Displaying items by tag: Egypt

The world's oldest bible is among 200 objects tracing Egypt's religious evolution in an exhibition at London's British Museum, which opens Friday and spans the 1,200 years since Cleopatra's death.

Titled "Egypt: faith after the pharaohs", the exhibition covers 12 centuries, from the country's integration into the Roman Empire in 30 BC to the fall of the Islamic Fatimid dynasty in 1171.

The United States returned Wednesday dozens of ancient artifacts that had been smuggled out of Egypt by an international criminal network, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said.

The items -- including a Greco-Roman style Egyptian sarcophagus discovered in a Brooklyn garage in 2009 -- were handed back to the Egyptian government at a ceremony in Washington.

"To think that some of these treasured artifacts were recovered from garages, exposed to the elements, is unimaginable," said ICE director Sarah Saldana in a statement.

Back in the day, Egyptians had a lot of gods. To those of us living in the modern era without degrees in archaeology, their names are perhaps most familiar from pop schlock like “Raiders of the Lost Ark” making hay with Egypt-y stuff: Ra, Geb, Shu, Osiris, Set, et cetera.

But then there was Amun. In ancient Egyptian mythology — we’re talking 3,000 years ago here — Amun was the king of the gods: the Jupiter, the Zeus, the Odin, the Big Kahuna.

Amun was important enough to have a temple — that goes without saying. But Amun was so important that the guardian of that temple, a nobleman named Amenhotep, got a fancy tomb. And photographs of that tomb have just been released by Egypt’s antiquities ministry.

Egypt plans to reopen the royal tomb of Nefertari, a wife of Ramesses II (who reigned from 1279BC to 1213BC), on a regular basis after it was closed for eight years because of concerns over the condition of the site’s wall paintings.

The burial site in the Valley of the Queens was opened for ten days in mid-October to celebrate the 110th anniversary of its discovery by the Italian archaeologist Ernesto Schiaparelli. Speaking at an event in London last month, Egypt’s minister of tourism, Hisham Zazou, proposed that the site remains open.

The closest comparison is Swiss cheese: holes in vast swaths of land where looters, armed with machine guns and bulldozers, take to ancient archaeological sites in search of international paydays. To the untrained eye, these holes, visible in satellite images, seem haphazard. But to experts, these deep pits, spanning acres of land, are the work of sophisticated traffickers.

It’s exactly the kind of looting that worries Mohamed Ibrahim Ali, Egypt’s minister of state for antiquities.

“Egypt,” an idyllic hill farm situated in an isolated hollow high on the slopes of Red Mountain in Arlington, Vermont, served as home base for the artist Rockwell Kent (1882–1971) and his growing family from the summer of 1919 to the summer of 1925. Arriving in Vermont on the heels of a sojourn to Alaska and buoyed by the critical and financial success of the work he had commenced there, including his travel memoir, Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska, Kent quickly rose to become one of the most renowned artistic figures in America. Despite the fact that this period proved to be pivotal in the arc of Kent’s career, the artist’s seminal years in Arlington have been largely overlooked.

Nineteen artifacts taken from the tomb of the famed boy-pharaoh Tutankhamun will be returned to Egypt next week after more than half a century at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Egypt's antiquities authority said Saturday.

The trove includes a miniature bronze dog and a sphinx-shaped bracelet ornament, the Supreme Council of Antiquities said in a statement.

The move, scheduled for Tuesday, is the result of an agreement between the two institutions last year to return the objects to Egypt.

At the time, then-antiquities chief Zahi Hawass said the objects would become part of the permanent King Tut collection at the new Grand Egyptian Museum, which is under construction near the Giza pyramids and is scheduled to open in 2012.

Hawass, once the most public face of Egyptian archaeology, was fired earlier this month after intense criticism of his close ties to ex-President Hosni Mubarak, who was ousted in February in a popular uprising.

The antiquities authority said the pieces were sent to New York in 1948 when the Metropolitan Museum closed its expedition house in Egypt.

The decision to repatriate the objects came after an extensive examination of the validity of their origin.

An Egyptian court on Thursday jailed five officials, including a former head of the state's fine arts department, over the theft of a Van Gogh painting worth an estimated $55 million, state media said.

"Vase with Viscaria" was stolen in August from Cairo's Mahmoud Khalil museum, home to one of the Middle East's finest collections of 19th and 20th-century art.

The state MENA news agency and court officials said the five had been found guilty of "causing the theft of the painting," without giving further details.

The painting has not been recovered.

A police investigation soon after the theft found that security measures at the museum were extremely lax, raising fears about the safety of the treasure trove of art and antiquities on display in Egypt.

Legal sources said the court sentenced Mohsen Shaalan, who was head of the culture ministry's fine arts department, to one year in jail and ordered him to perform community service.

Four other employees at the museum were given six-month prison terms, said the sources.

The museum houses works assembled by Mohammed Mahmoud Khalil, a politician who died in 1953, including paintings by Gauguin, Monet, Manet and Renoir, as well as the Dutch post-Impressionist master Vincent Van Gogh.

Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris offered a 1-million pound ($168,000) reward for information leading to the recovery of the painting.