Stealing from history

In the main hall at Cairo’s National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation is one of the country’s most prized possessions, recently returned from a life in exile: the golden coffin of priest Nedjemankh.

The 2,100-year-old coffin is thought to have been illegally excavated and stolen from Egypt’s Minya region in the aftermath of the 2011 revolution that toppled president Hosni Mubarak.

It was smuggled out of the country to France and eventually sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2017 for nearly $4 million.

The coffin was brought to the world’s attention again after American media personality Kim Kardashian posed with it for a photograph during the 2018 Met Gala.

An investigation was launched by the US Justice Department and Egyptian authorities, who found that the provenance document presented to the Met had been forged and instead claimed the sarcophagus left Egypt legally in 1971.

In 2019 it was brought home.

The return of the gilded coffin is perhaps the most high-profile case of an antiquity repatriated to Egypt, but there are many more and officials say it is only the tip of the iceberg.

“Over decades and decades, thousands and thousands of artefacts were looted and left Egypt in an illegal way,” says Minister of Tourism and Antiquities Khaled El Enany. “We are working with our partners from abroad to repatriate these objects.”

Since 2011, Egypt has recovered 29,300 illegally smuggled artefacts, including nearly 5,300 last year alone, according to Shaaban Abdelgawad, director of the ministry’s antiquities repatriation department. Between 2002 – when the department was formed – and 2011, about 6,000 artefacts were repatriated.

“We can’t know how many antiquities have been taken out of Egypt. One site can produce one statue or it can produce 1,000,” Mr Abdelgawad tells The National. “It’s like asking a fisherman how much he is going to catch today.”

The country has stepped up its efforts to return stolen artefacts in recent years, amid preparations to open the huge Grand Egyptian Museum and increasing global awareness of antiquities trafficking.

Last month, an Egyptian criminal court sentenced former parliamentarian Alaa Hassanein to 10 years in prison and billionaire Hassan Rateb to five years for their involvement in a high-profile antiquities smuggling operation.

In the Middle East, the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the Arab uprisings, which began in December 2010, led to the looting of museums and archaeological sites and a subsequent increase in the illicit trade in antiquities.

Figures estimating the annual cost of the illegal antiquities trade vary widely, from hundreds of millions of dollars to billions.

In New York alone, since the Manhattan District Attorney’s office formed a dedicated Antiquities Trafficking Unit in 2017, several thousand stolen antiquities valued at more than $200m have been recovered, according to the non-profit Washington DC group The Antiquities Coalition.

The trade of Egyptian antiquities was legal “like any other trade” until a 1983 law stopped artefacts from leaving the country – with the exception of temporary exhibitions, Mr Abdelgawad says.

In the decades that followed, famed Egyptologist and archaeologist Zahi Hawass, 74, made it his personal mission to return stolen artefacts to Egypt. In 2002, on his appointment as secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, he created the antiquities repatriation department.

“I was severe. I wrote a letter to every museum and I said if any museum will buy any stolen artefact, I will stop this museum from working – and I did stop many people,” Mr Hawass, who is a controversial figure in Egypt for having worked under the toppled president Hosni Mubarak as the antiquities head until 2011, tells The National.

In one such case in 2009, Egypt suspended the Louvre’s excavation in Saqqara and cancelled a lecture by a former curator from the museum over disputed artefacts. The Paris museum then returned the painted wall fragments that had been allegedly stolen from a 3,200-year-old tomb near Luxor in the 1980s.

Most of the artefacts smuggled out of Egypt were found through illegal digging at archaeological sites – an issue that has plagued the country for more than 200 years, Mr Abdelgawad says.

“Modern Egypt is built on Old Egypt, so it’s very easy for someone to dig under their houses and find antiquities,” he says. “We still suffer from this. And this is the majority of the antiquities that are taken out of Egypt.”

The 2011 revolution took illegal digging and mass looting to an unprecedented level. In one instance, during protests on January 28, a human chain formed to protect the Egyptian Museum from looters but, despite their best efforts, criminals broke through the skylight roof and stole 54 artefacts. Of these, 35 have been returned, including a statue of Pharaoh Akhenaten, while 19 are still missing, says museum general director Sabah Saddik.

The Antiquities Coalition was formed during that time to combat global illicit trade in ancient art and artefacts. The group commissioned satellite imagery to show progression of the looting at some key sites in Egypt.

“It was really devastating,” says Deborah Lehr, chairperson and founder of The Antiquities Coalition. “What we could see in Saqqara, pre-revolution, post-revolution … it looked like Swiss cheese – even bulldozers had gone in.”

The coalition pushed for an agreement to be signed between the US and Egypt in 2016 to protect Egyptian cultural artefacts from trafficking. The agreement was renewed for another five years in December.

