Out of Egypt

"That runs counter to everything I would expect," says Robert Ritner, a professor at the Oriental Institute, an Egyptology research center at the University of Chicago. "If it left Egypt that early, it probably left improperly. Any excavator for the Egyptian government is under obligation to provide that material back to Egypt — even in the '50s. It isn't his personal loot that he can then take out himself."

"It never happens," seconds University of Virginia art-history professor Malcolm Bell, who is also vice president for professional responsibilities at the Archaeological Institute of America. "It sounds like the sort of thing you could say if you didn't really know the circumstances and you were trying either explain or invent. But it's not the sort of thing that happens."

Reached via e-mail, Peter Lacovara repeats that the Egyptian government did in fact award artifacts to excavators on occasion. He adds, however, that he was skeptical of the Ka-Nefer-Nefer's provenance from the beginning.

"I urged [them] to check the provenance with the dealer as Goneim would be the only possible legitimate source for the mask coming onto the market," the Emory University curator writes. "I urged them again and again to contact the antiquities service to make sure the mask was not stolen."

Neither the Saint Louis Art Museum nor Phoenix Ancient Art has produced any documentation that the Egyptian government gave the mask to M. Zakaria Goneim. In fact, the archaeologist's own writings indicate that he did not own the mask: In the acknowledgements section of The Buried Pyramid, the author thanks the Department of Antiquities of the Egyptian Government, Cairo, "for permission to reproduce" two photographs of the mask.

According to the museum's provenance, the mask next surfaced in the "early 1960s" in the "Kaloterna Collection." The document provides no further information about the change in ownership other than to speculate in a footnote that "Kaloterna" might be a misspelling of "Kaliterna," a common Croatian surname.

The mask was soon resold, according to the provenance, this time to a "Private Collection, Switzerland." The transaction is said to have occurred in the "early 1960s."

The provenance contains no documentation of the purchase. Footnotes add that "[t]he Swiss collector requested anonymity," and that "[t]he Swiss collector's letter of July 2, 1997 confirms the sale of the mask to Aboutaam."

"The dealer did provide us with a letter to that effect from the individual who owned it that had requested anonymity," says Brent Benjamin. "The museum did verify the identity of that person. We know it's a real person. We know that person exists. We know the address. It's not a fictional person."

A copy of the letter obtained by the Riverfront Times identifies the Swiss collector as Zuzi Jelinek of 84 Quai de Cologny, Geneva, Switzerland.

The universe of high-dollar collectors is a rarefied one. Nonetheless, when a New York antiquities dealer ran the name "Jelinek" through his 18,000-name database of museums, collectors and dealers at Riverfront Times' request, the search came up negative.

According to Swiss telephone listings, a Suzana Jelinek-Ronkuline lives at 84 Quai de Cologny in Geneva. Her telephone number is identical to the one on the letter Phoenix Ancient Art provided to the St. Louis museum.

Reached by phone in Geneva, a man identifying himself as Jelinek's son, Ivo Jelinek, says his mother never owned the Ka-Nefer-Nefer mask.

"This is completely false information. We have nothing to do with any mask, certainly not from the Nineteenth Dynasty," asserts Jelinek, who says he lives at the address listed on the letter. "She has never had interest or invested money in such [objects]."

Jelinek says his mother's name may be linked to the Ka-Nefer-Nefer mask for another reason: the Aboutaam brothers, owners of Phoenix Ancient Art, rented another house she owns on Quai de Cologny. "They were tenants of Lebanese origin who rented one of our houses. They are merchants of perhaps of this type of objects — maybe this is the connection," says Jelinek. "They lived on [Quai de Cologny] at another number, but they left. They are not there any longer."

Presented with this information, Hicham Aboutaam directed the Riverfront Times to a woman identifying herself as Suzana Jelinek, of Zagreb, Croatia. "I bought the mask many many years ago, and I sold it many many years ago," says Suzana Jelinek when reached at her Zagreb home. "I have so many things in my collection that my children don't know what all I have."

"That's very peculiar," the University of Virginia's Bell says. "That's very suspicious. That's a very unconvincing sort of provenance that would not be acceptable anywhere."

Before purchasing the Ka-Nefer-Nefer mask, museum officials in St. Louis checked it against stolen-art databases maintained by Interpol and the International Foundation for Art Research. The mask came back clean.

"I think for 1998, the year that this mask was acquired, the level of diligence that was done here is exemplary," says Brent Benjamin. "We had an inquiry hand-delivered to the Cairo Museum's director, Mohammed Saleh, saying that this was an object that had been offered to the museum for acquisition, and did he know any reason why the museum should not do that. We got a written response from Dr. Saleh that raised no concerns about the acquisition."