Egyptian archaeologists, who normally scour the desert in search of treasures of the past, have discovered that one of the greatest caches of antiquities may well be in the basement of the Egyptian Museum.
For the past century, artifacts have been stored away in crates there and forgotten, often allowed to disintegrate in the dank, dusty cavern.
Forgotten until now. The recent theft and recovery of three statues from the basement have prompted antiquity officials in Egypt to increase an effort already under way to complete the first comprehensive inventory of artifacts in the basement.
"For the last 100 years, curators sat down to drink tea, but they did not do their jobs," said Zahi Hawass, the general secretary of the Supreme Council of Antiquities. "How many artifacts are in the basement? It was awful."
Step through a small, Hobbit-sized door, down a steep flight of stairs and through a locked gate. The basement is a maze of arched passageways and bare light bulbs hanging from decaying wires. It is packed with wooden crates, hundreds of them, sometimes piled floor to ceiling.
Cobwebs cling to ancient pottery and tablets engraved with hieroglyphics. Six hundred coffins and 170 mummies have been found so far. No one knows what may have been stolen over the years.
Last year, officials reported that 38 golden bracelets from Roman times had vanished from the basement, apparently six years earlier.
"It is an accumulation of 100 years of neglect," said Ali Radwan, a professor of Egyptology at Cairo University who took a recent tour of the basement. "It is not appropriate for a country like Egypt to have such miserable storage for its history."
The Egyptian Museum is a 104-year-old repository of some of the world's most famous antiquities. Inside, there are the mummified remains of pharaohs, like Ramses II, who died in 1212 BC. There are the treasures of the young Pharaoh Tutankhamen, the golden chariot and the golden mask.
Built and designed by the French, the two-story building in central Tahrir Square has changed little over the decades. It remains crowded with an estimated 120,000 items, most of which have also never been properly inventoried, museum officials said. And even the exhibition areas can be haphazardly arranged: Some of the labels date to colonial times, and some items are not labeled at all.
Certainly the Egyptian museum is not alone in its struggle to keep up with a vast collection acquired over so many years -- though the scope of the problem here may be unrivaled.
Nearly two years ago, antiquity officials hired a company to begin to clean out the basement and to convert some of the space into an exhibition area. Last year, Hawass decided that a more precise accounting was needed, so he sent in a team of curators to do a complete inventory.
It was a slow process in very difficult working conditions. There is little ventilation, poor lighting and dust -- lots and lots of dust. So far 22,000 items have been inventoried -- about 20 percent of what is actually in the basement, said Sabah Abdel Razek, the curator overseeing the job.
The team never knows what it will find when a crate is cracked open.
"It's like we are excavating," Abdel Razek said.
The work was proceeding quietly until early last month, when the museum discovered that three statues dating from the Old Kingdom era (2649 BC to 2152 BC) were missing. Initially, Hawass insisted that the pieces could not have been stolen.
But after curators scoured the basement for more than a week, the tourism and antiquities police arrested two men from the cleanup crew. They told the police that the statues were left in a corner for three days so they thought no one wanted them. They smuggled them out of the museum with construction debris, officials said.
After all the embarrassing publicity, Hawass decided to declare that it was time -- once and for all -- to put the basement in order.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
BOMBARDMENT: Moscow sent more than 440 drones and 32 missiles, Volodymyr Zelenskiy said, in ‘one of the most terrifying strikes’ on the capital in recent months A nighttime Russian missile and drone bombardment of Ukraine killed at least 15 people and injured 116 while they slept in their homes, local officials said yesterday, with the main barrage centering on the capital, Kyiv. Kyiv City Military Administration head Tymur Tkachenko said 14 people were killed and 99 were injured as explosions echoed across the city for hours during the night. The bombardment demolished a nine-story residential building, destroying dozens of apartments. Emergency workers were at the scene to rescue people from under the rubble. Russia flung more than 440 drones and 32 missiles at Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy
COMPETITION: The US and Russia make up about 90 percent of the world stockpile and are adding new versions, while China’s nuclear force is steadily rising, SIPRI said Most of the world’s nuclear-armed states continued to modernize their arsenals last year, setting the stage for a new nuclear arms race, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said yesterday. Nuclear powers including the US and Russia — which account for about 90 percent of the world’s stockpile — had spent time last year “upgrading existing weapons and adding newer versions,” researchers said. Since the end of the Cold War, old warheads have generally been dismantled quicker than new ones have been deployed, resulting in a decrease in the overall number of warheads. However, SIPRI said that the trend was likely
‘SHORTSIGHTED’: Using aid as leverage is punitive, would not be regarded well among Pacific Island nations and would further open the door for China, an academic said New Zealand has suspended millions of dollars in budget funding to the Cook Islands, it said yesterday, as the relationship between the two constitutionally linked countries continues to deteriorate amid the island group’s deepening ties with China. A spokesperson for New Zealand Minister of Foreign Affairs Winston Peters said in a statement that New Zealand early this month decided to suspend payment of NZ$18.2 million (US$11 million) in core sector support funding for this year and next year as it “relies on a high trust bilateral relationship.” New Zealand and Australia have become increasingly cautious about China’s growing presence in the Pacific
RSS