"Are you sure it's a full five hundred?" Zhang Yang questioned this claim.

You know, the ancient Egyptian civilization did not have a currency, so there was no such thing as using coins to replenish the number.

If the 500 pieces are all exhibited separately, they will catch up with the number of cultural relics loaned by the Yangcheng Museum twice.

"Of course." Boss Mo smiled and replied: "These cultural relics have been purchased by me in overseas cultural relics markets for so many years, and it has taken a lot of time and energy. ”

"Now I have to find a way to get my money back."

Hearing this, the people present were stunned, and it was a fresh and refined reason.

Zhang Yang was still thinking about making a bunch of fakes and holding a joint exhibition with the museum, this woman is really whimsical.

But listening to what she means, it seems that the things to be exhibited are all genuine?

"Boss Mo, are you going to sell your collection of real antiques?"

"Of course...... No. ”

Boss Mo shook his head and explained:

"Don't look at the number of these treasures, but in fact, in China, collectors can accept a very limited variety of Egyptian cultural relics, nothing more than mummies, pyramids, sphinxes and other world-famous things."

"In the end, these are the ones that can be sold in batches."

"Then I understand."

Zhang Yang suddenly realized, he and Captain Liu glanced at each other, and their eyes conveyed the inquiry:

How's that, is there any interest?

Captain Liu gave an answer with action, and he looked at the woman opposite with a sincere face:

"Boss, can you show us the collection you prepared?"

"Curator, who is this?"

"I'm sorry, I forgot to introduce, this Mr. Liu is an expert on African culture in our museum."

"African culture? It turns out that the Helin Museum also has research in this area? ”

Boss Mo looked at Captain Liu in surprise.

Looking at his dark complexion, fierce eyes, and weather-beaten appearance, he does have the feeling of being African.

"Of course, Mr. Liu originally wanted to come to your art gallery to study today."

"Actually, not only Mr. Liu, but also I have a lot of research on African culture."

Zhang Yang thought about where to go, anyway, the other party was a liar who cheated money with a clear conscience, and he didn't have any psychological pressure to make up the story.

Seeing that the woman was still hesitating, he went further:

"Lending an exhibition is not like selling materials, your collection has to be exhibited in the public in the end. If something is wrong, it will definitely affect the reputation of our museum. ”

"So before we officially cooperate, I have to make sure that you should be able to understand, right?"

"I understand." Boss Mo nodded.

Her expression was a little tangled, as if she was making some difficult decision.

"Otherwise, I'll take a few of them to the storeroom first. Although there is only a part of the collection, it is enough to represent the level of my collection. ”

"When the three experts see the real thing, they will believe that I am telling the truth."

"Please."

……

Zhang Yang and his entourage of three followed Boss Mo to take the elevator to the parking lot on the basement floor, and came to the back of two large box trucks.

The woman told everyone that these two cars were the temporary warehouses of her art museum.

Part of her collection of Egyptian antiques is in the carriage.

Such a chic warehouse, Zhang Yang is the first time to see it.

In particular, the two large trucks are both foreign license plates, giving people a strong feeling of "selling cultural relics".

When Boss Mo opened the back door of the car, he saw the antiques piled up in the carriage, and Zhang Yang gasped.

He still underestimated the other party's collection level!

If the car is full of genuine goods, then it must be an Egyptian moving company's truck, which secretly emptied the pharaoh's house!

"I never thought that this warehouse would be on display one day, so there was only a single lane for unloading."

Boss Mo pointed to the deep and narrow passage in the middle of the carriage, as if leading to the mysterious ancient Egyptian civilization.

"You three, who will go and see it first?"

"I'll do it."

Zhang Yang was the first to walk in.

At the entrance to the passage, two boxes of mummies are erected.

Zhang Yang didn't think it was anything to look at, because the paintings on it had almost fallen off.

Although it looks like the authenticity of ancient Egypt, just like the terracotta figurines of the Han Dynasty, antiques that cannot make modern people feel "beautiful", even if they have a history of thousands of years, do not have too high economic value.

However, Zhang Yang only took a step forward in the passage, and was immediately attracted by a few things placed next to the mummy box, which attracted all his attention.

It was several oval-shaped, jar-like jars of pickled sauerkraut.

