In 1957 the Rev Professor John Bowman purchased several objects from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York on behalf of the University of Melbourne. These included two objects that were originally obtained through the Egypt Exploration Society: a Ptolemaic stela from Oxyrhynchus (1897) and a wall frieze fragment from Deir el-Bahari (1906).

Objects from Tell Dafana from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia were transferred to the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam.