Why is the world’s oldest Egyptian museum in Turin?

Just before the Christmas festivities of 1824, an Egyptian pharaoh wrote to his royal counterpart Carlo Felice, duke of Savoy and king of Sardinia. Ozymandias, as he styled himself, was unhappy with his treatment in Turin, where he had been left standing in a courtyard for several months, packed in prickly straw that reached his neck. He and his companions – several thousand of them – had already made a long and tedious journey from Luxor. Forced to wait for more than three years in storage at the port of Livorno, loaded up again to sail to Genoa, then trundled over the Ligurian hills in horse-drawn gun-carts, they had reached the Savoy capital only to be stuck in straw, left in crates or placed piecemeal in glass boxes. He was bored and uncomfortable, Ozymandias complained, and his fellow travellers were no happier. Was this any way to treat 3,000-year-old kings?

‘Ozymandias’ was a five-metre-high sandstone statue of the 19th-dynasty ruler Seti II, and the ventriloquist making this tongue-in-cheek petition was almost as grand: Jean-François Champollion, celebrated in Europe for his decipherment of hieroglyphs in 1822. Both had travelled to Turin for the same reason, namely the creation of a new museum dedicated to ancient Egypt.