"Sometime in the fourth century BC, an unknown Egyptian master carved an exquisite portrait in dark-green stone. The statue that included this remarkably lifelike head of a priest, who was probably a citizen of ancient Memphis, may have been damaged when the Persians conquered Egypt in 343 B.C. before it was ritually buried in a temple complex dedicated to the worship of the sacred Apis bull .... After almost two millennia, the head was excavated by August Mariette, a founding figure in French archaeology, under a permit from the Ottoman Pasha. Sent to France as part of a collection of antiquities assembled for the inimitable Bonaparte prince known as Plon-Plon, it found a home in his faux Pompeain palace. After disappearing again, it resurfaced in the personal collection of Edward Perry Warren, a turn-of-the twentieth-century American aesthete, who sold it to the Museum of Fine Arts."--book jacket.