Saturday, April 24, 2010

Hawass chides museums over antiquities

Indiana Gazette (Ula Ilnytzky)

Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, said Wednesday he had a wish list of objects he wants returned. He singled out several museums, including the St. Louis Art Museum, which he said has a 3,200-year-old mummy mask that was stolen before the museum acquired it.

``We're going to fight to get these unique artifacts back,'' Hawass said at the New York preview of the ``Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs,'' an exhibition that has traveled to five other U.S. cities and London.

Last week, he said, he turned over to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security ``all the evidence that I have to prove that this mask was stolen, and we have to bring it back.''

On Wednesday, St. Louis Art Museum spokeswoman Jennifer Stoffel, said the institution ``had correspondence with Hawass in 2006 and 2007 and has not heard anything on the matter since.''

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

In this instance I am right behind Zahi, and the prominence that the St Louis Museum gives is not worth the paper it is printed on. They also tried some dirty tricks by blackening the name of the excavator Gonniem (accusing him of selling the mask), who was exonerated of any wrong doings in a missing alabaster vessel when his good friend Laurier found it in the storerooms of the Cairo Museum, but too late to stop him committing suicide as he was a very religious man and could not live with the shame of being wrongly accused.

Tass