DC Bible Museum returns artifacts to Egypt

[Wistman]

The Museum of the Bible Once Again Returns Artifacts, This Time an Entire Warehouse of 5,000 Egyptian Objects

(Jan 29, 2021)

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The Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC has returned some 5,000 artifacts to the Egyptian government, after years of talks between agencies including the Department of Homeland Security and the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

The objects have been held at the Museum since its opening in 2016. Egypt has been seeking repatriation of the objects, which it says were smuggled illegally out of the country, for just as long.

The objects include funerary masks; fragments of coffins; a set of portraits of the dead; heads of stone statues; manuscripts of Christian prayers written in both Arabic and Coptic, and just Arabic; and pieces of papyrus with text in Coptic and Greek, as well as hieratic and demotic script. The pieces will be displayed in Cairo’s Coptic Museum.

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The Museum has been plagued by issues of suspicious and incomplete provenance and has returned thousands of artifacts to Iraq and Egypt since opening in 2017. Founder and board chairman Steve Green is also the president of Hobby Lobby craft stores, and has a personal collection valued at $30 million, which he began amassing in 2009.

more at link:

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/museum-bible-returns-objects-egypt-1940432

[acute]

I think it's time that the British Museum returned the Elgin Marbles.

It shouldn't cost much to put them in a bag and mail them back to Athens.