The story of the retrieval of the items began in 2006, when the family of a London-based Egyptologist, the late Ron Davey, gifted his collection to the Myers Museum at Eton College along with an assemblage of photographs, slides and other useful study documentation. This archive and collection was offered to Davey in about 1992 by his friend and fellow Egyptologist Peter Webb.
On examining the Webb-Davey antiquities collection when they arrived at Eton, Nicholas Reeves, curator of the Myers Museum, was concerned to discover that a high proportion had been demonstrably acquired in Egypt during the period between 1972 and 1988, in other words after the 1970 UNESCO convention that ended the export of antiquities from Egypt. "I searched very carefully through the Webb-Davey documentation but was unable to discover any proof that permission had ever been granted by Egypt for an official export of these item," Reeves said. He added that the full background of the remainder of the pieces in the Webb- Davey collection was unclear. "They had seemingly been purchased by Webb or Davey in good faith on the London antiquities market during and after this same period," he said.
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