31 Jan. - 6 Feb. 2002
Issue No.571
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 31 Jan. - 6 Feb. 2002 Issue No.571 |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
RETURNING THE SPOILS: Shadi Abdel-Salam's Night of Counting the Years serves as a cipher for most tomb-robbing sagas, and last week, an epic worthy of his stark drama -- albeit one with a modern, international twist -- came to an end when a team of Egyptologists returned from Munich triumphantly bearing part of the sarcophagus of Akhenaten. American archaeologist Theodore Davis found this priceless object, the lid of which remained in the Egyptian Museum, in 1907. The lower part disappeared from the Egyptian Museum between 1915 and 1930, then suddenly reappeared in 1980, in the possession of a Swiss antiquities collector, who sent it to the Munich Museum for restoration.
Egypt tried repeatedly to retrieve the lower part, but Munich insisted that another object, an Old Kingdom offering table, be given in exchange. Finally, in 2001, an agreement was reached. Before the sarcophagus could return to its homeland, and become whole once more, however, it was put on display for three months in Munich, where 60,000 visitors came to get a last glimpse. The masterpiece is on display at the Egyptian Museum
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