Verrick Museum of Antiquities · Ostrander Wing · Gallery 9
The Bow of Ra
Solar Barque and Weapon in the Aethelgard Corpus. A single object, exhibited alone — on loan from the Collection of the Sunken Aethelgard, 14 October 2026 – 28 March 2027.
3 FEB · 0302
What the gallery shows you
In Gallery 9, the object is exhibited alone, in barque-state, accessioned as SA.1954.017.a–c. The wall label gives you a disputed date, a chain of custody with a stated gap, and a spectral bloom the Conservation Department declines to model. It is, by design, the whole of what the Museum is prepared to assert.
It is not the whole of what exists on paper.
Outside the official record
Supplementary material, catalogued and kept
Before the object now called the Bow of Ra was accessioned and before it was salvaged from a flooded depot in 1954, two separate records had already formed around it: a stela photographed at Ras el-Qaus in the winter of 1908–9, and a case opened at a different site the same week. The stela and the object never shared a custody chain. The papers of that season — the Report the Committee printed, and the private gathering its Director did not — survive as a seven-item archive. This archive makes the records available together and provides a manual comparison table for the material the printed report could only describe.
Open the Finding Aid →The stela (Register B No. 41) and the bow (field no. 137) never shared a custody chain — but their two chamber-openings fall on the same morning.
The stela's optical arc was first sighted, and the Veiled Oasis chamber was opened, within the same hour — a coincidence the archive never resolves.
Recorded by Dr. F. L. Ambrose across nineteen mornings, constant regardless of the sun's own drift.
Three ways in
Choose your depth
Reading Room
A selected sequence of records concerning the object, the stela, the pre-dawn arc, and two chambers opened on one dawn.
Consult selected records → 02Full Archive
Seven catalogued items in finding-aid order, with every facsimile, transcript, plate, relationship, and unresolved question intact.
Browse in catalogue order → 03Research Paths
Three source-grounded reading paths through the refraction decision, the shared dawn, and crate AR-1188.
Compare related records →A note on method
Evidence first. Interpretation last.
The records do not offer a single answer. Where the papers state a gap, the archive preserves it; where they permit a possibility, the final interpretation remains yours.
The record remains open. Consult the material that holds your attention.