France’s culture minister agreed on Friday to return five painted wall fragments to Egypt after a row over their ownership prompted the Egyptians to cut ties with the Louvre Museum.
A committee of 35 specialists unanimously recommended that France give back the painted wall fragments from a 3,200-year-old tomb near the ancient temple city of Luxor.
French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand “immediately decided to follow this recommendation,” his office said in a statement. It was not clear when France would send the fragments back to Egypt.
PHOTO: AFP
Mitterrand said the items were acquired by the Louvre in “good faith” and that the decision to return them reflects France’s and the Louvre’s commitment of “resolute action against illegal trafficking of cultural goods.”
Egypt’s antiquities chief Zahi Hawass described the disputed fragments as pieces of a burial fresco showing the nobleman Tetaki’s journey to the afterlife.
Hawass took his campaign to recover the nation’s lost treasures to a new level on Wednesday by cutting ties with the Louvre over the artifacts. It was the most aggressive effort yet by Hawass, Egypt’s tough and media-savvy chief archeologist, to reclaim what he says are antiquities stolen from the country and purchased by leading world museums.
In a statement on Friday, Hawass’ office said that ties would not be restored until the five fragments were returned to Egypt and that France would not be allowed to conduct archeological activity until then.
Thousands of antiquities were spirited out of the country during Egypt’s colonial period and afterward by archeologists, adventurers and thieves.
France is full of emblems of Egyptian history, from the Obelisk of Luxor at the Place de la Concorde, given to France by an Egyptian viceroy in the 19th century, to halls of sculptures, sarcophagi and other works in the Louvre.
Those at issue now, however, were obtained relatively recently.
Hawass’ office said thieves chipped them from the walls of the tomb near the Valley of the Kings in the 1980s. The Louvre bought them in 2000 and 2003.
“It wasn’t until November 2008, after archaeologists rediscovered the tomb from which the frescoes appear to have come, that serious doubts emerged about the legality of their removal from Egyptian territory,” Mitterrand’s statement said.
The Egyptian move to cut ties with the Louvre could jeopardize the renowned museum’s future excavations in Egypt. Egypt suspended the Louvre’s excavation in the massive necropolis of Saqqara, near Cairo and canceled a lecture in Egypt by a former Louvre curator.
After Hawass’ announcement on Wednesday, both the Louvre and France’s Culture Ministry said they were ready to return the pieces.
Mitterrand had ordered French museum experts to meet first to study the issue.
The Culture Ministry would not comment on another piece held by the Louvre that Hawass has said he wants back: the painted ceiling of a temple at Dendera showing the Zodiac.
Hawass also cut ties with the St Louis Art Museum after it failed to answer his demand to return a 3,200-year-old golden burial mask of a noblewoman.
Hawass also wants the return of the bust of Nefertiti — wife of the famed monotheistic Pharaoh Akhenaten — and the Rosetta Stone, a basalt slab with an inscription that was the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics. The bust is in Berlin’s Egyptian Museum; the Rosetta Stone is in the British Museum in London.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
TURNAROUND: The Liberal Party had trailed the Conservatives by a wide margin, but that was before Trump threatened to make Canada the US’ 51st state Canada’s ruling Liberals, who a few weeks ago looked certain to lose an election this year, are mounting a major comeback amid the threat of US tariffs and are tied with their rival Conservatives, according to three new polls. An Ipsos survey released late on Tuesday showed that the left-leaning Liberals have 38 percent public support and the official opposition center-right Conservatives have 36 percent. The Liberals have overturned a 26-point deficit in six weeks, and run advertisements comparing the Conservative leader to Trump. The Conservative strategy had long been to attack unpopular Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but last month he
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
RSS