Russian museum raises $60,000 to buy ancient Egyptian magic wand

Russia’s Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts has collected over four mln rubles ($60,200) to purchase an ancient Egyptian magic wand for its collection so now less than two million rubles ($28,000) remain to be collected, the museum said in a statement on its website.

"A total of 4,104,000 rubles have already been raised," the statement reads, adding, "1,896,000 rubles remain to be collected."

A museum source told TASS earlier that such exhibits reached the market literally once in a hundred years. The wand will be the museum’s most sensational purchase since it acquired the collection of Russia’s first Egyptologist Vladimir Golenishchev.

Collector Kirill Daneliya, who currently owns the wand, told TASS that he had halved the initial price from 12 mln rubles to six mln as an anniversary gift to the museum. Daneliya bought the wand at an Australian auction around ten years ago.

Unique exhibit
Magic wands are rare examples of ancient Egyptian artistic craft. World museums and private collectors own a total of 240 wands and their fragments. Most of them feature engraved patterns and only about ten wands are covered with bas-relief images. The wand in question is one of those few and is very well preserved.

In addition, there are images among those covering the wand that do not appear on other similar specimen. They include the figures of a bull, a donkey-headed leopard, a standing guenon monkey and a baboon with raised paws. The wand comes from a collection of antiquities, including ancient Egyptian ones, collected by Australian surgeon Harley Baxter.

The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts currently owns two such exhibits, both from the Golenishchev collection. The Egyptologist made numerous trips to Egypt over the course of 30 years, gathering the most part of his collection of Middle Eastern antiquities, which contained over 6,000 items. The best of them - including a magic wand dating back to Ancient Egypt's Middle Kingdom - are on display at the museum’s Egyptian Hall.