Looting at Met’s Excavations in Dahshur

Talking Pyramids (Vincent Brown)

Thomas Campbell, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art speaks of how the looting has effected their excavation site in Dahshur:

JEFFREY BROWN: Tell us about the site. What kind of work goes on there? And the attacks, what do you know about the attacks at this point?

THOMAS CAMPBELL: It’s a middle kingdom pyramid, a brick pyramid, now in a state of partial collapse. We’ve been excavating there for the last couple of decades, recreating, rediscovering the causeway that led down to the Nile, painstakingly recovering fragments of stones that’s chipped off the blocks lining the causeway and the other buildings. These fragments, they belong to the Egyptian government; they don’t belong to us. It’s this site that we fund really for scholarly purposes. And many of these fragments are stored on site, and so far as we understand the warehouse has been broken into at least on a couple of occasions.