With calls for Britain to agree to a three-month loan of the celebrated Rosetta stone and demands for Germany to relinquish a priceless bust of Queen Nefertiti, Egypt has launched a massive campaign for the return of its antiquities from Western museums.
Chief architect of the campaign is Zahi Hawass, general secretary of Egypt's Supreme Council for Antiquities, who with his trademark panama hat has long graced foreign television cameras with his inflammatory calls for the return of ancient treasures.
And to mark the 100th anniversary of Cairo's Egyptian Museum in December, the truculent archaeologist told egyptologists across the globe of his intention to "recover all the antiquities stolen from Egypt."
"Next year, I hope we can mount an exhibition of stolen artefacts," he said.
At the heart of his vision are some of the most prestigious treasures in the world's best museums, such as the glittering Egyptian collection at the British Museum.
He has already approached London over a "three-month" loan of the renowned basalt Rosetta stone, but British authorities were said to be reluctant to agree as they feared the stone might never return to London.
"We have asked the British Museum to allow us to display the Rosetta stone in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo for three months, to mark the renovation of the entire museum," he said on Monday.
He insisted that it was not a permanent request, even though the stone was uncovered in Egypt before being shipped off to Britain, because at the time "there was no legislation in place concerning antiquities."
But, according to the British press, at a recent private dinner Hawass asked British Museum director Neil MacGregor for the outright return of the stone to Egypt.
It was only then, that he reduced the demand to a simple loan request.
The Rosetta stone was unearthed in 1799 by a French soldier at the Rosetta fort in the Egyptian Mediterranean port of Rashid.
It later enabled Jean-Francois Champollion to decipher the writings of ancient Egypt as it contained a decree by Ptolemy V in hieroglyphics and Greek scripts, opening the door to an understanding of the ancient Egyptian writing.
The stone passed into British hands in 1801 and has since been on display in London's British Museum, where it attracts millions of visitors each year.
But Hawass has also reignited calls for Germany to return a 3,300-year-old bust of legendary beauty Queen Nefertiti, currently housed in a Berlin museum.
"We're asking for the return of this statue, which was smuggled out of Egypt illegally," he said.
An all-out row erupted between Egypt and Germany in June when the Berlin museum allowed artists to temporarily fuse the limestone bust to a bronze statue of a scantily clad woman.
The horrified Egyptian press slammed it a "crime," while Hawass denounced the exhibit as "an insult to Egypt's history" and Culture Minister Faruq Hosni demanded the return of the Pharaonic bust.
Director of the Egyptian Museum at Berlin-Charlottenburg, Dietrich Wildung, dismissed the uproar as "tasteless and absurd."
He said that the bronze statue was a model of an ancient Egyptian figure of the same period, wearing transparent clothing.
The bust was sculpted around 1372BC, during the 18th dynasty, and discovered in 1912 in Tell al-Amarna, in southern Egypt.
Egyptologist Mohamed Saleh said that German archeologist Ludwig Borchadt, who worked in Egypt in the early 1900s, took the bust back to Germany under a law that allowed him take 50 percent of what had been excavated.
Egypt has frequently asked for the return of the bust in the past, but Germany has cited its claim to the work based on a 1913 agreement that granted Nefertiti and a number of other important artifacts to their German discoverers.
One of history's great beauties, Nefertiti was the wife of pharaoh Akhenaton, remembered in history for having switched his kingdom to monotheism with the worship of the one sun god, Aton. He established his capital in Tell al-Amarna.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs