The collection was established in 1852, the year the museum was made open to the public, when it purchased the collection of statuettes from Countess Alexandra Lavalle, previously stored in her mansion on
English Embankment, and received the items collected in
Egypt by
Maximilian, Duke of Leuchtenberg, including two black
basalt sarcophagi of the
Late Period, now displayed in the middle of the hall, as well as the sculpture group of
Theban governor Amenemheb with his wife and mother (14th century BC). In 1853 the statue of
Sekhmet (15th century BC), brought by Alexei Norov from
Theban Necropolis of the
Eleventh dynasty of Egypt in the 1830s, was moved from the
Imperial Academy of Arts to the Hermitage. Some items were purchased for the museum from antiquities traders in Egypt and collections of Russian merchants or received as gifts. In 1862, the collection expanded significantly, as the Castiglione collection, which was purchased by the
Imperial Academy of Sciences from
Carlo Ottavio Castiglione in
Milan in 1826 and consisted of more than 900 items, core of the Egyptian museum of the
Kunstkamera, was transferred to the Hermitage. However, there were no
Egyptologists in Russia at that time.
Vladimir Golenishchev became the first Russian Egyptologist and started to work in the Hermitage in the 1870s. At the insistence of Golenishchev in 1881 the remainder of the Egyptian museum of the Kunstkamera was moved to the Hermitage. The Hermitage collection continued to grow in the 1880s, when
Coptic written monuments and two fragments of Egyptian
water clocks were acquired. In 1891, Golenishchev published the first complete inventory of the collection. Since the 1870s Golenishchev had collected a private Egyptian collection, which was sold to the
Pushkin Museum in
Moscow in 1909, shortly before he emigrated. For a few years, as the building for the Moscow museum was being constructed, the items were also stored in the Hermitage. Soviet Orientalist
Vasily Struve was in charge of the Hermitage's Egyptian collection from 1918 to 1933. The highlights of the exhibition include the mummy of priest Petese (10th century BC) and a fragment of a tablet of
Ramesses II's
Egyptian–Hittite peace treaty (13th century BC). ==Other Egyptian antiquities in Saint Petersburg==