I’m not going to take the time now to make my case for why I don’t think artifacts like the Rosetta Stone and the Bust of Nefertiti should be returned to Egypt. There are many reasons, but here’s one, revealed in this article in today’s NY Times: the deplorable state of the Egyptian Museum. The article focuses on the objects stored in the basement, but I daresay that the situation is not much better on the display floors. Here’s one quote:
Step through a small, Hobbit-sized door, down a steep flight of stairs and through a locked gate. The basement is a maze of arched passageways and bare light bulbs hanging from decaying wires. It is packed with wooden crates, hundreds of them, sometimes piled floor to ceiling.
Cobwebs cling to ancient pottery and tablets engraved with hieroglyphics. Six hundred coffins and 170 mummies have been found so far. No one knows what may have been stolen over the years. Last year, officials reported that 38 golden bracelets from Roman times had vanished from the basement, apparently six years earlier.
“It is an accumulation of 100 years of neglect,” said Dr. Ali Radwan, a professor of Egyptology at Cairo University who took a recent tour of the basement. “It is not appropriate for a country like Egypt to have such miserable storage for its history.”
And this:
Last year, Dr. Hawass decided that a more precise accounting was needed, so he sent in a team of curators to do a complete inventory. It was a slow process in very difficult working conditions. There is little ventilation, poor lighting and dust, lots and lots of dust. So far 22,000 items have been inventoried – about 20 percent of what is actually in the basement, said Sabah Abdel Razek, the curator overseeing the job.
The team never knows what it will find when a crate is cracked open. In one, Ms. Abdel Razek said, the team discovered parts of the palace of the Pharaoh Merenptah, which dates to the 19th Dynasty (1307 B.C. to 1196 B.C.) and was unearthed by a team from the University of Pennsylvania around 1915. Part of the palace was taken back to Philadelphia, where it remains on display at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, but the museum had no idea that other pieces of the palace were crated in the basement, she said.
No one should be asking museums to return artifacts when Egypt cannot manage what it has.
(HT: Egyptology News)
Touring the Egyptian Museum was as frustrating as it was incredible (and it was incredible). I didn’t see the basement, of course, but you get weary of spending hours looking at things that you know are historically (and maybe biblically) monumental but are unidentifiable. You try to fight the weariness because you know that you’ll probably only be there once in your life, but it seems to hover over you. Because in a museum, knowledge is power.
I think I remember hearing something (when I was in Egypt) about the Egyptian Museum being moved to near the Giza Pyramids and being completely redone. Do you know anything about that? They need a Yad-VaShem-quality museum to do justice to what they have.
Gunner – yes, they have plans to build a new museum near the pyramids. How long it will take I don’t know, but I wouldn’t expect it anytime soon.
I still haven’t been to the new Yad VaShem.
Amen to looking at stuff in the Egyptian Museum. Even with an official “Todd Bolen guide to Egpyt” ( which is of course a necessary for all Egpyt students) it is hard to find your way around that place.