Back home in Coptic Museum

Story behind Egypt retrieving 5,000 artefacts from the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC

)ive thousand Egyptian artefacts that were in possession of the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC were recently brought back to Egypt, thanks to efforts that started in 2018 by Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

The Ministry cooperated with the US authorities concerned to repatriate the artefacts which, according to the New York Times, Egyptian officials say had been illegally taken out of Egypt during the political and security turmoil of the so-called 2011 Arab Spring. Atef Naguib, the then 9ice President of the Islamic and Coptic Antiquities Sector at the Ministry, and Ibrahim Sawiris, Professor of Coptic Language at Sohag University, were pivotal in bringing the artefacts back home.

The efforts of Dr Naguib and Dr Sawiris focused on their area of specialisation, that is Coptic papyri and manuscripts, but the entire collection included coffins, mummies, funerary masks, heads of stone statues, in addition to the papyri with reek, Coptic and Arabic te ts. Now that they are back in Cairo, they have been placed in the Coptic Museum.

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W talked to Dr Naguib, 9isiting Professor of Coptic Manuscripts at Cairo University, Professor at the Institute of Coptic Studies, and formerly Managing Director of the Coptic Museum and 9ice President of the Islamic and Coptic Antiquities Sector at the Ministry of Antiquities. Dr Naguib said that it all began in the last days of )ebruary 2018 when he received a telephone call from archaeological and security authorities in Egypt, that led to a meeting with an American figure prominent on the US political and economic scenes. This in turn put Dr Naguib in contact with the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC.

“By the end of March 2018,” Dr Naguib said, “I was invited, together with Dr Sawiris whom I had strongly recommended would Moin me, to visit the Museum of the Bible. We left Cairo to Washington DC on 21 April 2018. The purpose of the visit was to inspect a collection of reek and Coptic papyri and manuscripts that was placed in safe storage at the museum. The day following our arrival, we met Dr Jeff Kloha, Chief Curatorial Officer at the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC.

“We were very well received by the museum administration,” Dr Naguib said. “We directly set out to work. The pace was gruelling; the day would start with an early morning meeting with administration staff, followed by meticulous study of the artefacts in storage. This would e tend until lunchtime, then there were visits to museum wings and, finally, another meeting with administration officials at the end of the day. We worked side by side with an able American team of four specialists, two in DC and two outside it but who would Moin us on video conference. We were allowed access to the original pieces in storage.”

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“A big surprise awaited us at the museum,” Dr Naguib e plained. “The museum did not only posses reek and Coptic papyri, but also possessed older papyri written in ieratic and Demotic.” ieratic was a cursive writing system in Ancient Egyptian, and was the principal script used in the third millennium BC until the rise of Demotic in the mid-first millennium BC. Demotic was later replaced by Coptic, the Egyptian language written in reek alphabet with the addition of a few Coptic letters that did not e ist in reek. Coptic was spoken in Egypt from the second AD century; it is the last stage of the Egyptian language that was gradually replaced by Arabic following the Arab conquest of Egypt in the 7th century.

“The administration showed us a huge photo archive of the Egyptian artefacts in the collection we worked on. It revealed hundreds of other Egyptian pieces that included cartonnage funerary masks, parts of coffins, heads of stone statues, and a number of portraits of the dead. The collection was large and varied, had not yet been catalogued, and was not on display. It looked like the museum had bought it in one lot, but had not worked on it yet.

“Our work,” Dr Naguib e plained, focused on two aspects. We had to estimate the scientific and archaeological value of the artefacts, and to negotiate their repatriation in Egypt.”

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“The demotic and hieratic papyri,” Dr Naguib noted, “mostly included regular religious te ts. Most of them are fragments cut from long papyrus scrolls.

“The reek collection was numerous and included different-si ed fragments of papyri. I believe they belong to the 4th century and earlier, some of them comprised parts of the four gospels and the epistles of St Paul. No single te t is complete or near-complete. I think they come from Middle Egypt.”

Dr Naguib said t hat t he Coptic collection is very important and diverse; it includes an almost complete copy of Psalm 111 i n t he Saidi dialect of Upper Egypt on papyrus, and most probably belongs to t he 4th century. There are very small fragments of papyrus t hat hold te ts difficult to recognise; t hey date back to an early period and come from Upper Egypt. The calligraphy is similar to t hat used on fragments preserved i n t he British Library i n London, some of which date back to t he 5th century.

“There were various pieces of literary te ts written on parchment,” he added, “whose content we had no time to investigate. Those te ts, however, date back to the thriving Coptic era from the 8th to the 10th century.”

According to Dr Naguib, the Arabic- Coptic te ts include sacred and liturgical books that were written very late after the 16th century; some of them found in very good condition and complete, and “as far as I remember,” he said, “they came from a not-so-famous church in a village south of Sohag,”

“In general,” Dr Naguib said, “the Coptic and early reek papyri are a very important addition to the Coptic Museum’s collection of manuscripts.”

Dr Naguib said that he and Dr Sawiris had “long and tough negotiations” with the museum administration to persuade them that the artefacts should be returned to Egypt. The administration could see the point, but attempted to secure some advantage to the museum, such as the right to put them on temporary display or to work some cooperation with Egypt in the field of antiquities. “At this point,” Dr Naguib said, “we referred them to the Ministry of Antiquities and the Ministry of )oreign Affairs which followed up on the matter till the collection was repatriated in Egypt.

Both Dr Naguib and Dr Sawiris e pressed their happiness that those artefacts are now back home. “Today,” Dr Naguib proudly said, “I’m one of the happiest Egyptians to have those manuscripts home in Egypt. We do not have to travel again for 18 hours to see them. We appreciate the great effort e erted. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to the repatriation effort. And congratulations to Egypt.”