The entries belonged to the collection of George Petrie, an Irish artist and antiquarian. Many years later, staff at the National Museum of Ireland were working through the old inventories. They were looking for the sorts of things one expects: axes, pins, pieces of horse tack. The stone bottles kept appearing in the records. So they looked for them.
They were lying side by side in a drawer.
They are small, elongated vessels made of pale stone. One is broken; the other survives intact. Their shape resembles alabastra, containers for scented or medicinal oils known from Egypt, Greece and the eastern Mediterranean. A museum geologist thought the material might be gypsum, which includes a form of alabaster. Marks inside the broken vessel may also fit the way such containers were hollowed out.
Now for Lucan. The catalogue says the vessels came from a rath, an old earthwork, there. An 1832 issue of the Dublin Penny Journal mentioned a “Danish Rath” near the village. That is a historical description, not a verdict on where the bottles were made. Their reported findspot survives in an old record. It is not a modern excavation report with every step of the evidence chain intact.
Petrie himself later called one of the objects an Egyptian alabaster bottle. Other scholars were less certain, considering Roman or later possibilities. When they debated it, the objects had not yet been relocated in the museum. An argument about things sitting somewhere in your own collection: archaeology can be remarkably patient with itself.
Finding the vessels makes the question better. It does not settle it. Where were they made? When did they reach Ireland? Were they really found where the old catalogue says? There is quite a distance between “looks like” and “travelled from Egypt to an Irish ringfort”. A label cannot cross it on its own.
Further study might bring the story into focus. For now, I like the open drawer: two real objects, an old entry and a journey with its ticket missing.
