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Egypt recovers 5,000 illegally-smuggled artefacts from US

The items mainly consisted of manuscripts but also included funeral masks, parts of coffins and the heads of stone statues.

Friday 29/01/2021 AW ARAB WEEKLY KSA

Visitors look at monuments during their visit to the Coptic museum in old Cairo. (AFP)

CAIRO - Egypt announced this week that it had retrieved some 5,000 ancient items from the United States, after years of negotiations to return what it said were fraudulently acquired items.

In a statement, Wednesday, the ministry of tourism and antiquities confirmed the “arrival at Cairo airport of a large number of ancient Egyptian items which had been in the possession of the Museum of the Bible in Washington.”

The items, totalling nearly 5,000, mainly consisted of manuscripts, but also included funeral masks, parts of coffins and the heads of stone statues, said Chaabane Abdeljawad, an official quoted in the statement.

The items, which left Egypt in a fraudulent manner, would be placed in the Coptic Museum in Cairo, the statement added.

It was not clear how the items left Egypt illegally or ended up at the museum in Washington, but Egyptian authorities negotiated their return over several years.

Many treasured items were damaged, destroyed or illegally whisked out of the country during the popular uprising against former President Hosni Mubarak in 2011.

Thousands of them have ended up on the international market, on internet sites or under the hammer at auctions.

The Embattled Museum of the Bible Has Returned Over 5,000 Ancient Artifacts to Egypt

By Helen Holmes • 01/29/21 THE OBSERVER

The Museum of the Bible in D.C. in 2017. SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images
On Thursday, the US Department of Homeland Security announced that over 5,000 ancient Egyptian artifacts had been returned to their country of origin after previously being held at the Museum of the Bible, a Washington, D.C. institution that’s been troubled by various dustups since it first opened in 2017. The ancient objects that were recently returned to Egypt include numerous papyrus documents, heads of statues, fragments of coffins and funeral masks, and the papyrus artifacts are of particular interest to scholars. This mass repatriation has been years in the making, and comes on the heels of evidence that the objects may have been obtained illegally.
During and in the aftermath of the 2011 turmoil surrounding the presidency of Hosni Mubarak, many Egyptian treasures were furtively shipped from the country and sold all over the world; the US government has been particularly stringent about tracking these items down. There was, however, a previous indication that the Museum of the Bible’s return of the items to Egypt would take place. In March of 2020, Steve Green, the Museum of the Bible’s Chairman of the Board, stated that he had begun collecting “biblical manuscripts and artifacts” for the museum in 2009, when he knew little about the practice. Green also admitted that he had obtained “insufficient reliable provenance information” for many of the items he’d collected, leading to the return process that’s now unfolding.

Plus, the Museum of the Bible hasn’t just been reprimanded for questionable acquisition practices: in March of 2020, an internal investigation at the museum found that all of the textual fragments in the museum’s “Dead Sea Scroll” collection were forgeries. Given that so much of the material within the museum appears to be either inauthentic or obtained using shady practices, it’s also interesting that the Museum of the Bible has also restricted scholars from accessing and studying its materials in the past; the museum has reserved that privilege for individuals selected by the Green Scholars Initiative. On the whole, the Museum of the Bible seems like a holy mess.

Museum of the Bible in Washington returns around 5,000 disputed biblical objects to Egypt

Institution has been faulted for a lack of oversight in determining what artefacts were legally exported and sold

NANCY KENNEY 28th January 2021 

The Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC

The Egyptian government and the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, say that around 5,000 artefacts acquired by the museum–manuscript fragments, funeral masks, parts of coffins and the heads of statues–have been returned to Egypt as a result of evidence that they were acquired illegally.

The handover comes after years of negotiations over the ancient objects, mostly papyri that is of major interest to scholars. Details have not been disclosed about how the items left Egypt, but many treasured objects are thought to have been illegally shipped from the country amid the political turmoil of the 2011 uprising against then-President Hosni Mubarak or other chaotic circumstances and to have later ended up on the international market. For years, such objects offered for sale online have been under scrutiny by the US federal government.

Steve Green, president of the US company Hobby Lobby and the board chairman and founder of the Museum of the Bible, who says he began acquiring biblical manuscripts and other artefacts in 2009, reports that the objects’ return involved extensive talks that began with Egyptian officials in late 2017. They appear to be destined for the Coptic Museum in Cairo and were transferred to the US government for shipment on 7 January, he adds.

Green announced last March that “several thousand items that likely originated from Iraq and Egypt, but for which there was insufficient reliable provenance information” in the museum's collection would be returned to their countries of origin.

Critics say that the Green family have played a prominent role in acquiring biblical objects that were not legally sold. They have also accused the Green family and the Museum of the Bible of limiting publication access to manuscript fragments unless they enlist in the institution’s Green Initiative, most of whose adherents are thought to be Christian and evangelical.

Previously the museum announced that thousands of its Middle Eastern antiquities had disputed provenances and that its collection of Dead Sea Scrolls was not authentic.

Green notes that the museum on 27 January also initiated the shipment of 8,106 disputed clay objects to the Iraq Museum in Baghdad under the supervision of the US government, in addition to 3,800 clay items that have been set aside for that institution.