Egyptologists at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art have identified a trove of small figurines and jewelry that was illegally taken from King Tutankhamun's treasure packed tomb.
The artifacts, 19 small-scale objects which include a lapis-lazuli sphinx that might have adorned a bracelet worn by King Tut, entered the Met’s Egyptian collection over the period of the 1920s to 1940s.
After an in-depth investigation into the history of the relics, the Met’s experts concluded that “without doubt” the objects “originated in Tutankhamun's tomb.”
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“Because of precise legislation relating to that excavation, these objects were never meant to have left Egypt, and therefore should rightfully belong to the Government of Egypt,” Thomas P. Campbell, director of the Met, said in a statement.
Before they are reunited with the other treasures of the boy king, who reigned about 1336-1327 B.C., the objects will be on display until January as part of the Tutankhamen exhibition in Times Square.
They will then be exhibited at the Met for a further six months. Finally, they will return to Egypt, to be first shown at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and then permanently at the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza when it opens in 2012.
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Fifteen of the 19 pieces are "bits and samples," Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) said in a statement. The remaining four, including a tiny bronze figurine of a dog with a golden collar, are "of more significant art-historical interest," the statement said.
The attribution to King Tut’s tomb appears to confirm speculations that several objects were stolen, ending up in foreign collections.
The claim was first made in 1978 by the late Thomas Hoving, a former director of the Met, in his best-selling book, “Tutankhamun: The Untold Story.”
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Based on information found in files of the Met, the book related that Howard Carter, who discovered King Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922 in the Valley of the Kings, stole objects from the site and had a secret arrangement to sell them to the Met.
Carter reported that on Nov. 26, 1922, he and three others, including Lord Carnarvon, the man who funded the discovery of the tomb, looked into the tomb through a hole, saw “wonderful things,” then re-closed the hole to wait for the arrival of Egyptian authorities, as required by law.
According to Hoving, things went in a rather different way. In "one of the best kept secrets in the history of Egyptology,” as Hoving wrote, the story goes that Carter and Carnavon did not wait for the Egyptian authorities. Instead they secretly searched the tomb’s inner chambers, pocketed several objects, then resealed the hole.
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At that time, the Egyptian government allowed excavators to keep a substantial portion of the finds from digs undertaken and financed by them.
But in the case of Tutankamun's tomb, no such partition took place.
Theories abound that fine objects dating to the time of Tutankhamun and residing in various collections outside Egypt actually originated from the boy king’s tomb.
Such conjectures intensified after the death of Howard Carter in 1939, when a number of artifacts were found to be part of his estate.
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“When the Metropolitan Museum acquired some of these objects, however, the whole group had been subjected to careful scrutiny by experts and representatives of the Egyptian government; and subsequent research has found no evidence of such a provenance in the overwhelming majority of cases,” the SCA said.
Likewise, evidence indicates that objects that entered the Met from the private collection of Lord Carnarvon in 1926 do not belong to King Tut’s tomb, the Egyptian authorities stated.
The majority of the 19 objects repatriated by the Met entered the museum collection because they were found in 1939 among the contents of Carter’s house at Luxor.
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All of the contents of that house were bequeathed by Carter to the Metropolitan Museum.
According to Zahi Hawass, chief of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, the Met has long been a strong partner in Egypt’s efforts to repatriate illegally exported antiquities.
“Through their research, they have provided us with information that has helped to recover a number of important objects,” Hawass said.
Photos: From King Tut's collection: a tiny bronze figurine of a dog with a golden collar, and a lapis-lazuli sphinx that might have adorned a bracelet worn by the boy king. Courtesy of Metropolitian Museum of Art
Tags: Ancient Civilizations, Ancient Egypt, Archaeology, Mummies, Near East and Middle East Archaeology
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