The material of the jar is strange, a bit like a stone, and under the light of the white light, it reflects a yellowish-white light.

There are no patterns on the body of the jar, but the top of the jar is carved with the head of a pharaoh wearing a turban.

Different jars have different figures carved on the top.

"Isn't that what kind of jar?"

Zhang Yang vaguely remembered that he had seen this thing in some videos of popular science mummies.

"Name: (Emshet) Canopis Can"

"Material: Alabaster"

"Produced in: 625 B.C.E."

"Details: Canopis jars containing entrails removed from corpses during the mummification process, usually in groups of four, for the liver, lungs, stomach, and intestines.

The carved deity on this jar belongs to Emshet, the son of Horus and protector of the liver, and is generally placed in the southern part of the burial chamber."

Looking at the item information, Zhang Yang's hand stretched out to the jar immediately retracted.

Sure enough, the things that are put together with the mummy box are very underworldly.

Zhang Yang counted the number of canopis cans, eight.

Combined with the chronological information, there are exactly two groups.

In addition to Emshet, who guards the liver, each group also has Habi (lungs), Domtev (stomach), and Kebshanaf (intestines).

They are placed in the east, south, west, and north directions of the tomb.

This practice is somewhat of a feng shui flavor.

"Two sets, a complete set of funerary goods......"

Zhang Yang suddenly thought of something, he turned his head and looked at the wooden boxes of the two mummies.

625 B.C., 594 B.C.

It is the same age as the two sets of canopis cans.

That's a whole two!

Is it so complete?

Zhang Yang continued to observe, and he noticed that these jars were sealed, and what they were when they were dug up may be what they are now.

What about the wooden coffin that houses the mummy of the tomb owner?

Normal wooden coffins will be sealed with asphalt materials in the gaps, but considering the "medicinal value" of the mummy itself, most of the wooden coffins that have been circulated to the market have no contents.

And because the ancient Egyptians sometimes buried some empty boxes to trap people, after opening the box, the mummy and the wooden coffin were sold separately, and the market price was even higher than that of the complete wooden coffin.

But these two wooden coffins, it seems to be complete?

Complete wooden coffins, sets of Canopis jars, this is already a complete ancient Egyptian tomb.

Zhang Yang was suddenly full of anticipation for what he would see next.

Because according to his experience, these two sets of things are most likely unearthed in recent years, and they will not be formal channels.

……

Keep going inside.

Sure enough, there are many more good things.

The first thing that aroused Zhang Yan's interest were two cat mummies.

The overall shape is similar to that of a humanoid mummy, except that the human head is replaced with a cat head.

But even with this little cat's head on the mummy, the ancient Egyptians still played their artistic cell.

In one piece, the cat's head is realistic, and it looks a bit like a leopard;

The other is a completely cartoon image, so abstract that it is unrecognizable.

As the favorite cat of all ancient civilizations, cat slaves abound in ancient Egypt, so cat mummies are actually not too rare objects.

But now there are more cat slaves in society, and cat mummies are very suitable as ornaments in the living room, so their market value is not lower than that of ordinary humanoid mummies.

In addition to the cat mummies, there are also some bronze cat statues next to them.

There is a theory that these bronze cats are actually the ancient Egyptian version of tomb beasts.

Zhang Yang took a cursory look, most of them were antiques from the sixth to fourth centuries BC, and the current market price was about 100,000.

This kind of is very common in the auction market, that is, there is no need to pay too much attention to it.

The treasures he was looking for were either difficult to buy or had just been unearthed;

Or like the box in front of you, it is a typical funerary object.

On the shelf in front of Zhang Yang, a square box with a glass cover was laid flat.

This is a relatively good storage condition in the whole carriage.

The inside of the box is divided into twelve small pavilions, each of which contains amulets common in ancient Egyptian culture.

One of the most famous is probably an ornament shaped like an eagle's head.

The ornamentation is simple, but the style is distinct.

The appearance of the ornament is an eye-catching light blue, with a bit of celadon flavor, but it is much rougher than that of Chinese porcelain.

Locally, due to abrasion, the gray quartz sand inside has been exposed.

This is the "Eye of Horus", one of the favorite amulets of the ancient Egyptians.

