One of the largest wooden pharaonic sarcophagi ever discovered, smuggled out of Egypt and on display until recently in an American museum, was returned to Cairo on Monday, Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shukri announced during a press conference. in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs broadcast on television.
“There are two types of sarcophagi: those of the royal remains and those of the remains of the nobles, this one belonged to a nobleman,” said Mostafa Waziri, director of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.
The 2.94-meter-long, 90-centimeter-wide sarcophagus, with its face painted green, dates to the late Pharaonic era nearly 2,700 years ago and was discovered in central Egypt.
It was “looted from an archaeological site in Egypt” and trafficked, arriving in the United States in 2008, according to a statement from the Manhattan prosecutor released in September. It was then sold there to a private collector, who lent it to museums. According to the prosecutor, its value is estimated at more than a million dollars.
relaunch tourism
In a decade, Cairo has managed to recover more than 29,000 ancient pieces stolen and later resold outside of Egypt. In addition to these returns, Egypt has also announced several important discoveries in recent months, mainly in the Saqqara necropolis south of Cairo. It unveiled more than 300 sarcophagi and 150 bronze statues in 2021 and 2022, many dating back more than 3,000 years.
Egypt is counting on these new discoveries to reactivate tourism, hard hit by Covid-19. This sector, which employs two million people and generates more than 10% of GDP, has been at half mast since the Arab Spring of 2011.
The Egyptian authorities have been promising for months the imminent opening of their “Grand Egyptian Museum”, near the Giza plateau, without having a date for its inauguration so far. Many predicted it in 2022, for the bicentennial of the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone by Frenchman Jean-François Champollion and the centenary of the discovery of the tomb of the child-pharaoh Tutankhamun.
Source: BFM TV
