Egypt asks art museum to return mask

The Supreme Council of Antiquities for Egypt has given the St. Louis Art Museum a May 15 deadline to turn over the 3,000-year-old burial mask of Ka Nefer Nefer, which they believe left the country illegally.

Officials at the museum in St. Louis are evaluating documents from the council that seek to prove that the mask from around 1307 to 1196 BC could have been stolen from an Egyptian Museum storage room.

“We don’t feel like we’ve seen everything yet,” said Brent Benjamin, director of the St. Louis Art Museum. “It’s premature to speculate what the outcome will be. We are looking at documentation, and we are still awaiting other materials from Egypt.”

Benjamin would not say if the museum planned to meet the deadline.

Egypt’s antiquities council first made the claim in late February that the mask could have been stolen in the 1980s when a storage room was looted in Cairo.

The museum bought the mask from an art dealer in the United States in 1998 for about $500,000, after checking with authorities and the international Art Loss Register to see if the item was stolen. The museum also got approval for the purchase from the Egyptian Museum, Benjamin said.