The one in the box is the same pottery as Saboti, a bit like the most primitive porcelain carving, and the light blue layer on the outside is glaze.

Even if you don't know the culture of ancient Egypt, you can see such things when you visit antique stalls.

Zhang Yang met when he was in Pan Jiayuan, and there was an uncle who sold this thing, and the price of one piece at that time was 300 yuan, saying that it was worn by the Egyptian pharaoh.

Of course, that's fake, not to mention the pharaoh of ancient Egypt, even the current "pharaoh" Salah wears more than this price.

The normal market price is around fifteen thousand.

With the Eye of Horus, of course, the most famous bug in ancient Egypt - the scarab beetle.

The scarab beetles on the antique stall in Pan Jiayuan are one by one, like beans, and the material of the real product should be red jade such as agate.

But this box contains a blue ceramic scarab made of the same material as the Eye of Horus.

And it is divided into three parts: the left wing, the body and the right wing.

At the edge of each section, there is a considerable number of drilled holes.

It is reasonable to suspect that some kind of metal or fabric should have been used to weave a complete beetle form through the holes.

The head of the insect body has the same turban decoration as the mummy of the pharaoh.

This is enough to illustrate the high status of the scarab beetle in ancient Egyptian culture.

The shell lang can be praised to this part, looking at the entire Blue Star, it is also a unique existence.

In addition to these two most famous amulets, there are several lion-headed amulets and heart-shaped amulets that are also blue in the chest.

The difference in their production time is less than 20 years.

The material and craftsmanship are the same, and the age is still so close, Zhang Yang has every reason to believe that this is the same batch of funeral goods.

The two older ones have serious signs of wear and tear, and they are likely to be items carried by the deceased during his lifetime.

Such amulets, when buried, are often placed in the wooden coffin of the mummy, attached to the body wrapped in a shroud.

Although this shows that they are not the same as the first two sets of mummies, because those two pieces have not been opened.

But they were just right together with a rag kept in a glass frame next to them.

"Name: Fragment of the Shroud"

"Material: Linen"

"Date of production: 232 B.C.E."

"Details: This is a fragment of the shroud on a mummy from the ancient Egyptian and Ptolemaic periods, made of fine linen, with patterns and words on it that are part of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, which embodies the deceased's yearning for transcendence and resurrection, which is very precious."

The Shroud?

Zhang Yang didn't expect that the gray, dirty rag in the frame would have such a background.

The shroud is generally the most inconspicuous thing in ancient tombs.

Grave robbers often throw them away when they encounter them.

But once the shroud has words and patterns on it, it's completely different.

It is said that the Qianlong shroud that Sun Dianying casually discarded, because of the scriptures on it, finally sold for a sky-high price of 130 million.

And in front of Zhang Yang, the shroud of the mummy, the content on it, the Book of the Dead, is not much better than the Buddhist scriptures, or even more powerful.

In a sense, the Book of the Dead is the ancient Egyptian version of the curse of the afterlife.

It was first carved on the walls of the royal mausoleum, and later written on papyrus as funerary objects;

Later, this custom was introduced from the royal family to the people.

Ordinary Egyptians probably felt that the scriptures written on paper were not effective in "transcending the undead", so they simply wrote them on the shroud and wrapped the deceased directly in the scriptures.

Whether this effect is good or not, I am afraid that only the interviews with the deceased can know.

But the mummy shroud, which was originally flat, was upgraded all of a sudden, because of the scriptures.

Zhang Yang couldn't even estimate the value of the shroud.

Although it is only a small fragment and the pattern on it is not very clear, there is no doubt that such a thing, all over the world, is a museum-level artifact and will not be circulated in the market at all.

In other words, money can't buy it.

What Zhang Yang can be sure of is that Boss Mo's talismans and this shroud should be the wool of the same ancient Egyptian.

Thinking back to the time before she said that these collections cost her a lot of money......

"This woman can't be the white gloves of the overseas tomb robbery group in China, right?"

"Or, these things are all stolen cultural relics in Egypt, and she can't do it, and she wants to take the opportunity to exhibit them in a foreign country and museums, and launder them all?"

Zhang Yang took a deep breath, it's okay, it's okay, Captain Liu is outside.

Thanks to Lin Zi 482 for his 200 coin tip!

(End of chapter)