, as the senior consultant in Egyptology. Harvey, who has been hired by the museum as a temporary assistant curator, is charged with researching the Egyptian artworks -- and planning how best to reinstall them.
"We want to put Baltimore on the map of Egyptology," Harvey says. "And we want to contribute to scholarship and research."
It is an enormous task. The museum owns about 1,575 Egyptian artworks -- the majority given by Henry Walters in 1931. Amassed by a connoisseur who particularly loved small objects of beauty and fine craftsmanship, the collection has many secrets to tell.
"The story goes that when Henry left his collection to the city, everything was packed up in boxes, and it was like Christmas every day as the curators opened them up and put the objects into storage or on display," Harvey says. "It's easy to see that mistakes could have been made, or things could have been stored in the wrong place."
In 1946, the Walters published a catalog written by a scholar named George Steindorff, but it documented only half the objects. About 350 items were placed on public view in 1974, when the museum opened its then-new wing.
For years, the other artifacts -- about 1,225 of them, dating from 4,000 B.C. to A.D. 7 -- have been sitting on shelves waiting to be rediscovered. And recent research may cause scholars to rethink the objects' importance. Some already are better-known outside the museum than within because they have been lent for exhibitions elsewhere. Some, dubbed fake, may be genuine. A few that are thought to be real may be clever forgeries.
It is up to Harvey to sort them out.
"I look and look at these objects and read files and eventually you just begin to tie things together. You begin to see things. You make the connections of where this came from and what that means."
A 'magic realm'
This is what he has always wanted to do.
When Harvey was 10, his grandmother took him on a behind-the-scenes tour of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston -- home to one of the world's best Egyptian collections. The tour included a visit to the museum's storage vaults. And that was that.
"It was like entering the magic realm for me," he says. "It just captured my imagination, I still have the papers I wrote for sixth grade about meeting the curator. I don't think I ever wrote a school paper that didn't have to do with Egypt or archaeology after that."
At 16, he began volunteering at the Boston museum. Then he majored in archaeological studies at Yale. Now 31, he is still writing school papers on archaeology: His doctoral thesis at the University of Pennsylvania focuses on an excavation that he is leading in Abydos, just north of Luxor.
At Abydos, Harvey has unearthed 3,000 fragments of decorated limestone relief blocks, remnants of a temple belonging to King Ahmose, who reigned from 1550 to 1525 B.C. "There is nothing like it!" the archaeologist says. "To pick up a dusty piece of stone, to turn it over and to see paint! Fresh paint! Well, fresh from 1500 B.C."
