Statues of ancient Egyptian rulers and their gods can be encountered in the grandiose galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Manhattan’s traffic-choked Fifth Avenue. More humble grave goods, excavated from tombs along the Nile, can be found in homemade cabinets in a South African barn at the end of a dirt track road. Several hundred artefacts made of pottery, stone and metal are displayed in the wood-panelled vitrines of one of Japan’s oldest universities, while a single, 5000-year-old ceramic vessel is tucked away in a shed in a quiet Cornish village. Scattered between national museums, public schools, masonic lodges, royal palaces, universities and auction houses are hundreds of thousands of archaeological finds from Egypt. Some are unassuming fragments, others are monumental works of art.