Dr. Charles Trick Currelly has been long celebrated as the visionary first director of the Royal Ontario Museum of Archaeology and one of its founding fathers. Yet this extraordinary Canadian has left a legacy far greater than that. Currelly was not an adventurer or a thief of priceless antiquities. He stumbled into archaeology, diverted from pursuing a doctorate in socialism, and was not your typical British imperialist but a radical leftist in his day. He sought not to pilfer or plunder Egypt’s finest treasures but to bring back to Canada items he legally purchased and earned (through the EEF) of a modest variety in order to educate and inform generations to come: tools of the tradesmen and peasantry, small items of daily life, and other finely crafted pieces to illustrate the arts and crafts of man through the ages.

By investigating his archaeological and buying achievements in Luxor Egypt alone, it is possible to see that the nature of his excavations, along with the special character of the pieces he brought home to Toronto amounts to an impressive and singular Egyptian collection in Toronto.