Egypt has formally asked Sweden for the return of 212 artifacts taken out of the country by a Swedish collector in mid 1920s, Egypt's chief archaeologist said Monday.
Zahi Hawass, the head of the Council of Antiquities, said in a statement that the council's lawyer has been in touch with Ostergotlands County Museum in Sweden.
The artifacts, Hawass said, were taken "in an illegal manner" by Otto Smith, a collector who was digging in Egypt at locations such as Saqqara and Luxor in mid 1920s, when there was a huge appetite for Egyptian artifacts in the West.
Smith took the objects home to Sweden with him, and after his death in 1959 his family gave the pieces to the Ostergotlands Museum, asking the museum to look after them, according to Hawass. The museum is located in Linkoping, 130 miles (210 kilometers) southwest of Stockholm, Sweden's capital.
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2 comments:
Hawass is very talkative as we all know. Why doesn't he make claims from the British Museum? Was the Rosetta Stone taken from Egypt by permission? Petty stuff like the things from Sweden are stored in tens of thousands in the basement of the Egyptian Museum so what is really the point?
The answer is surely to be found in the mind of Hawass himself, which seems to be self correcting and continues working machine incapable of making errors etc.
I would like to make a little correction to this comment. Hawass has asked for the Rosetta Stone, along with the bust of Nefertiti in Berlin and the Zodiac in the Louvre, amongst others. The objects in Sweden are not being display with due care, they are in a cafe and need to be put into proper cases.
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