“When you have the [agreement], it switches the burden of proof. Egypt doesn’t have to prove that the items were looted. The importer has to prove that it’s legitimate,” Ms Lehr says.

The 1970 Unesco Convention against the illicit trafficking of cultural property stipulates that “the requesting state has to provide all the evidence to support its claim”. As a result, bilateral agreements are often necessary to encourage co-operation.

Mr Abdelgawad says Egypt has signed several bilateral agreements over the past decade that have helped to recover antiquities, including with Chile, Cyprus, Ecuador, Guatemala, Greece, Italy, Jordan, Lebanon, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Spain and Switzerland.

Egypt’s repatriation department's work to return antiquities falls predominantly into two categories: short-term and long-term.

Short-term missions include tracking and returning stolen artefacts that are advertised for sale online, while their long-term efforts include working to repatriate items from museums abroad.

Mr Abdelgawad says retrieving items placed on black-market auctions and internet sales is a "race against time, because if I’m not fast enough, it may go to private collections and it will be difficult to get to after that".

Katie Paul, co-director of the Antiquities Trafficking and Heritage Anthropology Research Project, a study into transnational trafficking and crime financing by anthropologists and heritage experts in the US, says the growth of social media has exacerbated the issue.

“Now you can simply get on a Facebook group called ‘pharaonic antiquities on sale’ in Arabic and offer it to thousands of people all at once,” she says.

An added challenge is the lack of transparency in auction houses.

“It’s the world’s largest unregulated market,” Ms Lehr says. “It’s the only market where you can do multimillion-dollar transactions and not be required to disclose the buyer and seller.”

Sotheby's and Christie's, two of the world's largest auction houses, have each previously faced investigations and criticism for a lack of transparency and vigilance around provenance – each having sold items later found to be illegally sourced.

The former said it had made changes to ensure works of art and antiquities are carefully examined and their paperwork rigorously checked before they can be sold.

"The art market has undergone significant improvement in its approach to ethical standards and due diligence obligations," Sotheby's UK office said in a statement for The National.

"Sotheby's ... recognises, as it has done for many years, the significant responsibility to conduct its business in a responsible and ethical manner and in particular with regard to deterring the illicit trade in cultural property."

The company said it had established a global compliance department that focuses on due diligence and cultural heritage matters and had trained its staff to ensure auctioned items met international regulations.

"Sotheby’s policy and practice is to closely examine the sources of the art works we sell and to be extremely sensitive to any cultural heritage issues presented by property we handle."

But the problem, really, starts at home, with items being smuggled out of Egypt.

To prevent this, Mr Hawass placed specialised antiquities department personnel at ports and airports. The country also strengthened punishments in 2018 from three to five years in prison to 25 years and a minimum five million Egyptian pounds ($317,432) fine.

In many cases, repatriation efforts can take years. Negotiations to return 5,000 artefacts from the Museum of the Bible in Washington began in 2016 only to have the items finally returned in January 2021. Egypt recovered 36 artefacts from Madrid in December that had been smuggled to Spain in 2014.

“Any piece that was taken out of Egypt illegally, it will come back. That is our main target,” Mr Abdelgawad says. “If it is in museums or private collections or being sold online, it will come back, sooner or later.”

While Egypt works to repatriate its stolen artefacts, Yemen is frantically trying to staunch the haemorrhaging of cultural property from the country.

For almost eight years, war has devastated the country's people and cultural sites. Thousands have been killed and millions displaced in what the UN has described as the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

Steeped in ancient history, Yemen's coastline has long been a crossroads of cultures with large settlements found in the northern mountains dating back as early as 5,000 BCE. Archaeology researcher Lamya Khalidi described Yemen's history as "the fingerprint of hundreds of thousands of years of human history and resilience", from the first waves of migration out of Africa across Bab Al Mandab strait 60,000 years ago, to the subsequent rise and fall of kingdoms and empires that brought with them different religions, cultures and architecture.

For years, creations from this rich history have been under threat of destruction and looting with Yemen's government accusing Houthi rebels of smuggling stolen antiquities out of the country to sell on the black market to fund the war.

Museums have also been targeted and the ancient artefacts, manuscripts and paintings they house are among the thousands of priceless objects that have either been destroyed or stolen.

Khaled Salem, spokesman for Yemen's ministry of culture, tells The National the government was working with the international community to repatriate looted antiquities.

“We have a good number of antiquities that were found and are under the authority of the French, Swiss, German, Omani and Egyptian governments' control,” he says.

Yemen’s ambassadors to those countries are working with their respective foreign ministries to launch investigations and ensure the safe return of the artefacts, he says.

While there is no official figure for the number of antiquities stolen to date, authorities with Unesco have taken inventory at several of Yemen's museums. In 2021, Yemeni officials accused Houthi rebels of smuggling and looting more than 14,000 rare manuscripts and hundreds of artefacts.

