Met Is to Repatriate to Egypt Artifacts From King Tut’s Tomb
By KATE TAYLOR
Published: November 10, 2010
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is voluntarily returning 19 artifacts to Egypt that had been in its collection for decades and that Met curators recently determined came from Tutankhamen’s tomb, the museum said on Tuesday.
Zahi Hawass, the secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Egypt, was scheduled to announce the transfer in Cairo on Wednesday. The 19 objects are small in scale. Among the more significant are a tiny bronze dog, less than three-quarters of an inch tall, and a small sphinx from a bracelet. The objects will be on display until January as part of the Tutankhamen exhibition in Times Square, which was organized by a company working with the Egyptian government. After that, they are to be exhibited at the Met for six months and then sent to Egypt to be shown at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza when it opens in 2012.
The Met has been proactive about returning objects to Egypt in the past and has a good working relationship with Mr. Hawass’s council. The museum’s director, Thomas P. Campbell, said in an interview that he had been to Egypt twice since becoming director last year. His most recent visit was two weeks ago, when he met with Mr. Hawass to discuss the transfer and to visit an excavation the Met is running at Dahshur.
Speaking by phone, Mr. Hawass, a powerful figure in Egypt, praised the Met and Mr. Campbell and criticized museums that have not acceded to his demands to repatriate Egyptian objects. In 2009 he cut off ties to the Louvre over the issue. (Relations were restored after the Louvre agreed to return five painted wall fragments.) He is now battling the Saint Louis Art Museum over a 3,200-year-old golden burial mask.
“I have to tell you, I have many fights and misunderstandings with every institution in America and France and everywhere, but never with the Met,” he said.
Most of the Met’s Egyptian collection came to it through partage, the early-20th-century practice of dividing the finds of excavations between the host country and the archaeological teams carrying out the digs. But the Egyptian government considered Tutankhamen’s tomb, which was discovered in 1922 by the British archaeologist Howard Carter, to be so significant that it had Carter sign a waiver stating that all of the excavation’s finds would stay in Egypt.
There has been speculation over the years that some objects from the tomb had ended up in foreign collections. In 1978 Thomas Hoving, a former director of the Met, stirred the pot by asserting in his book “Tutankhamun: The Untold Story” that many objects in the Met’s collection had come from the tomb.
Mr. Campbell said that recent research by two Met curators found that only these 19 objects came from the tomb. The bronze dog and bracelet fragment were acquired from Carter’s niece, who inherited them from Carter; two other objects, part of a handle and a collar accompanied by additional beads, were bequeathed to the Met as part of the contents of Carter’s house at Luxor.
A version of this article appeared in print on November 10, 2010, on page C3 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/arts/design/10met.html?_r=1