Fragments come back home

Link to full article (Al Ahram Weekly)

The controversy over five 3,200-year-old ancient Egyptian tomb fragments removed from Egypt and put on display in the Louvre in Paris has finally come to a close, reports Nevine El-Aref

Following two weeks of sometimes difficult negotiations with the Louvre Museum in Paris over the fate of five ancient Egyptian tomb fragments dating back over 3,000 years, France agreed this week to hand the five painted fragments back to Egypt.

According to Egypt’s Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni, President Hosni Mubarak received a telephone call from French President Nicolas Sarkozy in which Sarkozy confirmed that the five fragments, stolen from a tomb in Luxor, would be returned to Egypt. Hosni added that the conversation had emphasised the deep cultural relations between Egypt and France and the friendship between the two presidents.

Hosni said that preparations were now underway between the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), the Louvre and Egypt’s embassy in France in order to ensure the safe return of the fragments next week.

The controversy over five 3,200-year-old ancient Egyptian tomb fragments removed from Egypt and put on display in the Louvre in Paris has finally come to a close, reports Nevine El-Aref

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Click to view caption

Parts of a painted scene discovered in 1980 at the tomb of a nobleman in Draa Abul-Nagaa necropolis on Luxor’s west bank

Following two weeks of sometimes difficult negotiations with the Louvre Museum in Paris over the fate of five ancient Egyptian tomb fragments dating back over 3,000 years, France agreed this week to hand the five painted fragments back to Egypt.

According to Egypt’s Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni, President Hosni Mubarak received a telephone call from French President Nicolas Sarkozy in which Sarkozy confirmed that the five fragments, stolen from a tomb in Luxor, would be returned to Egypt. Hosni added that the conversation had emphasised the deep cultural relations between Egypt and France and the friendship between the two presidents.

Hosni said that preparations were now underway between the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), the Louvre and Egypt’s embassy in France in order to ensure the safe return of the fragments next week.

 

Statue of Alexander Found in Alexandria

From State Information Service – Link to full article

A statue of Alexander the Great has been discovered in the Egyptian coastal city of Alexandria, Governor Adel Labib said on Wednesday 7/10/2009.

Archeologists have suggested the statue was of Alexander the Great and it was uncovered during excavations at el-Shalalat Park in the city, he said.

The discovery was made by a Greek mission working in the city.

 

Egypt Suspends Louvre Saqqara Excavations over Stolen Artefacts

Link to original article

Egypt has decided to suspend all archaeological cooperation with the Louvre, after the French museum refused to return fragments of a Theban Tomb. The news was confirmed today by Dr. Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt’s antiquities department. The artefacts were excavated in a tomb near Luxor, and according to Dr. Hawass were stolen by the French. This decision endangers planned conferences at the Louvre, as well as the French team’s current excavations at Saqqara, the ‘city of the dead’. A boycott of the Louvre’s Egyptological activities also ensures no archeological expeditions sponsored by the French museum could go ahead in Egypt.

The decision to cut all ties with the Louvre, as well as its archaeological teams, was taken two months ago after the Louvre had repeatedly ignored requests for the return of four reliefs. Dr. Hawass says the reliefs were illegally taken from a tomb in Luxor’s Valley of the Kings in the 1980s.

The disputed artefacts are 5 fragments from the wall of Theban Tomb 15 (TT15), the tomb of Tetiki on the West Bank at Dra Abu’l Naga.  The tomb was photographed in 1968 and shown intact.  In the 1990’s the tomb was – like so many – lost, and thought to be destroyed by modern building. A team from the Heidelberg University rediscovered this tomb during excavations at Dra Abu El-Naga in 2001, but the fragments were missing.

Update from ABC News -

…Subject to a decision by France’s national museum scientific committee, Mr Mitterrand said he was ready to order the frescoes be handed back.

Under the UNESCO convention of 1970, member countries agreed measures to prevent the illegal export of national treasures.

Mr Mitterrand [French Cultural Minister] said the five Egyptian pieces had been acquired in good faith by the Louvre and it was only in 2008, after the discovery of the tomb from which the murals apparently came, that serious doubts were raised about their provenance….

It would seem that all is set to end well, but does this set a precedent of “gunboat diplomacy” with regards to antiquities? And where is the line drawn? Dr. Zahi Hawass, has repeatedly said that it is only ilegally aquired anqituities that should be returned to Egypt, and so, one assumes, where methods like this would be used.

However, Dr. Hawass has repeatedly referred to a desire to see the Rosetta Stone and Bust of Nefertiti returned to Egypt, despite both peices being regarded as legally removed by the UNESCO Convention of 1983.  Will “gunboat diplomacy” be used to secure these peices? If it is, then the implications for both foreign archaeologial research in Egypt, and the status of all Ancient Egyptian collections in foreign museums could be far reaching.

Foreign museums will be loathed to surrender peices that they hold, in their and UNESCOs eyes, perfectly legally, and may have done so for the better part of 200 years. Yet, threatened with their ongoing work in Egypt being wiped out, they face a “Catch 22″ situation that may end up causing more harm than good.

In addition, the history of these artefacts is often entwined with the history of more than just Egypt. The Rosetta stone, for example, from the point of view of Ancient Egyptian history, is of relatively minor importance compared to it’s unique and hugely symbolic importance to modern Egyptology, which is essentially an international discipline centred as much around Paris, London, and any number of cities from Tokyo to Buenos Aires, as well as Cairo.

