Looters were prevented from removing their spoils from the Egyptian Museum, and restoration of the 70 artefacts damaged during the foiled raid has already been completed, reports Nevine El-Aref Eleven skilled restorers have been working flat out in the first-floor laboratory of the Egyptian Museum, the cantaloupe-coloured building on the north side of Tahrir Square that has featured on our television screens over the past two weeks. The restorers, all Egyptian, have each been working on individual objects and have succeeded in repairing them and returning them all to their original condition. The 70 objects were damaged during attempts by a criminal mob to enter the museum on the night of Friday 28 February, as the uprising by young people in Tahrir Square reached its peak. As chaos spread in the surrounding streets, vandals grasped the opportunity to break into the Egyptian Museum and steal jewellery from the gift shop at its eastern side of the building. Ten of these outlaws succeeded in entering the museum galleries by means of climbing the fire escape stairs to the roof, where they broke the windows of the dome and used ropes to gain entrance to the Late Period gallery. Looking for gold to steal, they broke the glass of 30 showcases and threw their genuine contents on the floor, causing some to break. Among these objects was a statue of the golden Pharaoh Tutankhamun riding a panther and another of his father, Pharaoh Akhenaten. On their way out, the vandals smashed two skeletons kept in the storage gallery next to the X-ray laboratory in the garden. At the museum entrance gate the robbers found themselves trapped by a human chain made up of young Egyptian protesters, who held them and prevented them from escaping with their looted pieces of Egypt's priceless heritage. Three days later, as a ferocious clash was taking place in Tahrir Square between protesters and supporters of President Hosni Mubarak, Molotov cocktails were thrown at the wall of the museum and set on fire one of the army tanks placed in the garden to safeguard the museum. The spreading flames and smoke led many people to believe that the museum had come under fire, but in fact the museum was unscathed and the fire was immediately extinguished by soldiers. With mass anti-government protests still simmering throughout the country and unleashing a wave of violence on the streets, the Egyptian Museum was not the only monument under threat. Six wooden boxes filled with antiquities were taken from the store galleries of the Qantara East site in north Sinai, where objects from the Port Said Museum are being stored while the museum undergoes refurbishment. However, 288 of the objects have been retrieved with the help of honest local Bedouin. Failed burglary attempts were also reported at the Coptic Museum in Old Cairo; the Royal Jewellery Museum and the National Museum in Alexandria; and the Manial Palace Museum. Luckily, foresighted employees of the Royal Jewellery Museum removed objects from the showcases and put them in the basement, which they sealed before leaving. Archaeological sites such as Saqqara, Mit Rahina, Luxor and Aswan also came under threat. Vandals forced open the padlocks of some of the tombs on these sites, but they did not enter the tombs or cause any damage. Worried about the fate of Egypt's heritage, UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova called Zahi Hawass, the newly-appointed minister of state for antiquities, to ask about the recent situation in the Egyptian Museum and archaeological sites all over the country. Hawass assured her that all rumours about the Egyptian Museum and archaeological sites were unfounded and that they were all "safe and sound". Hawass rejected the decision taken by the International Committee of Museums (ICOM) to establish an international supervision committee to oversee and monitor the Egyptian Museum in an attempt to protect it following the recent attempt to loot it. "We don't need any international supervision. The Egyptian Museum and all archaeological sites in Egypt are under the protection of the army and honest Egyptian people," Hawass insisted. He noted that some foreigners thought Egypt was not interested in protecting its monuments and museums, but said that was not true. "Egypt has 5,000 years of civilisation, and we love our heritage. We are not the Taliban who destroyed the monuments of Afghanistan," he said. "I want everyone to relax and to know that I am here and we are all watching with open eyes. I want people to know that after days of protest, the monuments are safe. Why? Because the Egyptian people are protecting them," Hawass concluded. In a statement released by the Ministry of State for Antiquities, Hawass stated that some reports published in the media claiming that the necropoleis of Memphis, Saqqara and Abusir had been plundered were untrue. These sites, he continued, like all archaeological sites in Egypt, were safe and had not been looted. The tombs of Maia and of the two brothers, Mereruka and Tiye at Saqqara, which some newspapers inaccurately claimed had their paintings damaged, were unharmed, while the two mummies in the Egyptian Museum reported as damaged were in fact unidentified Late-Period skulls and not royal mummies. When they were recovered from the thieves on their way out of the museum, the skulls were in the same condition as they had been when in storage.
