Out of Egypt

"What is the museum[?] [I]s it a respectable place with a respectable role or it is a place for crime in another form? Do we have what we can call a criminal museum?" Hanna asks in an open letter to the International Council of Museums. "A mummy mask of Ka Nefer Nefer, published by Goneim in 1957, has been looted in the late '80s from the Saqqara Storeroom and sold in 1998 by Ali Aboutaam to the St. Louis Art Museum."

Van Rijn's crusade has not escaped the notice of the Saint Louis Art Museum. "It's not an allegation that is made lightly, and it's certainly not one that I take lightly," says Benjamin, adding that he will closely consider any new information about the mask's history. "Mistakes can be made. You're frequently in the situation of having to make decisions without having complete information, and information can be out there of which one was unaware, and in the face of which one may rethink what one's done. We would certainly do that."

Former New York Metropolitan Museum of Art director Thomas Hoving takes a harder line. "The mask's provenance sounds like the stuff we used to use," quips Hoving, who was director of the Met when the museum acquired the disputed Euphronios Krater. "It was kind of a joke. Everybody went nudge-nudge, wink-wink. You know: 'Oh, yeah, right, "the anonymous Swiss collector." That's good.' It was kind of a joke. Now it's no longer a joke. This is the kind of provenance that, personally, I wouldn't have anything to do with."

Emory University museum curator Lacovara — whose letters the museum has used to bolster the mask's provenance — agrees. "While there may be a remote possibility that the piece has a legitimate provenance, it seems unlikely," Lacovara writes in an e-mail to Riverfront Times. "I would think that if St. Louis cannot prove that the mask was legally awarded to Goneim and sold by him or his heirs, the mask should be considered stolen and returned to Egypt."

Zahi Hawass, secretary general for Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities who has recently burnished his image by aggressively tracking down stolen artifacts, has not made any public statement about the Ka-Nefer-Nefer mask. (Hawass did not respond to requests for comment for this story.)

For the time being, the Saint Louis Art Museum is standing by the mask's provenance. As are the Aboutaams. Asked whether there is any truth to van Rijn's allegations about the mask, Hicham Aboutaam replies, "Absolutely none."

Of course, it would be a simple matter to trace the mask's journey were it not for Goneim's untimely death.

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By March 1954 M. Zakaria Goneim had succeeded in uncovering a sunken entryway that led to the newly discovered pyramid's central funerary chamber. Though the archaeologist had encountered signs — animal corpses, papyrus scrolls — that later generations had breached the entryway via a vertical shaft, he was heartened to discover that the passageway had been sealed with rough-hewn stones.

As digging progressed, Goneim began to imagine he could sense the pharaoh who'd lived nearly 5,000 years before.

"It may sound fantastic, but I felt that the pyramid had a personality and that this personality was that of the king for whom it was built," Goneim writes in The Buried Pyramid. "You crawl along some dark corridor on hands and knees, past falls of rock.... [T]he workmen have been left behind, and suddenly you realize you are alone in a place which has not heard a footfall for nearly fifty centuries. Above you is more than 100 feet of solid rock, and above that again rests the bulk of the pyramid. No one with imagination can have such an experience and not be profoundly stirred."

So it was with great excitement that on May 31, 1954, Goneim and his crew finally broke through to the funerary chamber.

"When we picked ourselves up and the lamp was raised, a wonderful sight greeted us," Goneim writes. "In the middle of the rough-cut chamber lay a magnificent sarcophagus of pale, golden, translucent alabaster."

Unlike previously exhumed sarcophagi, which opened by a lid on the top, the Sekhemkhet sarcophagus opened and closed via a sliding panel at its foot. What's more, the coffin appeared to be sealed.

"[O]ne by one, my other workmen clambered through the hole in the blockage," Goneim would later recall. "I gave way completely to my pent-up feelings, kept in check for so long. We danced round the sarcophagus and wept. We embraced each other. It was a very strange moment in that dark chamber, 130 feet beneath the surface of the desert."

It was an important find: Though Egypt's Upper and Lower Kingdoms were unified during the Third Dynasty, Egyptologists knew precious little about the period. When the world's media got wind of Goneim's discovery, journalists from Buenos Aires to London descended on Saqqara.