Mr. Abbott and his Egyptian Collection

Henry Abbott was a physician in the service of Mohammad Ali, and over the period of twenty year’s residence in Cairo amassed a large collection of artifacts for which he had spent the sum of one hundred thousand dollars. This being a tremendous amount of money, he was urged by his friends to smuggle the collection out of Egypt and sell it in New York, as the prohibition of removing antiquities from the country [in effect since 1835) had made Egyptian artifacts desirable to American buyers. 

By unknown maneuverings and machinations, Abbott and the collection arrived in New York in 1853, but no one was interested in purchasing a collection consisting of over eleven hundred items. Abbott was persuaded to open his own Museum, which he did, with some misgivings. The museum was located at various spots along Broadway, including the Stuyvesant Institute.

Abbott issued a catalogue in 1853 of the collection at the Institute, it ran for seventy-two pages, and was illustrated with examples from the collections. Sixteen human mummies or parts of mummies are listed throughout the catalogue, including, among others,  the mummy of a dwarf; the skull of a female mummy with plaited hair; the leg of a female wanting the foot which had been amputated, a “very handsome mummy, supposed to be a female” and “a mummy in a very splendid case.” Numerous hands and feet, gilded and unadorned are also mentioned, as well as mummy cases and parts thereof.  The collection was also noted for its three Apis bull mummies, which were considered quite rare.

Abbott could not sustain the museum on his own and so it was eventually sold to the New-York Historical Society (which holds the original visitor's register) and which since has been transferred to the Brooklyn Museum.