A NOBLE GIFT – FROM THE NILE TO MORAVIA - Podhorny - 2018

Archduke Josef Ferdinand Habsburg of Tuscany visited Egypt in 1903 and continued thus a long family tradition (reaching back to his grandfather Leopold II of Tuscany) of Near Eastern travel that was usually accompanied by collecting of natural history specimens as well as art history artefacts. Josef Ferdinand was a keen correspondent, and reported details of his trip, from monuments of Cairo to the temples at Philae. Although the trip had been originally planned as a hunting expedition, it turned out the archduke was a keen collector as well as a hunter. He obtained antiquities from official dealers, including the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and procured altogether 350 objects that had originated from a number of significant excavations in Egypt in the 2nd half of the 19th century. The resulting collection of ancient artefacts was donated to the Moravian city of Olomouc, where the Archduke was a military commander of a local garrison. A museum was founded subsequently and bore his name. During the twentieth century, the collection was re-housed in Prague and is now part of the collections of the Náprstek Museum, a section of the National Museum.

Keywords

Olomouc – Museum – Collectors – Egypt – Habsburgs – Travellers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.26720/anthro.17.07.26.1

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