The Real Story

• Ancient King Gets It Together
• Discarded King Together Again
• Brooklyn Curator Links Pharaoh Statue in Cairo
• One and One Make One!

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!