Artefacts from Tutankhamun's tomb formerly in the private collections of Howard Carter and Lord Caernarvon have returned to Egypt after nearly nine decades, reports Nevine El-Aref It seems that the spell of the Golden King Tutankhamun will last forever. While the Americans are admiring some of his treasured collection in two touring exhibitions now in Denver and New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art (MET) has offered Egypt 19 objects attributed to Tutankhamun's tomb. These small-scale objects are divided into two groups. Fifteen of them have the status of bits or samples, while the remaining four are of more significant art-historical interest and include a small bronze dog and a small sphinx bracelet-element. The pieces were acquired by Howard Carter's niece after they had been probated with his estate and were later recognised to have been noted in the tomb records, although they do not appear in any excavation photographs. Two other pieces include a part of a handle and a broad collar accompanied by additional beads, which entered the collection because they were found in 1939 among the contents of Carter's house in Luxor. All of the contents of that house were bequeathed by Carter to the Metropolitan Museum. The story of these artefacts started as early as 1922 when Howard Carter and his sponsor, Lord Caernarvon, discovered Tutankhamun's tomb with all its distinguished and priceless funerary collection in the Valley of the Kings on Luxor's west bank. At that time, according to laws applied in Egypt, the Egyptian government generally allowed archaeologists to keep a substantial portion of the finds from excavations that they had undertaken and financed. However in 1922 when Carter and his team uncovered Tutankhamun's tomb it became increasingly clear that no such partition of finds would take place in this particular case. The splendour of the treasures discovered captured the admiration of the whole world, and it soon began to be conjectured that nevertheless certain objects of high quality dating roughly to the time of Tutankhamun and residing in various collections outside Egypt actually originated from the young Pharaoh's tomb. Such conjectures intensified after Carter's death in 1939 when a number of fine objects were found to be part of his property. When the MET acquired some of these objects, which had been subjected to careful scrutiny by experts and representatives of the Egyptian government and to subsequent research, no evidence of such a provenance was found in the overwhelming majority of cases. Likewise, a thorough study of objects that entered the MET from the private collection of Lord Caernarvon in 1926 did not produce any evidence of the kind. There was some discussion between Harry Burton (a museum photographer based in Egypt, the museum's last representative in Egypt before World War II broke out, and one of Carter's two executors) and Herbert Winlock (an American Egyptologist employed at the MET) about the origins of these works and about making arrangements for Burton to discuss with a representative of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo whether these works should be handed over to Egypt, but the discussion was not resolved before Burton's death in 1940. When the MET's expedition house in Egypt was closed in 1948 the pieces were sent to New York, where they stayed for more than six decades. Recently, following the issuing of Egypt's new antiquities law and its project to restitute illegally smuggled antiquities, two of the MET's curators embarked on an in-depth study to substantiate the history of the objects. They eventually identified them as indeed originating from the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun. The MET's director, Thomas P. Campbell, consequently contacted Zahi Hawass, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), to offer the 19 objects from the famous tomb to Egypt. "This is a wonderful gesture on the part of the MET," Hawass commented, expressing his delight at recovering part of Egypt's ancient Egyptian treasure. "These 19 objects from the tomb of Tutankhamun can now be reunited with the other treasures of the boy king." He pointed out that for many years the MET, and especially its Egyptian Art Department, had been a strong partner in Egypt's ongoing efforts to repatriate antiquities that had been illegally exported. Through their research they have provided the SCA with information that has helped to recover a number of important objects. Last year, Hawass said, the MET gave Egypt a granite fragment that joined with a shrine on display in the Karnak temple complex. The newly-recovered objects will now go on display with the Tutankhamun exhibition currently in Times Square, where they will remain until January 2011. They will then move back to the MET where they will be shown for six months in the context of the MET's renowned Egyptian collection. Upon their return to Egypt in June 2011 they will be given a special place in the Tutankhamun galleries at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo before being moved with the rest of the Tutankhamun collection to the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza, which is scheduled to open in 2012. By Nevine El-Aref
