Culture : Cracking the Case of the Missing Artifacts : A major theft of antiquities embarrasses Egypt and elicits promises to improve security.

Foreigners have been taking home artifacts of Egypt’s Pharonic Age at least since 1801, when the British carted off the Rosetta Stone from Alexandria to London.

But the latest thefts from the tombs surrounding the 4,600-year-old Step Pyramid at Sakkara--or at least the latest to be discovered--have forced the government agency charged with protecting Egypt’s priceless heritage to admit to embarrassing lapses in security, training and inventory controls in the country’s 114 storehouses of ancient art.

Following the breakup of a large-scale antiquities smuggling ring in London by Scotland Yard and questions by the Egyptian press, officials here acknowledged the government has no effective catalogue of its artifacts and thus no real idea of how much has been stolen over the years.

Much of the material has been stacked in remote tombs beneath the desert and secured only with bolted doors, according to knowledgeable sources. Some of these storage rooms have not been officially inspected in dozens of years, and security often depends on poorly paid employees vulnerable to the temptations of theft and bribery.

Culture Minister Farouk Hosni, the man responsible for supervising the Egyptian Antiquities Organization, has promised to upgrade security as part of an ambitious new program for showcasing ancient Egyptian art, an assurance met with some skepticism here. Meanwhile, critics have seized on the scandal not only to attack the Culture Ministry but as evidence of the corruption and incompetence that they contend permeates the government.

Scotland Yard’s three-member Art and Antiquities Squad, working with authorities here and in China, another source of stolen artifacts, undertook a nine-month undercover investigation that resulted in the recovery of more than 300 Egyptian pieces and the arrest of 25 inspectors of the Antiquities Organization in March.

London detectives have declined to release details while the investigation continues, but Egyptian officials said the recovered items included amulets, figurines, hieroglyphic reliefs and wooden masks. Many apparently were looted from tombs and storehouses in the Sakkara area, about 20 miles south of Cairo, and passed through the airport as copies or plastered over to look like cheap Cairo souvenirs.

Despite some disagreement about the value of the pieces--a leading London art dealer said he understood they included “a lot of absolute rubbish”--the implication of even low-level government employees in the crime opened a wound in Egypt.

In recent years, the custodial care of Egyptian antiquities, potent symbols of national pride, has become politically charged. The government has been accused--not always fairly--of failing to adequately protect the country’s monuments from the ravages of pollution, erosion, overpopulation and tourists; of endangering antiquities by shipping them around the world for exhibition, and of threatening the Sphinx with the proposed construction of a highway, an idea abandoned just last month.

Through most of it, Hosni, a 50-year-old artist and onetime cultural bureaucrat from Alexandria, has stayed afloat. He is in his eighth year as culture minister to President Hosni Mubarak.

In a recent talk with reporters, Hosni sought to downplay the significance of the thefts by noting that Egypt has been battling tomb robbers for thousands of years. He said 40 new storehouses will be built and staffed to “the highest technical standards.”

The government also is constructing regional museums to display artifacts now warehoused. Previously announced plans to build the world’s largest museum on the plateau behind the pyramids of Giza are moving ahead, Hosni added.

But Egypt is among the countries lagging in efforts to protect its artifacts against theft, according to Philip Saunders, a British expert at locating stolen art.

In a telephone interview from his office in Plymouth, Saunders said the absence of a photographic or written record of thousands of pieces in storage in Egypt means customs officers often have no way of knowing if an object has been stolen. When Egyptian officials do report a missing object, it often is long after the fact.

“It can take two years for information to reach us,” Saunders said. “There’s something wrong with the information highway down there.”

Egypt also has become a relay station for material smuggled from other Middle Eastern countries into Europe, he asserted: “A lot of stolen, looted things from north of Egypt are moving through Egypt. They have the network there because they’ve been at it for so long.”

The ultimate sources of the problem are the number of tombs and artifacts and the lack of money available to protect them.

“The sheer archeological wealth of Egypt is overwhelming,” said Kent R. Weeks, an Egyptologist at the American University in Cairo. “I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to say you can stick a shovel in the ground anywhere in Egypt and come up with antiquities. It’s just terribly hard to protect it all.”

Weeks also noted that a university-trained Egyptologist earns about $35 a month in an entry-level job with the Antiquities Organization. The same person could earn 20 to 30 times that as an expert tour guide, he said.

Weeks has been working in Egypt for more than 20 years and said that despite the dust blown up in the latest scandal, the situation is improved from the past. He remains optimistic that the government can make good on its promises to do more to protect archeological sites.

“One reason it appears there are more thefts now is because we’re more aware of them,” he said. “ . . . It is a big problem, however, and given the number of objects in these storehouses today, it’s going to take a long time to get the (new) system in place.”