Issue No. 599
Heritage
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15 - 21 August 2002 Issue No. 599 Heritage |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Back where they belong
TWO TEAMS of archaeologists were in the United States and Italy this week to collect more objects stolen from Egypt and escort them back home, reports Nevine El-Aref.
The batch of antiquities from Washington includes two coloured Roman mummy masks found by chance in the house of a weapons trader arrested by US police. Also included in the batch is the inscribed block hailing from Behbeit Al-Hagar Temple in the Delta which was identified at Christie's auction house and successfully withdrawn from sale (see Al-Ahram Weekly 4-10 July).
"One of the masks is the well-preserved face of a woman, her eyes inlaid with black kohl. The other is partly deteriorated, but prior to its return the Egyptian Embassy in Washington paid for it to be restored," said Emad Maqlad, head of the financial administration at the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA).
The return of these antiquities just a month after the recovery of an inscribed limestone relief used in evidence at the trial of Manhattan art dealer Frederick Schultz is a clear indication of the attention being given by the Ministry of Culture to retrieving the nation's heritage. Schultz was sentenced in New York in May to 33 months' imprisonment for conspiring to steal objects from Egypt.
The stack of antiquities recovered from Italy includes 25 artefacts, most of them Pharaonic statues. Police discovered two of these objects in a car boot belonging to an Italian woman, and found the other 23 pieces on searching her house.
SCA Secretary-General Zahi Hawass said the "huge collection of artefacts" found with an Anglo-Egyptian dealer arrested recently at Heathrow Airport would also be recovered at the end of this month. This case was brought to light a month ago when the dealer made an attempt to pass a number of genuine Pharaonic and some fake objects through British customs, claiming they were heirlooms inherited from his father. The man was arrested after officials called in the British Museum for an assessment. The collection is now being held in lockers at Heathrow until Egyptologists have examined them and separated the real articles from the fakes, after which they will return to Egypt.
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