Musée du Louvre to Return Stolen Artifacts to EgyptBy STAN PARCHINOctober 9, 2009Dr. Zahi Hawass emerges from a tomb with a lantern. Photograph courtesy of Zahi Hawass and University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Dr. Zahi Hawass, soon-to-retire Secretary General of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), severed ties with the Musée du Louvre on Wednesday, October 7, 2009. He rightfully asserted that the prestigious Parisian institution possessed five painted wall fragments, each removed illegally from a New Kingdom tomb in the 1980s. Two days after Hawass' announcement, a national commission convened by Frédéric Mitterand, France's embattled Minister of Culture, agreed unanimously (and predictably) to repatriate the artifacts. French museum officials and other experts quickly averted a diplomatic disaster. In the meantime, Dr. Hawass suspended French archaeologists' licenses to excavate at the ancient pharaonic necropolis (funerary complex) of Saqqara, located south of Cairo. He also canceled a lecture by Christiane Ziegler, the Musée du Louvre's esteemed former Curator of Egyptian Antiquities. Zahi Hawass, the indefatigable head of Egypt's SCA since 2002, is an outspoken advocate of looted artifacts' restitution to their homelands. According to the vociferous scholar, the Musée du Louvre purchased purloined painted reliefs that were illicitly extricated from the tomb of Tetaki, a cleric or noble who lived during Egypt's illustrious 18th Dynasty (ca. 1550-1295 B.C.). Four of the five fragmentary wall images from the sepulchre, located near the Valley of the Kings, were obtained by the French museum in 2000. The fifth was acquired at a public sale conducted by Paris' auspicious Drouot auction house in 2003. The French government, insisting the Musée du Louvre's officials acted in good faith when they acquired the Egyptian relics, denies any wrongdoing. Since May 2007, Dr. Hawass has asked four countries' governments to loan five monumental works from his homeland's glorious past for the projected 2012 opening of the Great Egyptian Museum (GEM) near Giza. The National Geographic Scholar-in-Residence's list includes: the Rosetta Stone (British Museum); the Bust of Nefertiti (Berlin's Neue Museum); the Zodiac Ceiling Painting from the Dendera Temple (Musée du Louvre); the Seated Statue of Hemiunu, nephew and vizier of Pharaoh Khufu, the builder of Giza's largest pyramid (Hildesheim's Roemer- und Pelizaeus-Museum); and the Bust of Anchhaf, architect of Pharaoh Khafre's pyramid (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).
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