New Whodunit-Style Cairo Exhibit to Trace Stolen, Recovered Treasure

Papyrus records show Ramses III’s foreman professed innocence when he was accused of stealing a chest belonging to the pharaoh. Some 3,000 years later, archeologists uncovered evidence of his guilt--the gold-plated box was buried under the foreman’s home.

The tale is itself evidence, say national museum curators who have worked with police to assemble a new exhibit tracing the loss and recovery of ancient treasures. The Ramses chest proves Egyptian art has had a powerful allure for generations.

The “Lost and Found” exhibit is due to open later this year at the Egyptian Museum.

Museum director Mohammed Shimy said the underlying theme of the exhibit is Egypt’s determination to protect its heritage, and its gratitude for international help in that campaign.

“These pieces are very important, because they are part of our civilization,” Shimy said. “If we lose our civilization, we lose ourselves.”

Many of the 155 items in the exhibit were recovered with the help of sharp-eyed experts abroad and foreign police agencies linked by Interpol, as well as by Egypt’s own Tourist Police. White-uniformed Tourist Police officers are ubiquitous at the pyramids and other sites, and their department is responsible for recovering stolen antiquities.

A 1993 law effectively bars individuals from owning any Egyptian artifact more than 100 years old or more recent pieces judged of historical importance.

Egyptians who registered private collections with the government within six months of the law’s passage were allowed to keep them, but they cannot sell them or transfer them outside their families. The law transformed owners into caretakers.

Unregistered antiquities can be confiscated. The sale within Egypt or smuggling abroad of antiquities can bring jail terms of up to 15 years.

“It’s a very strict, very severe law, because we want to protect our heritage,” said Gen. Abdel Khalek Tahawi, head of the Tourist Police.

He sees the “Lost and Found” exhibit, which he is co-sponsoring, as a way of sensitizing the public.

“If people realize how important it is to protect our heritage, they will help the police in doing our job,” he said.

A three-foot-high pink granite head of the god Amun-re that dominates one wall of the “Lost and Found” gallery is there thanks to a French Egyptologist.

The expert was suspicious when he saw the head, dating from the 19th dynasty (1307-1196 BC), for sale in Paris several years ago. He alerted Egyptian authorities, who determined it had been taken from the country illegally and arranged for its return.

It may never be clear how something as large as the Amun-re head was spirited out of Egypt. The first steps of its journey to Paris may have been similar to those of an even larger “Lost and Found” treasure: a 2 1/2-ton sandstone bust.

A gang of thieves had carted the bust--broken into the head, the headdress in two pieces and a fragment of beard--on camelback from a Nubian temple. They were caught in the desert outside Cairo with their booty transferred from camel to truck and cloaked in blankets.

“Since we have no inscription, we can only say it is a royal head,” said Hassan Said, a curator at the Egyptian Museum.

The giant royal head is one of many exhibit pieces ripped out of context by thieves. Much of their history and identities are lost, even though the pieces themselves have been found.

One was dubbed the mystery statue when it was unearthed in 1997 by a farmer working his land near the Nile Delta town of Zagazig.

The ancient sculptor worked in limestone with astounding detail, delicately carving fingernails, jewelry, hair woven into a braid. A woman sits in a high-backed chair surrounded by four children.

Because it was unrelated to the ruins near where it was found, Egyptologists believe the woman-and-children group was buried for safekeeping at Zagazig after being stolen from elsewhere by an ancient grave robber or a modern thief.

A delicate, jeweled amulet and two beautiful daggers are no mystery. They came from just upstairs in the museum.

Three years ago, an unemployed Egyptian hid under a display case until closing time, then opened cases to remove the daggers, jewelry and other items from perhaps the most famous of the Egyptian Museum’s collections: the three-millennium-old Tutankhamen tomb treasures.

The thief was caught as he tried to sneak out of the museum the next morning.

The audacious but unsuccessful attempt led to the firing of the museum director and $3 million worth of security improvements at the pink neoclassical building that houses more than 100,000 artifacts.

“Lost and found the same day,” say captions on photographs of the amulet and daggers in the ground-floor gallery where the new exhibit is housed.

The pieces themselves remain carefully guarded upstairs with the rest of the trove unearthed in 1922 by British archeologist Howard Carter in the Valley of the Kings, outside the southern Egyptian city of Luxor.