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The Real StoryFamilies Work Education Art and Culture In 1972, headlines in the New York Times and Rochester newspapers announced:
These articles all reported an exciting discovery at the Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Rochester. Here's a version of the article that appeared in the New York Times:
Dateline: Cairo, Egypt - February 2, 1972.
The assembled statue was of Ny-user-ra , a Fifty Dynasty ruler during the Old Kingdom. The statue, of Aswan granite and about 3 feet tall, was broken at the elbow with the right arm bent above the break line and holding a mace.
The link between the two pieces occurred to Mr. Bothmer, the Brooklyn Museum's curator of ancient arts, in 1969, when he came across a footnote reference to the bottom part of the statue of Ny-user-ra.
"There was a light that clicked in my memory when I read that footnote," Mr. Bothmer recalled this morning. "In 1952, I was in Rochester to give a lecture and stopped by the Memorial Museum to see their Egyptian pieces. I took notes on the broken statue, photographed it from all four sides and then forgot about it until I read that footnote 17 years later."
With the help of a German Egyptologist then in Cairo, Dr. Guenter Grimm, measurements were made of the lower-parts break lines. Mr. Bothmer measured the upper half and found that the two fit within a sixteenth of an inch.
The Egyptian museum subsequently made a plaster cast of the lower part and shipped it to the Brooklyn Museum. Mr. Bothmer borrowed the upper half from Rochester and the match was perfect . . .
Today, the statue is displayed in Rochester with the original upper half and a plaster cast of the lower section. And thanks to the inscription that identifies Ny-user-ra on the lower part of the statue, we know which pharaoh is represented in this piece!
Last Updated: June 5th,2011
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