Gifts
Temple of Dendur
The largest gift to the Egyptian collection in terms of tonnage and size is the Temple of Dendur. It was built as a shrine to the goddess Isis in about 15 B.C. by order of the Roman emperor Augustus not long after the Romans gained control of Egypt. The temple was also built to commemorate two deceased brothers, sons of a Nubian chieftain, who were revered by the local population as saints.
The temple had to be dismantled and removed from its place in 1963 because the waters of the Nile rising behind the new Aswan High Dam would otherwise have submerged it. Two years later, in 1965, the government of Egypt offered the temple to the United States in its dismantled state in recognition for the aid America had provided toward saving a number of Nubian temples doomed to be permanently flooded by the construction of the High Dam. The temple blocks, which weighed more than eight hundred tons, were packed into some 640 crates and shipped by freighter to the United States. President Lyndon Johnson appointed a commission to consider the best location; after a series of hearings, it was decided that the temple would be placed in The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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