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With quick search on eBay , you will find more than 1,000 artifacts for sale. Some of these artifacts are being listed by companies like Art Ancient LTD. Art Ancient LTD is a British company that works online in trading ancient artifacts from around the globe. It guarantees the legality of the artifacts it trades.
There are also items listed by ancient-artefacts.com that directs you to Antiquities.co.uk.
If I am not mistaken trading in Egyptian artifacts officially had been banned in Egypt since the second half of the 19th century.
I wrote before on how our ancient Egyptian heritage is being sold in international auctions. I will not deny that Egypt stopped some auctions in the past, but now it is getting ridiculous .. eBay for God sake !! What next we found our ancient Egyptian artifacts being sold on Craigslist !!
Already now the lazy ministry of antiquities began to act against some auction in Jerusalem showing some of the artifacts from different ancient eras.
Yes I know! at 20:00 this evening i send an email to the office of Mohamed Ibrahim, the minister of antiquities, with a link to the ebay site! I think u also read the Ahram article in which a staggering 126 stolen ancient Egyptian artifacts are now up for auction in 2 auction houses in Jerusalem!! sick to my bloody stomach from this!!!
ReplyDeleteAgain this is how it works with international law about antiquities: The line of demarcation is 1970 which means that you cannot sell or even buy ancient Egyptian antiquities on the international antiquities market without proper chain of custody and proper provenance
ReplyDeleteSo you can let us say buy or sell the famous Nefertiti masque (pre 1970) but who would want to sell it anyway but you cannot buy or sell the looted items from the Mallawi museum and not on display on the UNESCO web site (post 1970) without having to face the fact that the item will be taken away from you and returned to Egypt and you might have to pay substantial penalties and do not forget that it is not private collectors that would be interested in such item because they know very well that they cannot sell them after all you can steal the Mona Lisa but you cannot sell it. The only places now that buy such items are museums but again museums are very careful about not breaking international laws
You can also check on the UNESCO web site or even inform them if you wish and they take it very seriously and I know for a fact that UNESCO as well as Interpol check e-bay for any stolen antiquities and they go after the sellers
The real problem is that members of el-ikhwan that looted the Mallawi museum more likely than not had no clue that they will not be able to sell the items that were looted from the museum
I'm surprised that the professor is not aware of the above
Here is a summary of the international law on selling and buying antiquities
ReplyDeletehttp://archive.archaeology.org/online/features/schultz/intllaw.html
Zeinobia: are you also aware that there are many papyri fragments from the Greco-Roman period in both Egyptian/Coptic and Greek that are for sale on e-bay and I suspect that most of them come from Oxyrhynchus in today's el-Minyya and I also suspect that each one has proper chain of custody and provenance and they were acquired before 1970
ReplyDeleteThe real disaster here is the climate of Egypt is ideal for preserving papyri for ever (dry and hot with low humidity) but these papyri are not in Egypt which means that they can easily disintegrate and the tragedy of the copy of "The Gospel of Judas" extant in Egyptian/Coptic and was found in the same area and survived in Egypt for almost 1700 years it almost fell apart after being stored in a bank in New York and with very high humidity it almost fell apart
I happen to believe that all these treasures belong to Egypt and should be in Egypt (the Rosetta Stone and the Nefertiti masque included). However, it is about time that we teach children about the history of Egypt and make them proud of it and this would be the best way to preserve these treasures