The Eloquent Peasant » Blog Archive » Statues of Tutankhamun, Akhenaten, & Nefertiti stolen from the Egyptian Museum, Cairo

The Eloquent Peasant » Blog Archive » Statues of Tutankhamun, Akhenaten, & Nefertiti stolen from the Egyptian Museum, Cairo
Yes, yesterday Dr. Hawass listed on his blog (www.drhawass.com) several objects which, it turns out, are missing fro the Cairo museum, now that some of the dust has settled. And some of them are, if not the "crown jewels," pretty close. This blog here, "The Eloquent Peasant," is by an Egyptologist who tries to provide pictures of the objects based on Hawass' description of them. Most are easily identifiable, but some are a bit ambiguous (which "head of a princess"?). The Tut objects, of course, are quite familiar.
I'm going to editorialize here and say this has probably been a rather chaotic couple of weeks for the museum and its staff, so it's not entirely mysterious that it took them so long to ID the "missing" items. Like most people, their work schedules have probably been rather abnormal, due to the thousands of people, not to mention tanks and TV cameras, outside the very gates of the museum. (Shoot, we missed a few days due to snow here, and I'm completely off track. Can't imagine what a revolution would do to my concentration.) So I'm sure it took a while to get organized and figure out what was broken and what was truly gone. What a headache. Meanwhile, Hawass is probably pretty distressed on a personal level, since he's spent his whole career 1) working with (and/or constrained by) the Mubarak regime, and 2) trying to convince the international audience that Egypt is safe for antiquities. The question that is starting to nag me, though is this: why were there so few security guards on duty at the museum that night? Why were they so insistent on pinning the break-in of the museum proper (not gift shop) on this one lone criminal? It doesn't look good, at this point. I'm grateful that the rest of the Egyptian people seem to have banded together after this incident to protect their heritage, but there's still something fishy about what happened in that first incident.