The pillage and plunder continue

Dina Ezzat

Al-Ahram Weekly 5-11 January 1995

Picture caption:

The picture to the right shows but part of a collection of pottery
shreds, shwepte figures, lithic artifacts, fossils, mummy beads and
amulets. Smuggled abroad by an expatriate, he boasted that he had
collected them quite easily from all over the country at poorly
protected sites in the Western Desert and Sinai. "There were no guards
at all!", he said. To the left, high-rise buildings can clearly be
seen at the edge of archaeological land. Such infringement is a great
temptation to robbers.

Main story:

News that statutes and scarabs have been stolen from the Temple of
Montu at Karnak is the latest proof that there is still a lucrative
trade in stealing the treasures of ancient Egypt.

This latest incident also shows that no one can be sure exactly how
common such thefts are„as this theft probably took place up to a
year ago the Higher Council of Antiquities (HCA) admits. "We are not
exactly sure when the theft took place, but it must have been over a
year or two ago," said Mohamed El-Saghir, director of the Upper Egypt
sites.

The HCA says that 55 artifacts were taken. The robbery was discovered
by coincidence when a chief inspector of monuments noticed that "some
wild grass was growing on the wall of the storage room of the
temple....Underneath the grass we found a hole in the wall through
which the thief got in to the storage room," Saghir explained. The
robbers selected the most expensive pieces from the collection which
dates back to the New Kingdom, and left 1000 pieces behind.

The storage room is one of six in Karnak Temple. It was last opened
over two years ago when a French excavation team put in some pieces.
"The storage rooms are never opened for regular check-ups. We only
open them either to put in or take out pieces," Saghir explained.

Initial police investigations suggest that the pillage is the result
of the inefficiency of the guards of the storage room. "But none of
the five guards are suspected of involvement in the robbery," Saghir
stressed.

The theft comes less than a year after a statue of the lion-headed
goddess Sekhmet was stolen from Karnak. Together they show that the
organised theft of ancient Egyptian artifacts is continuing today, and
only a small percentage is intercepted and recovered by the police.

Greed and official incompetency are helping the trade to flourish,
despite laws to protect the Egyptian heritage by making illicit
digging and smuggling a criminal offence. In fact, there is every
indication that the problem is becoming more serious.

Over the last two years, close to 500 cases of attempted smuggling
have been reported. Most involve artifacts worth millions of US
dollars. And for every case which is intercepted and the objects
recovered, an unknown quantity find their way out of the country and
into the hands of collectors. It is a question of supply and
demand--as long as people are prepared to pay large sums for genuine
objects, there are people willing to desecrate tombs and temples to
obtain them.

The Higher Council of Antiquities is concentrating on curbing the
crime, but they admit that one Egyptian smuggler this year shipped
over 200 Pharaonic, Coptic and Islamic monuments to Europe, then on to
North America.

Sixteen stone and wooden statues of an Old Kingdom official called
Ipy, stolen from a storage area in Saqqara last year, were recovered
and are now exhibited in Cairo Museum. "But some were in a very poor
condition, and it took us a month of serious work to restore the
broken parts of these statues, and fit new bases," said Sami Abaza,
the senior restorer at the museum.

Illegal digging also causes serious damage to the monuments, and
literally thousands of unexcavated areas are being targeted by
thieves. "When robbers find a tomb they dig indiscriminately," said
Ibrahim El- Nawawi, a member of an HCA committee in charge of
recovering antiquities. "Unskilled digging ruins the buried monuments,
and the unskilled handling and packaging of pieces for transportation
causes further damage," he said.

 But how does one go about protecting these sites? Back in 1991,
Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni responded to a question in parliament
about the thefts by saying: "If I cannot guarantee the protection of
my own house against robbery, how can I make sure that monuments,
spread across the whole of Egypt, will not be subjected to robbery ?"

Hosni's critics interpreted these remarks as a sign of reckless
inefficiency, and within the last three years little has been done to
ensure that museums, temples and storage areas are properly secured.
Nor has action been taken to put qualified guards who know the value
of what they are protecting in charge of the sites, which was the
declared intention 18 months ago.

"The poor calibre of security guards, and the quality of some storage
areas built in mud brick or wood is the real problem," said Nawawi.

"The guards are so poorly trained that they cannot face robbers who
are usually heavily armed, and some of the antiquities inspectors do
not know the inventory of the sites they are supposed to protect,"
added Ali Radwan, dean of the Faculty of Archaeology at Cairo Museum.
Most guards are not sufficiently armed to stop a robbery. One guard at
a temple in Kharga Oases confirmed this by saying: "All I have is a
simple pistol, and that can never stop anyone from doing anything."

More disturbingly, the involvement of officials in such robberies is a
well-guarded secret. "The public prosecution records show evidence of
the deviation of some officials," admitted Abdel-Halim Noureddin,
secretary-general of the Higher Council of Antiquities.

A finger has also been pointed at some foreign teams excavating in
Egypt. In theory only archaeologists affiliated to a recognised
institution can apply for a licence to excavate in Egypt, in return
for obligations like a commitment to restore monuments. But there are
reports of certain individuals "with no previous experience or
knowledge about archaeology who still find senior officials willing to
give them a licence to dig", claimed Radwan. "Sometimes they do not
even have to approach an official of the HCA. They just give LE30 or
LE40 to a guard and get away with what they want."

This complex problem has no simple solution. While a concerted effort
is made at one level to monitor excavations and control sites, it is
overlooked on another. While steps have been made to equip some
museums and storerooms with hi-tech controls, others remain
unprotected. In short, too many sites are there to tempt the
professional thief to whom fear of capture is a minor deterrent far
outweighed by the potential reward.