Honolulu museum helps with worldwide artifact theft investigation

It's like a scene out of an Indiana Jones movie. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents converge on the Honolulu Museum of Art to retrieve stolen antiquities. This is part of a worldwide investigation – one the museum is happy to be part of.

"They don't belong here. They're stolen," said Honolulu Museum of Art Director Stephan Jost. "On one hand I hope they find a great home someplace. On the other hand, we've had them on view here almost 25 years. Lots of people loved them. The bottom line is they don't belong here."

Jost is gladly handing seven artifacts over to federal agents. They're hot. Stolen! It's now part of a case against New York art dealer Subhash Kapoor, who's accused of being involved in an international antiquities smuggling operation.

Immigration and customs enforcement agents contacted the museum last year after determining the 2000-year-old terra cotta rattle may be one of the stolen items. The museum jumped into action identifying even more ill-gotten pieces.

"Seven works. Five we bought from the dealer. One was given us by the dealer," said Jost. "We thought he was such a nice guy. One was sold to a private investor who gave it to the museum."

Homeland Security Special Agent Brenton Easter is part of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. Easter is on this case. He's kind of like the Indiana Jones of ICE. His educational background is archaeology. He's been investigating the theft of cultural items for a decade and says this is a big case.

"Three other pieces came from a site which we believe was recently pillaged as recently as the 1990s. The pillaging there was rather prolific," said Easter. "It's good to know we're recovering this material and we'll be able to send it back because a lot of this material left India, I think. before the government knew it was there."

The items were carefully packed up and loaded onto a truck. They'll make their way to the East Coast while authorities build their case. Eventually, they, too, will return home. Easter says the museum was a big help.

"They came forward with the information. The provided us with additional information leading us to other pieces," said Easter. "They were incredibly helpful. They were incredibly easy to work with. I can't thank them enough."

"The more light you shine on systems, the more you ruin their market and I'm more than happy to ruin their market," said Jost.

Since 2007, ICE has repatriated over 7,800 artifacts. Kapoor is sitting in an Indian jail awaiting trial. There is an U.S. arrest warrant as well.

Special Agent Easter says three of Kapoor's co-defendants have been convicted in the U.S. Eventually, the seven artifacts retrieved on Wednesday will be returned to their homeland India.

You can read the transcript and or see the news clip here.
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Reference:

Akana, Paula. 2015. “Honolulu museum helps with worldwide artifact theft investigation”. KITV4. Posted: April 1, 2015. Available online: http://www.kitv.com/news/honolulu-museum-helps-with-worldwide-artifact-theft-investigation/32145282

Damaged Ancient Egyptian Artifacts to Be Restored

The artifacts damaged at the Egyptian National Museum in Cairo last week will be restored in five days, Egypt’s Minister of Antiquities said on Monday.

Among the 70 artifacts vandalized during anti-government protests, the most significant are a statue of King Ahkenaten wearing the blue crown and holding an offering table, King Tutankhamun’s gilded walking stick and a wooden statue of King Tut standing on the back of a panther.

The damage was caused by about six people who broke into the museum through its windowed ceiling using ropes.

“One of those people fell down on a showcase while going down using the rope. He got injured and could not escape, and was arrested inside the museum. The army also arrested about 10 more people who tried relentlessly to scale the western museum surrounding wall,” Zahi Hawass, Minister of Antiquities, said in a statement on Monday.

According to Hawass, the thieves were “ignorant” people who took out the objects from their showcase and dropped them on the floor when they realized that they were not made of gold.

The thieves also ransacked and vandalized the newly opened museum gift shop, which they believed it was the real museum.

“The funny part of the story is that only the books of the gift shop remained untouched. Looters are never interested in books, I guess,” Hawass said.

He added that the looters were desperately looking for a mummy in order to find “red mercury,” which it is fabled to be a magical substance used by the ancient Egyptians in mummification.

For this reason they smashed a New Kingdom empty coffin.

“These incidents show the ignorance of the vandals,” said Hawass.

The newly appointed Minister of Antiquities also clarified what happened to the two mummies whose heads were photographed lying on the floor among scattered bones.

