Excavating the Museum: A Dataset of Beni Hasan Lower Cemetery Objects Held in 10 Museum Collections (Garstang Excavations, 1902–1904)

Finds from John Garstang's 1902–1904 excavations of the Lower Cemetery at Beni Hasan, Egypt, were dispersed across museums worldwide under the "division of finds" system standard for the period. Objects from the same tomb ended up hundreds or thousands of miles apart. This dataset reunites 2,120 of those objects across ten of those collections — nine museums in the United Kingdom and one in Egypt — into a single, open, citable table. Each record documents registration number, holding institution, tomb number, object type, material, dimensions (height, length, width, in centimetres), and chronological attribution, where known. The deposit includes four files: museum_list_final_v3.csv (the dataset, UTF-8, comma-separated, open format), museum_list_final_v3.xlsx (the same data in Excel format, with an additional Info sheet), beni_hasan_table.html (an interactive, searchable, filterable version of the table, with all data embedded and no internet connection required), and README.md (the full data dictionary, methodology, and known limitations). Compiled from published museum catalogues and first-hand collection visits, cross-referenced against Garstang's original excavation records where possible. For full documentation of fields, missing-value conventions, and known limitations, see the included README.md.