LONDON: For months, curators at a British museum had been wondering how an ancient Egyptian statue in a sealed display cabinet had been able to rotate on its glass shelf, seemingly of its own free will. Rumors abounded that it was cursed or that the spirit of its owner had entered the figurine, causing it to shudder.
Others put forward more prosaic explanations, suggesting a magnetic field was behind the statue’s movements. But now, a British engineer has solved the riddle, discovering that minuscule vibrations from traffic and footsteps from passersby were causing the 3,800-year-old stone figurine to spin.
Video footage of the spinning statue went viral on the Internet over the summer, drawing crowds to the Manchester Museum in northern England to gaze at the curious artefact.
Mystery of the rotating Egypt statue solved
