The St Louis Mask issue is still alive and kicking

River Front Times (Malcolm Gay)

Some of you may remember that a very beautiful funerary mask, currently located in the St Louis Art Museum, has been the topic of repatriation disputes in the past. I have covered this in a number of posts (click the link for all the available references), and Geoffrey Tassie has provided an articulate summary of some of the issues online (posted February 2006). I thought that this impasse had slipped off the list of Egyptian repatriation grievances, but apparently the issue has been revived by Hawass in an interview.

During a discussion of the recently identified mummy of queen Hatshepsut on the July 9 edition of the Charlie Rose Show, Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, again called out the Saint Louis Art Museum for its refusal to return the Ka-Nefer-Nefer mask to Egypt. Hawass contends that the ornate funereal mask, which depicts a woman of the Nineteenth Dynasty, was illegally removed from Egypt after its discovery in 1952. The history of the mask was the subject of "Out of Egypt," a Riverfront Times feature story published early last year. Toward the end of the Rose interview, Hawass stated that although he has
overseen the repatriation of roughly five thousand Egyptian artifacts over the past five years, one prize has eluded him: "We still have one mask in [the] Saint Louis Museum of Art [that was] stolen from Egypt," said Hawass. "The museum does not want to return it."

There is a video recording of the interview on the above page, which contains the relevant pronouncement and also contains an extract from the programme Egypt's Lost Queen.