Egypt Retrieves 454 Ancient Artifacts From Eton’s Myers Museum
By Mahmoud Kassem and
Emad Mekay
April 30, 2009
(Bloomberg)
-- Egyptian authorities have recovered 454 ancient Egyptian artifacts, including pharaonic pottery
and bronze coins, from the U.K.’s Myers Museum. They had been removed from the country more
than 30 years ago.
The pieces have been returned to Egypt, the Cairo-based Culture Ministry said in a statement today, citing the country’s chief archaeologist Zahi Hawass. The Myers Museum is part of Eton College, in Windsor, west of London. No one at the museum was immediately available for comment.
The recovered artifacts were taken out of the country between 1972 and 1988 after Unesco banned antiquities trafficking in 1970, Hussein Al-Afuni, a head of Egypt’s Red Sea antiquities department,
was quoted in the statement as saying.
The items included 12 bronze coins, four scarabs, 94 beaded necklaces, 99 fragments of pottery with colored drawings and 109 funerary figures, the statement said.
Since 2002, Egypt has recovered some 5,000 ancient Egyptian artifacts that were taken out of the country.
The Myers Museum is a collection of ancient Egyptian decorative arts, and is housed inside Eton College. Most of the collection was acquired by William Joseph Myers (1858-1899), who attended
Eton.
To contact the reporter on this story:
Mahmoud Kassem
in Cairo at
mkassem1@bloomberg.net;
Emad Mekay
in Cairo
emekay@bloomberg.net.
Last Updated: April 30, 2009 12:08 EDT