Because of its very nature, illicit trafficking of cultural property is very difficult to quantify and monitor, Unesco tells The National in a statement.

“This is particularly true for countries suffering from armed conflict, where illegal excavations and looting are a generally known risk and the possibility of patrolling sites and securing museums is diminished,” it reads.

“It is also known that the emergence of illicit online sales on social networks and more recently the Covid-19 pandemic, have posed new challenges to the protection of cultural property,” Unesco says.

Marwan Damaj, Yemen’s minister of culture from 2016 to 2020, pushed for the return of many looted items and has called for international assistance against the Houthis' “exhumation and destruction” of Yemen’s history.

"During 2017, 2018 and 2019, Houthi rebels increased their smuggling and sales of looted items from museums and cultural sites across the country,” Mr Damaj tells The National.

Among the most valuable artefacts that can be found in Yemen are its manuscripts. More than 50,000 ancient manuscripts make up the country's written heritage, providing an insight into its cultural and Islamic intellectual history. Very few have been studied and most are now at risk.

In Taez, a city in the south-western highlands of Yemen and the country's former capital, a combination of natural weathering and heavy shelling left the historic National Museum and its contents in ruins. Nearly 70 per cent of the 55-year-old museum’s collection was lost or stolen during the conflict, Reuters reported.

The museum's once carefully curated artefacts, including manuscripts, an ornate turban belonging to an ancient king and Qurans dating back more than 1,000 years, were incinerated, leaving behind charred walls, collapsed shelves and shattered glass. Acacia trees have also taken root near by and contributed to the weathering and collapse of the museum's walls.

Museum officials say they were able to recover some of the precious content from local markets, while volunteers have also returned pieces, but much is probably lost for ever.

The museum reopened in 2020 after four years of closure and restoration, made possible only through a private donation and £100,000 ($123,931) grant from the British Council’s Cultural Protection Fund.

One of the most prominent government libraries in the country to contain invaluable manuscripts is the House of Manuscripts in Yemen's capital, Sanaa.

Established in 1980, the library houses the Sanaa manuscript – one of the oldest Quranic manuscripts in existence, dating back to the end of the seventh century.

But its existence – along with the other manuscripts in the library – were threatened in 2014, when the Houthis ousted the government and took over the library.

“This is extremely worrying because we don’t know what the conditions are for these scripts and where they are,” Mr Damaj says.

"Since the Houthi takeover, we have not had access to the library, [which] is located in Sanaa’s university. It has thousands of historic manuscripts that include Islamic ones considered to be the oldest in the history of the religion."

During the former minister of culture's time in office, he contacted Unesco for help and any information on the condition of the manuscripts, but the UN body was unable to help.

Yemen has lost “many important things following the takeover of the Houthis”, Mr Damaj says.

Baraqish, one of Yemen’s oldest cities, in the north-west of the country, was used as a military site by Houthi rebels and was subsequently destroyed in 2015 during the war. Mr Damaj says the site was also used as a burial site by Houthis. The site has since been recaptured by Yemen's army.

The official says he was still trying to follow up with international groups on how best to protect and preserve cultural sites, museums and artefacts that are at risk of the militias.

“What the Houthis have done to our history is unacceptable and there are no words to describe their inhuman actions towards Yemen,” Mr Damaj says.

Mustafa Khalid flips through a stack of papers in his hands. Each one lists several legal cases Iraq's government has filed at courts around the world in an effort to retrieve artefacts that were illegally dug up and smuggled out of the war-ravaged country.

“Our artefacts that were looted from our archaeological sites are scattered around the world,” Mr Khalid, an employee at the Heritage and Antiquities Board’s Repatriation Department, tells The National.

Thousands of these precious antiquities have turned up at auction houses or museums in countries including the UK, Germany, Spain and the US, as well as many more.

To date, Iraq has filed more than 320 cases in an attempt to repatriate them.

“It’s a hard process to chase these items down and the legal battle can take years,” Mr Khalid says. “But we are making progress."

Backed by the international community, the government's efforts bore fruit last year with the US returning more than 17,000 looted ancient artefacts, including a 3,500-year-old clay tablet that bears a portion of the Epic of Gilgamesh, to Iraq. Some of the artefacts were seized from Oklahoma arts and crafts company Hobby Lobby. And, last month, about 100 returned paintings and sculptures – pillaged during the 2003 US invasion – were displayed at an exhibition in Baghdad.

The successes bring hope to a nation that has seen its cultural heritage and museums ravaged as a result of decades of war, lack of security, mismanagement and corruption.

Since the 2003 war, which Iraqis regard as the worst period of plundering, authorities have repatriated more than 150,000 artefacts, the board’s spokesman Hakim Al Shimmari tells The National.

The artefacts were seized abroad as well as in Iraq, he says.

