Tut’s Head.
A fine face sculpture is for sale in London - $US5 million plus – and the usual screaming and belching is going on about it being stolen etc. You know the standard story which contains no details and never any evidence just swingeing accusation
Forgotten is what a mere suburban lawyer would tell you do – Stg 200 for the advice – get an injunction to stall/halt the auction then commence a full legal action and produce the evidence and have it tried out by the best courts in the world – Stg 50,000-200,000 total legal costs to get the 5 million object you are so ‘certain’ is stolen. If you win the costs go to the looser – if you loose you pay the entire Stg 400,000 costs. An injunction to stop the auction might cost Stg10,000 which is a low cost option that forces a private negotiation - if you have any evidence its stolen.
The same point about going to the courts to have the facts tested could be made in dozens of other screaming cases or in the case of Nefertiti’s head in Berlin.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-auct ... SKCN1TZ1HE (Nefertiti's bust is not covered by the international treaty - only objects stolen or illegally moved after the signing of the treaty - in Egypt's case about 1966. Proving a theft 100 years ago has real problems with evidence assuming there will be no contemporaneous oral evidence of the alleged theft. Documents are likely to be no more apparent than a standard Egyptian contract in 2019)
Hawass says he ‘knows’ from mere auction house photographs that it was stolen from Karnak in the 70’s even though he is a Giza expert, has never worked at Karnak and was overseas studying at the time. Is this chap capable of telling one truth in his 75 years.
https://www.msn.com/en-sg/news/newsothe ... ar-AADS2A8
Use the courts – that is what everyone else does. If he is so certain then test the case with his own money.
They asked UNESCO to intervene in this matter but it didn’t – probably because the Egyptian case is little more than incontinent hot wind – as it usually is.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/07/ ... 00985.html
Failure to take legal action at this time would be regarded in an English court in any future litigation as acquiescence or admission of poor legal grounds and make any subsequent legal action much harder to win. Don’t scream murder and then walk home quietly but go to the police in a years time. In addition the object had been well known and exhibited publically for many years without a sound from the fundaments of the Supreme Antiques. If their case is so strong make the accusation at a relevant time not at the last moment.
The use of the law is the last thing the Supreme Antiques or Hawass thinks about probably because they know that their own courts are utterly corrupt and ‘therefore’ assume all others are. They also probably assume that all auctioneers are like those in Egypt and we thank god they are wrong in this matter and that the courts and that most in the rest of the world is utterly unlike Egypt.
Arguing your case on the streets and in the media is a low rent approach to intimidate that indicates poor evidence.
That they rant and rave one day before the auction in this case when the catalogue has been public for months tells you all you need to know about their devotion to hard, systematic work, monitoring the market, positive relations with auctioneers and ability to plan ahead – they have little in all these cases.
It tells you something about the sheer incompetence of the Supreme Antiques that they never ever use the standard legal systems to preserve and protect their antiques. Maybe they are as unbelievably stupid and impetuous.
These matters are carefully monitored in honest countries and the FBI and the Metropolitan have large units watching the situation whereas, as everyone knows, Egypt is a cess pit for the source of theft of its own objects and hardly, maybe never, prosecutes a local for theft. We all know that in 2011-13 there was large-scale pillage – can anyone find a single record of a single prosecution for what went on. At the very least there should have been prosecutions of the Supreme Antiques staff and the 20,000-40,000 Tourist Police who were paid to guard the sites and museums. Obviously everyone did his or her job perfectly – or not. The pillaging of Tahrir was someone’s responsibility but whose.
Next time Hawass or someone else screams in the west – walk up to them and tell them – go to court. Also ask them why Egypt was such a late signatory to the UNESCO convention which set the rules on cultural theft. If you want a contract to work for yourself you need to first sign I and at an early date.
This time the ‘hard working ’Supreme Antiques organized a last minute public demonstration by sign-carrying Egyptian rent-a-crowd nationals outside Christie’s. A pathetic stunt which added no logic and not one fact to the allegation that the object was stolen – standard foaming mouth hysteria 101. Noise not logic.
