Out of Egypt

"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."

The letter the museum sent Saleh contains sparse details. The letter, penned by Sidney Goldstein, the museum's antiquities curator who initiated and oversaw the mask's purchase, says the museum has "been offered a mummy mask of the 19th dynasty and I was wondering if you know of any parallels to this object. I have never seen anything quite like it with a reddish copper-like face probably owing to the oxidation of the gold surface. It is currently on exhibition in the Egyptian exhibition at the Museum of Art and History in Geneva. I would greatly appreciate your thoughts on any parallels you might know of this piece and hope that I might have the opportunity to speak with you in several weeks by telephone about this opportunity."

Goldstein sent a photograph and physical description of the mask along with his letter to Saleh, but he did not mention Goneim by name, nor did he refer to the Saqqara excavations.

"The excavation information was not on the description of the mask because the letters [to Saleh] were sent out before the entire provenance was even discussed," says Jennifer Stoffel, director of marketing for the Saint Louis Art Museum. "This was early on, when we were only considering the object."

Saleh is no longer employed by the Cairo Museum and could not be reached for comment.

"Could it be that [Saleh] was unaware of where it might have come from? If Saleh failed to recognize the mask — when he was controlling literally millions of pieces of antiquities — it could be understandable," says Egyptologist Robert Ritner.

Adds Ritner: "At least it shows that they acted in good faith to contact him."

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In 2003 Italian authorities indicted Marion True, formerly the antiquities curator for the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, for conspiring to receive stolen goods and the illicit receipt of artifacts. Earlier this month the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York ended a 30-year feud with the Italian government when it agreed to relinquish a 2,500-year-old Greek vase painted by the Greek master Euphronios. The Italians have long contended that the Euphronios Krater, considered one of the world's finest examples of Greek red-figured vases, was looted from an Etruscan tomb near Rome and smuggled out of the country. In a third high-profile case, New York antiquities dealer Frederick Schultz was sentenced in 2002 to 33 months in prison after a federal court determined he had conspired to deal in stolen antiquities.

Many archaeologists say the crackdown has been a long time coming. "On the whole, the [antiquities] market is fueled by works that are looted. There are some that are not, but most of them are. They get laundered and deprived of their histories, and then new histories are written and they are sold," says the University of Virginia's Malcolm Bell. "In many cases the dealers simply don't want to know, or they cover up the source. The dealers act as an almost impermeable filter that denies evidence to the purchaser."

Until the second half of the twentieth century, an artifact's provenance was generally regarded as an ancillary detail, obscured by the light of its inherent beauty, educational value and ability to transport the refined collector to a remote, halcyon past. Western excavators, curators and dealers were given almost free rein to cherry-pick a source country's finest antiquities, and many a Western archaeologist — whose job was to grow his museum-employer's collection — justified acquisitions by arguing that precious artifacts were better off in Western institutions where curators could work their preservation magic. Antiquities-rich nations such as Greece, Turkey, Italy and Egypt had yet to pass stringent laws governing the export of antiquities.

In the past 30 years, however, source countries like Egypt have enacted a thicket of legal impediments to export. In 1970 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization adopted the Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Cultural Property, which binds member nations to help retrieve stolen or illegally exported items at the request of another member state.

The United States was a late arrival at UNESCO's party, implementing it in 1983. That same year the Egyptian government passed a law mandating that any cultural artifact unearthed in that country after 1983 belonged to the Egyptian state.

"Anything discovered in Egypt post-1983 is owned by the Egyptian government," says DePaul University's Patty Gerstenblith. "So anything taken from [the ground in] Egypt without permission is stolen property."

More recently, source countries have stepped up recovery efforts and begun actively litigating for the return of what they see as their cultural patrimony.