[MSN] Brent Benjamin and the Saqqara mask in the Saint Louis Art Museum: Demands for Antiquities, Demands for Proof

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Demands for Antiquities, Demands for Proof 

By SOPHIA KISHKOVSKY
Published: May 13, 2006

Facing claims from an Egyptian antiquities official, the St. Louis Art
Museum said yesterday that it would keep a 3,200-year-old mummy mask unless
Egypt could produce firm evidence that it was stolen, The Associated Press
reported. Zahi Hawass, secretary general for the Supreme Council of
Antiquities in Egypt, asserted this month that the mask had probably been
stolen from an Egyptian site before it was acquired by the art museum in
1998. He set a deadline of Monday for the object's return, telling The St.
Louis Post-Dispatch that if it were not handed back, "I will make their life
hell." Brent Benjamin, the museum's director, said that the mask had been
acquired for about $500,000 and that the museum had checked with the
international Art Loss Register, Interpol and the director of the Egyptian
Museum in Cairo to verify that the mask had not been reported missing, lost
or stolen. The burial mask, made of wood and plaster, with glass eyes for
the woman whose head it covered, was excavated from a pyramid in 1952 in
Saqqara, Egypt. Mr. Hawass said that because of poor record-keeping
practices, it was documented only once, in 1959. He said he had given the
St. Louis museum a copy of a register indicating that the mask, of Ka Nefer
Nefer, above, had been sent to the Egyptian Museum that year. Mr. Benjamin
said Mr. Hawass had "not provided conclusive evidence to support his claim."
But he added, "The museum remains willing to evaluate its proper ownership
of the mask in light of valid documentation."

http://www.nytimes.com/