Pirated skulls come home

Al Ahram Weekly (Nevine El-Aref)

Nevine El Aref has been busy this week. This is a nice compliment to her previous article (below) about the National Committee to Return Smuggled Antiquities.

A 26th-dynasty limestone relief and two Graeco-Roman skulls are back in Egypt, Nevine El-Aref reports.

An archaeological delegation headed by Youssef Khalifa, director of the department of stolen and recovered antiquities at the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), returned from London this week with three artefacts that had been stolen and illegally smuggled out of Egypt.

The first was an ancient Egyptian object saved for the nation when the SCA succeeded in halting its sale at Bonham's auction hall in London as part of its campaign to stamp out the trade in illegally- smuggled artefacts.

The object is an inscribed limestone relief that was chopped off the tomb wall of the 26th-Dynasty nobleman Mutirdis. The tomb was discovered in 1969 at Assassif on Luxor's west bank by German Egyptologist Jan Assman, and the fragment was apparently still in its original place when the tomb was restored between 1973 and 1974. A photograph of the inscription still in situ was published in 1977 in Das Grab der Mutirdis.