Getting value out of Tourist Police, stopping employment of interrelated family members, checking staff on and off duty and related matters might stop the daily thefts that seem to occur. Here are some of their recent priorities. Work to prevent a coin from King Farouk’s reign leaving the country and the like. The Supreme Antiques put this in their world-wide internet newsletter featuring their achievements.
http://www.egyptologyforum.org/MOA/MoA_ ... nglish.pdf. Maybe they are unhinged. They also have the police searching ships to find 20th century Iraqi coins and an 18th century western walking stick.
http://www.egyptologyforum.org/MOA/MoA_ ... nglish.pdf
Total Supreme Antiques staffing is approximately 77,000. One book gives the staff numbers for the West Bank in Luxor in 1998-1999. 196 guards, 115 conservators/restorers, 17 inspectors, 20 administrative staff, 150 engineers, (what would they do) and others. For those who know that administration is chaotic the permanent staff were paid by the Ministry of Finance not SCA – why? Luxorites wanting a job had to go to Cairo for an interview – why? Guards work/worked 24 hour shifts 6 to 6. Source The Modern Neighbors of Tutankhamun: History, Life, and Work in the Villages ...By Kees Van der Spek p224 - incredible detail on the disordered and obsessively detailed pay structures, how some work 1 hour a day and other hard to believe slackness. Its Monty Pythonesque and Luxor’s share out of 77,000 is disproportionately small – it should be 1/5th to 1/10th – not 1/200th
Even the Egyptian Minister said that there were 33,000 objects missing from the Tahrir/Supreme Antiques collection/storage locations.
https://aawsat.com/english/home/article ... re-missing Here is a data base of news items of looted Egyptian objects. Overwhelmingly the looting/theft activity is in Egypt, and probably involving Ministry staff, and in the region. The Hawass rants about the decadent thieving West don’t fit the current facts and the local maladministration because Egypt and its brothers are doing most of the dirt.
https://news.culturecrime.org/country/egypt.html
If tens of thousands of objects are missing from ‘secure’ facilities that can only mean that staff have been grossly negligent or that staff are criminals. None charged.
Starting with the work that children could do they could develop a single system of all the holdings but attempts at this go back 10-20 years with little or no results. Hawass bears a huge responsibility for this mess as do the wretchedly managed, until now, American Research Center in Egypt. The Mellon Foundation in 2006 gave large amounts (probably in the millions
www.gizapyramids.org) to fix this but nothing happened except the hiring of amateur US archaeologists with no relevant experience – like Dr Scott and Dr Kamrin.
As recent as 1996 you could buy minor antiquities stolen from the museum in Khan.
http://edition.cnn.com/WORLD/9606/18/eg ... index.html So a deal of objects on the market got there by choice or negligence.
Who is involved isn’t as unclear as first seems and was surprised to read the following from the Australian Government TV/Radio system which has a very high reputation for integrity – unlike the person they write about.
The quote:
“Egyptian authorities have also been accused of having a hand in the smuggling process, including Dr Hawass. He was taken to court in relation to smuggling and corruption in 2013, but cleared of the charges.
"This is what weak people say, that officials were involved. There is no official involved in smuggling," he says.
A foreign archaeologist, who spoke to the ABC on condition of anonymity, said they suspected inspectors were involved.
Sometimes I'm sure that inspectors are complicit, and the police are frequently complicit and in some cases the military is complicit because they fly things out in military planes," the archaeologist says.’
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-21/ ... m/10388394 October 2018. Walt Curnow is a Cairo-based journalist and former editor at Ahram Online who writes about Egyptian politics and culture.
The reference to military planes is so specific and so unexpected that its unlikely to be an invention. That the military are involved in corrupt money making should surprise no one.
If the above story is untrue Hawass should obtain an injunction to protect his reputation or sue for defamation. I’m waiting.
A joke. Sudan should scream and yell for all objects relating to the Kushitic Pharonic period, or the Greeks and Romans wanting ‘their’ objects ‘back’. Two can play this ranting hysteria. The Turks could ask for all the mosques built in their period to be dismantleD and relocated to Istanbul. The Jews are still waiting for delivery on the Camp David Accords – fair compensation for all assets stolen by Nasser. On the last matter Egypt holds a near world record for recent theft and extortion and with a much broader base than with Jewish assets. Theft is the very base of the wealth of the Nasser period.
Another joke. Because there is no record of the holdings of the Supreme Antiques there should be an ‘inspection’ of the homes of the Supreme Antiques beginning with Hawass. In 2004 Hawass faled to take the most basic steeps to jail one of the biggest looters in the world - Aboutram - an Egyptian national and huge looter out of Syria and Iraq as well. His fault not the west’s and this chap has been on the streets since. Aboutam was also a looter of ancient European objects as part of the network that included a Medici relative and Sotheby’s (Christies is the auction house involved in the auction of King Tut’s head in this matter).
http://www.academia.edu/8401380/Phoenix ... ater_Again
