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The Egyptian material that has survived from Sir William Hamilton's collection is restricted in both quantity and range, consisting as it does of two small 'modern' mummies and fifteen scarabs. Nevertheless, important questions are raised by the problem of determining how and why Hamilton acquired this material. Two types of constraint were operating on eighteenth-century collectors, the externally imposed limitations of accessibility and the self imposed restrictions of aesthetic and scholarly selection. Although travel in Egypt, particularly south of Cairo, remained difficult and perilous to the end of the eighteenth century, it still seems that out of the material available to them, certain classes of object were privileged and others eschewed by contemporary collectors. Thus while the mummies might be classed as curiosities, Sir William may have considered the scarabs desirable acquisitions because the), formed an historical appendage to the well-established and well-defined collector's category of classical engraved gems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]