Thefts from the Cairo Museum
After dismissing the break-in at the Cairo Museum as merely looting of the souvenir shop, Zahi Hawass has had to admit that some of the Tutankhamun exhibits have been stolen. Why it has taken him so long to realise is a question that his future masters may wish to address, for the objects are - or were - sited prominently in the Tutankhamun section of the museum and right from the start he acknowledged that one of the glass cases had been smashed.
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| These two statues are among the four that have been stolen. |
Among the objects Hawass has admitted are missing are the gold-plated wooden statue showing Tutankhamun standing on a papyrus raft and holding a harpoon, and a gold-plated wooden statue showing Tutankhamun being carried on the head of a goddess. The case in question held four of these statues - two showing Tutankhamun harpooning, one showing him being carried by a goddess and the fourth showing him as a young man holding a shepherd's rod. This one depicts him wearing the hedjet crown of Upper Egypt, the other three show him wearing the crown of Lower Egypt.
How the fact that the case was empty escaped notice defies imagination. Of course it is likely that the museum staff were tight-lipped about the missing objects, not wishing to incur the wrath of their boss, but it seems clear that Hawass, for all his bluster on TV, doesn't really know the Tutankhamun collection or he would have spotted that these objects were gone as soon as he walked into the hall.
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| The four stolen statues in the Cairo Museum in happier times. |
Of course there is another aspect of the affair, and that is the sheer stupidity of the thieves. Presumably they stole the objects believing that they were solid gold, but there is a substantial difference in weight between a two-foot tall statue made of gold and one made of wood! The nine men in custody are doubtless being interrogated on this point with the careless brutality for which Egyptian police are infamous, but a) I find it hard to feel any sympathy for them, and b) presumably they are not the ones who stole the statues, or else they would have been recovered along with the other objects they were carrying!
Meanwhile Hawass has grudgingly admitted that the Cairo Museum was not the only one targetted on that fateful night when the police withdrew from the streets. Attempts were made on the Coptic Museum in Babylon, Old Cairo, on the Royal Jewellery Museum in Alexandria, and on the open-air Museum at Memphis. Hawass triumphantly reports that nothing was stolen from this latter site (which impliest that perhaps objects were stolen from the other museums) but as the only object in the building is a 35' tall stone statue of Rameses II, far too heavy to be pocketted even by the most ambitious looter, that is hardly surprising.
Still, it is not all bad news. Hawass has been demanding the return of various objects, including the Rosetta Stone from the British Museum and the bust of Nefertiti from the Berlin Museum. He pretends that he only wants them on loan for the opening of the new Gizeh Museum in 2013, but everyone is sure that in his case possession will be the traditional nine-tenths of the law and the lending institutions are unlikely to get them back. Now they have an excellent excuse for turning down his demands.
© Kendall K. Down 2011
