“Excavated assemblages were scattered like confetti, carried away in the hands of curious children for a few cents and by beady-eyed adult punters” writes British archaeologist, curator and lecturer, Alice Stevenson (2019:189) about this process in the USA. Although archaeological thinking evolved, it substantially changed only after the Second World War when many museums in western countries divested themselves partially or completely of the Egyptian collections. But archaeologist Flinders Petri, for decades an imposing figure in excavations and operation of the EEF, followed similar sequencing, prominently in his typology of predynastic pottery. An iconic example is that at the Pitt-Rivers Museum in England where sequences of objects are arranged in the progression from simple to complex. The random manner in which the artefacts were supplied to the museums was in large part underpinned by a broader concept of research whereby the objects meant to illustrate progress from crude to refined, from primitive to civilised.

But beyond these groupings there is little connecting a necklace with a scarab, a cup with a plate, or a shabti with any burial. Many objects can be grouped by place of excavation such as Abydos, El Mahasna, Oxyrhynchus, Serabit el-Khadim, and by broad chronology such as Pre-dynastic, 18th Dynasty, Ptolemaic Dynasty. As a result, nearly the entire Egyptian collection is incredibly fragmented and random. And nearly 400 artefacts generously donated to the Museum by Ernest Wunderlich are equally haphazard, mostly purchased in antique shops and auctions.

It is also worth mentioning that British archaeologist John Garstang, who supplied the Australian Museum with over 100 Egyptian artefacts, operated in a similar manner. This eccentric distribution was devised for various reasons, but the funding arrangements and hence commercial imperative was an important factor in shaping museum collections and, in some measure, archaeological thinking. As a result, it is likely a few ceramic pots from one grave would be scattered over five continents. And sometimes a piece of fabric has been cut to smaller fragments to give different subscribers a sample. Most of the objects seem to have assumed interchangeable value to the recipient and distributor alike each pot, shabti or pendant was as good as any other, regardless from which tomb they were recovered. Since its conception the EEF focused on digging for objects and distributing them widely to subscribing organisations around the world, including those in United Kingdom, United States, South Africa, India, Japan, and Australia.

Legacy of new kingdom egypt