Thursday, February 09, 2006

Letter re the St Louis Mask

Thanks very much to Geoffrey Tassie of the Egyptian Cultural Heritage Organization (ECHO http://www.e-c-h-o.org/index2.htm) for forwarding the following letter:
To whom it may concern
I hereby confirm that the mummy mask of Kai Nefer Nefer shown on the website of museum-security (
http://www.museum-security.org/) and allegedly purchased by the Saint Louis Museum has been excavated by Zakaria Goneim in the area of the unfinished step pyramid of Pharaoh Sekhemkhet at Saqqara in the years 1951-1955 (the illustration comes from Z.Goneim, Horus Sekhem-khet, Cairo 1957, plate 58). The finds of this excavation should be in storage in the so-called Sekhemkhet Magazine, located to the south of the pyramid of Unas at Saqqara. This storeroom, which also served as a repository for numerous finds from our own excavations (the Anglo-Dutch excavations at Saqqara, organized by the Egypt Exploration Society in London and the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden), has been entered by force and plundered at the end of the '80s. It is unknown to me whether the Egyptian authorities have communicated this theft at the time. I myself have seen an object from the said storeroom circulating on the Dutch art market in the '90s. I would not be surprised if various institutions or private collectors have purchased objects from this storeroom in that period. In the meantime the storeroom has been completely (?) emptied of objects and partly dismantled by the local authorities; the remaining objects have been put together in a newly built storage facility at the valley edge at Saqqara.

Dr. Maarten J. Raven
Curator, Egyptian department
Joint field director, Dutch excavations at Saqqara
Rijksmuseum van Oudheden
(National Museum of Antiquities)

No comments: