Fitting home for Egypt’s heritage
An exhibition of 150 artifacts from the tomb of Tutankhamun will arrive in London in November on the third stop in a 10-city tour that has already broken box office records in Los Angeles and Paris.
The boy king has captivated Western imagination since his tomb was discovered in 1922, but, as Egypt’s Ministry for Antiquities has made clear, this is a farewell tour. Sixty of the objects have never left Egypt before and none ever will again. After the tour ends in 2021, all 5,400 of the artefacts entombed with Tutankhamun more than 3,300 years ago will be reunited for the first time since they were discovered in the Valley of the Kings by the British archaeologist Howard Carter. From then on, and rightly so, the only place to see them will be in Egypt, at the breathtaking Grand Egyptian Museum, which opens next year. Egypt has fought a long and only partly successful battle for the return of objects taken under terms created by the very imperialists who stripped the country’s heritage for the benefit of museums in America and Europe – men who included Howard Carter and his patron, Lord Carnarvon.
By the time the pair stumbled on Tutankhamun, both had already enriched themselves at Egypt’s expense. In the words of a 1978 book that exposed Carter’s somewhat sordid back-story, the former chief inspector of the Egyptian Antiquities Service was also “a highly successful ‘gentleman dealer’ in Egyptian antiquities” working on commission for collectors such as Carnarvon.
Egypt’s battle to wrest back control of its heritage piece by piece continues to this day. In 1988 there was an attempt to recover 300 pieces from Carnarvon’s estate that his descendants had “rediscovered” in storage at Highclere Castle, the ancestral home in England of the Carnarvon dynasty and now familiar to millions of TV viewers around the world as the fictional Downton Abbey.
In July, the Egyptian government announced it was to sue Christie’s, the international auction house, over the $6 million sale of a 3,000-year-old quarzite head of Tutankhamun, whose provenance could be traced back only as far as the 1970s, when Egypt says it was stolen from Karnak. Christie’s insists it “carried out extensive due diligence verifying the provenance and legal title.”
In 2017, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York spent $4 million on a 2,000-yearold golden sarcophagus, but in September this year it was forced to repatriate it after it emerged that it had been looted during the Egyptian revolution.
The Grand Egyptian Museum is better qualified than any in the world to house the unrivalled treasures of Egypt’s past. At a time when governments everywhere are recognizing and apologizing for the sins of the past, from slavery to colonialism, the time has surely come for the museums of the world, whose collections are built on the loot of imperialist freebooters, to relinquish the treasures to which they have no moral claim.