“When the crisis erupted, I took a very quick walk through the museum and thought that the two skulls thrown on the floor of one of the side rooms might belong to some of the royal mummies examined in our DNA research project on the royal mummies (the Egyptian Mummy Project), namely those found in KV55,” Hawass said.

In particular, he feared for the mummies of Akhenaten (from tomb KV55), Queen Tiye (also known as the Elder Lady from KV35), and the mother of Tutankhamun (also known as the Younger Lady from KV35), which are housed in vitrines next to the second royal mummy room on the west side of the museum.

“I am happy to report that they all are safe and untouched,” Hawass said.

He confirmed what was reportedon Friday by Discovery News, namely that the two mummies were “unidentified Late Period individuals that were going to be used to test the CT machine.”

“They were two already disembodied heads being temporarily stored next to the CT scanning lab in the museum’s grounds,” Hawass told Discovery News.

A team of 11 members has already begun the restoration work, starting from the statue of Akhenaten carrying an offering tray.

“On the staff of the Egyptian Museum is Nadia Lokma, one of the best experts on wood conservation in the world,” Bob Brier, senior research fellow at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University, said.

“For her master’s thesis she restored Tutankhamen's chariot, a project that took years. I guarantee you she is already planning how to restore the broken Tutankhamen objects to their former glory,” Brier, one of the leading experts on mummies and Egyptology, said.
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References:

Lorenzi, Rossella. 2011. "Damaged Ancient Egyptian Artifacts to Be Restored". Discovery News. Posted: February 7, 2011. Available online: http://news.discovery.com/archaeology/damanged-egyptian-artifacts-to-be-restored.html

France Returns Ancient Treasures to Egypt

France has handed over to Egypt five fragments of an ancient wall painting that were kept in storage at the Louvre museum in Paris.

President Nicolas Sarkozy presented today one of the slabs to his Egyptian counterpart Hosni Mubarak, ending a year-long feud over their ownership.

The five "steles," which are each only 15 cm (5.9 inches) wide and 30 cm (11.8 inches) high, were removed from a wall painting in a 3,200-year-old tomb on the West Bank of Luxor.

Beautifully frescoed with scenes depicting the journey into the afterlife, the tomb belonged to Tetiky, a nobleman of the 18th Dynasty.

"In 2008, a team of Egyptologists from Heidelberg University investigated the tomb and found several pieces had been cut out of the walls. Slides from 1975 show the wall paintings intact, so we believe they were removed sometime in the 1980's and sold to private collections in Europe," Dr. Zahi Hawass, the secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), wrote in his blog.

The Louvre purchased four of the fragments from the Maspero gallery in France in 2000, while the fifth was acquired at auction in Paris in 2003.

After presenting evidence to the Louvre that the objects had left Egypt illegally, Cairo's antiquities department broke off ties with the museum in October, saying they would be restored once the fragments were returned.

"When the Louvre applied for their permits to continue their excavations at Saqqara, I was forced to suspend their excavations, because we cannot have teams working in Egypt when we know their organization possesses stolen artifacts," Dr. Hawass said.

"Any museum that buys stolen artifacts will receive this same treatment. I was forced to cut archaeological ties with the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Saint Louis Art Museum because they would not return artifacts, even after the SCA presented evidence they had been stolen…. I hope this story will be a warning to everyone, all museums and archaeologists, Egyptians and foreigners, not to deal in stolen antiquities," Dr. Hawass said.

Emphasizing that the Louvre museum had acted in good faith when it purchased the artefacts, President Sarkozy remarked that "France is particularly committed to fighting the illegal trafficking of works of art."

Dr. Hawass, who claims to have secured the return of some 5,000 treasures during his SCA tenure, has recently started an international campaign for the return of renowed artefacts such as the bust of Queen Nefertiti held by Berlin's Neues Museum and the Rosetta Stone from the British Museum.
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References:

Lorenzi, Rossella. 2009. "France Returns Ancient Treasures to Egypt". Discovery News. Posted: December 14, 2009. Available online: http://news.discovery.com/archaeology/france-returns-ancient-treasures-to-egypt.html