The country is an easy target, it teems with archaeological sites and antiquities but also suffers from decades of political unrest. As the birthplace of the world’s oldest recorded civilisations, modern Iraq has more than 7,000 years of Mesopotamian history, including the ancient Babylonians, Sumerians, Akkadians and Assyrians.

Although the pillaging of Iraqi archaeological sites is not a new phenomenon, looting and smuggling intensified after the 1991 Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein’s power diminished significantly in remote and rural areas.

But the major blow came after the fall of Saddam’s regime in 2003. Shortly after the US troops entered Baghdad, looters burst into the Iraqi National Museum, making off with about 15,000 priceless artefacts and leaving the floor littered with shattered pottery.

While security forces focused on fighting the insurgency that arose after 2003, thousands of archaeological sites were left vulnerable to looting.

During that period, some of the major sites – such as the ancient cities of Babylon and Ur – were used by the US-led troops as military bases.

In mid-2014, thousands of cultural and archaeological sites fell into the hands of ISIS during their onslaught in northern and western Iraq.

During the four years ISIS controlled parts of Iraq, the militant group destroyed artefacts they considered idolatrous and sold others on the black market to finance their so-called caliphate.

In recent years, Iraq has stepped up efforts to return stolen cultural property. It has struck agreements with different countries and, in 2015, the UN Security Council adopted a resolution prohibiting the trade in cultural property from Iraq and Syria and called on member states to co-operate to end it.

In Iraq’s quest to return stolen artefacts, Mr Khalid plays a major role.

He spends hours each day surfing the internet in search of Iraqi antiquities being sold at auctions and on social media or displayed at museums.

When he finds them, he sends their details to a technical committee that searches for provenance records or any evidence that ties the object to Iraq.

“If the committee confirms that they belong to Iraq we start the process of communicating [with] the Foreign Ministry and other concerned ministries to start chasing them through our embassies," Mr Khalid says.

“Sometimes we receive tips from people abroad or foreign governments through our embassies on suspected items."

The greater challenge is finding antiquities that are being held by private collectors, he says.

Last year, US hedge fund tycoon Michael Steinhardt was forced to surrender $70 million of stolen antiquities stolen from Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey and other countries, many of which passed through the hands of antique traffickers.

Hundreds of other items were also returned to Iraq from other countries, including 337 pieces held by the private Nabu Museum in Lebanon.

The majority of these artefacts came from illicit digging, says Dr Laith Majid Hussein, director of the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage.

To date, Iraq has managed to recover just one third of the National Museum collection.

To prevent the illegal trade of antiquities, Iraq is working on preventing theft at source.

Increased security personnel have been employed and fencing is being built around archaeological sites. While pillaging has decreased in recent years, it remains an issue, Dr Hussein says.

“There are more than 20,000 archaeological sites in Iraq and it is impossible to assign guards to each site,” he says. “In that case you need an army of guards."

A lack of resources and modern technology are also part of the challenge, says Maj Gen Hadi Hassan, director of the Ministry of Interior's Antiquities and Heritage Protection Department.

The department, established in late 2008, has 1,600 employees, including administrative staff who work with about 3,300 civilian guards at major sites, Maj Gen Hassan says.

“We are mainly deployed at the major ancient cities that attract tourists and museums.

“We don’t have the capability to cover all the sites and therefore some attempts could take place in remote areas,” he says.

He is pushing for the adoption of a new strategy to protect the sites using drones or cameras to offset the lack of resources.

For the first time, security cameras have been installed around the 2,000-year-old Hatra city in northern Iraq to monitor it, he says.

A lack of government support has also hindered efforts to protect Iraq's cultural heritage.

This year, Amir Abdul-Razaq Al Zubaidi, general director of the Antiquity Department in the southern Thi Qar province, submitted his resignation in frustration.

The province, about 400 kilometres south of the capital Baghdad, is home to 1,200 archaeological sites. Many of them are renowned ancient cities and settlements that developed in southern Mesopotamia between the fourth and third millennium BCE.

Mr Al Zubaidi says lack of money, mismanagement and bureaucracy pushed the situation to “horrifying levels”.

“Do you know how many civilian guards we have?” he asked in a video published on his Facebook page on March 22.

“No more than 125 guards, and that means more than 1,000 archaeological sites are left without protection."

A government decision that required all guards to submit their weapons to police has only made the situation worse, Mr Al Zubaidi says.

“How do they protect the archaeological sites? With a stick?

“I sent many requests and letters to find solutions, but unfortunately I reached a closed road,” he says.

“I can’t continue like that.”

Words Nada El Sawy, Sinan Mahmoud and Mina Aldroubi
Editor Juman Jarallah
Design Nick Donaldson
Graphics Roy Cooper
Picture Editor Olive Obina
Video Editor Mahmoud Nasr
Sub Editor Nigel Walsh