Strata: $27 Million Consoles a British Museum

In July 2014, an Egyptian statue from the fifth millennium B.C. was auctioned off for more than $27,000,000 in London. For such a price, one might expect that the statue depicted royalty. However, the subject of the statue is not a pharaoh—but a scribe named Sekhemka.

Living and dying during the Fifth Dynasty in Old Kingdom Egypt, Sekhemka served as inspector of the scribes of the royal house. His statue dates to c. 2400–2300 B.C. and most likely comes from the Royal Cemeteries of Saqqara. Seated, he is shown wearing a wig and a short pleated kilt. Open on his lap is a papyrus scroll that lists 22 different offerings to sustain him in the afterlife.

Sekhemka’s wife, Sitmeret, kneels next to him. Smaller in scale than her husband, Sitmeret affectionately wraps her left arm around his leg while touching the same leg with the fingertips of her right hand. An inscription identifies her as “the one concerned with the affairs of the king, one revered before the great god.”

Measuring 2.5 feet high, 1 foot wide and 1.5 feet deep, the impressive statue caught the eye of the second Marquess of Northampton—Spencer Joshua Alwyne Compton—when he was traveling in Egypt between December 1849 and April 1850. He acquired the statue and brought it back with him to Great Britain.

In the 1880s, the statue was given to the Northampton Museums and Art Gallery by either the third or fourth Marquess of Northampton. It remained in the museum’s collection until the museum gave it up for auction this past summer.