 

Hawwas: L.E. 700m spent annually on restoration, development of archaeological sites

From the Egypt State Information Service (FULL ARTICLE)

The head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities on Thursday 20/8/2009 unveiled restoration work under way at one of Egypt’s most famous synagogues, a project he denied was meant to assuage Jewish anger at the country’s culture minister.

The Egyptian government has rallied around Culture Minister Farouk Honsni, but Zahi Hawwas, the head of the Council said the decision to restore the Moses Ben Maimon Synagogue in Cairo had nothing to do with Hosni’s candidacy.

“I believe these rumors were started to harm Hosni’s bid to become the next director general of the UNESCO,” said Hawwas. “The Jewish monuments are Egyptian monuments … they are part of us and part of our culture”, he said

He added that the Ministry spends L.E. 700m annually on the restoration and development of archaeological sites, especially the ones which were damaged after the earthquake of October 1992.

This seems to be part of a trend I’ve noticed over the last 18 months or so, highlighting SCA work on post – Pharaonic sites, such as the Rosetta Museum (highlighting the Ottoman heritage in the city), the rebuild of the Abu Haggag mosque in Luxor and the long term Islamic Cairo projects, the last of which was first mooted back in the early 2000’s, but has only recently really begun to make an widely publicised impact.

It will be interesting to see how this develops, and whether this will mean a long term broadening of the SCA’s focus, and the implications of that for Pharaonic era monuments and artifacts.

 

Seti I Before Hathor (B7)

This week, from the birthplace of Egyptology, the zenith of Pharaonic art…

 

Egypt warns pharaohs’ tombs could disappear

AFP – Wednesday, August 19

LUXOR, Egypt (AFP) – - The ornate pharaonic tombs in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings are doomed to disappear within 150 to 500 years if they remain open to tourists, the head of antiquities has warned.

Zahi Hawass said humidity and fungus are eating into the walls of the royal tombs in the huge necropolis on the west bank of the Nile across from Luxor, which is swamped daily by several thousand tourists.

Poor ventilation and the breath of the hordes of visitors are causing damage to the carvings and painted decorations inside the tombs, he told journalists on a tour of the royal necropolis on Monday.

“The tombs (in the Valley of the Kings and nearby Valley of the Queens) which are open to visitors are facing severe damage to both colours and the engravings,” Hawass said.

“The levels of humidity and fungus are increasing because of the breath of visitors and this means that the tombs could disappear between 150 and 500 years.”

The Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens, where pharaonic royalty was mummified, is home to the tombs of legendary pharaohs such as the boy king Tutenkhamun and Queen Nefertiti.

Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities have taken a series of measures to protect the tombs, including setting up new ventilation systems, restricting the number of visitors and closing some tombs.

Hawass said the authorities have also decided “to close some tombs definitively to tourists and replace them by identical replicas,” including those of Tutenkhamun, Nefertiti and Seti I.

“A team of experts is currently using laser technology to examine these tombs in order to build the replicas… which would then open to visitors in a place near the Valley of the Kings,” Hawass said.

Link to full article

The idea of building exact replicas of the most visited tombs has long been suggested, though this is perhaps one of the most concrete statements I have come across so far that the SCA is seriously looking into giving this idea the go ahead.

 

Lintel of Ahmose I From Armant – British Museum Cat. EA 1708

First video in the aforementioned series, focusing on the lintel of Ahmose I from the temple of Montu at Armant, Upper Egypt. Now in the British Museum, displayed in the Egyptian Sculpture Gallery. Cat.  No.: EA 1708

PS: For more light-hearted amongst you, look carefully at the pyramid in the intro logo

 

Objects in the Egyptian Sculpture Gallery – British Museum

Recently my partner has been active on producing videos for Youtube, so I have decided to produce a series of videos, each focusing on an individual object from the Ancient Egyptian collection of the British Museum, starting with it’s sculpture gallery.  Hopefully this will help lift this blog out of it’s neglect, for which I truly am sorry!

 

Glorious Technicolor

I have finally got round to getting some of my photos on-line, thanks to Flickr. You can find them here. I’ve licensed them under a Creative Commons licence, so feel free to use them for any non-commercial work you wish, just credit me as the source.

As Flickr limit your upload to 100mb per month, I’ve only been able to get photos from Abydos and the Ramesseum on-line so far, but more will follow.

 

Revering The Ancestors : A Duty To The Past

I’ve written on here before concerning the exceedingly black image that most of contemporary society has of Ancient Egypt. A lot of these views are based on old stereotypes from Hollywood, the press hysteria over the “Mummy’s Curse” surrounding the tomb of Tutankhamun (a.k.a. “King Tut”) and views based on the myths and folktales of an entirely different culture (I.e. Exodus).

Archaeology and study of Egyptian literature and administrative documents long ago dispelled these black myths, but the public perception lingers. This may be because that much of work done in translation and excavation is published in journals and books that are largely inaccessible and undesirable to the general public because of it’s highly academic nature, and many of the specialist publications are also not available in more general bookstores. Meanwhile increasing amounts of information come from TV, whose study of Egyptian culture is limited to Hollywood blockbusters or embarrassingly bad “edutainment” documentaries that focus on the sensational.

However, what good is research if it’s huge advances in understanding utterly pass by the general population, whom still cling the notions of the sneering Pharaoh keeping his slaves in line with the lash?

I am interested in getting some views and comments on this, so please debate!