Nineteen treasured artefacts found in the tomb of Tutankhamun will go on special display at the Egyptian Museum for the first time upon their arrival from New York on Tuesday, Nevine El-Aref reports Preparations are in full swing at the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square to host the newly-restituted artefacts from Tutankhamun's tomb that were formerly in the private collections of Howard Carter and Lord Caernarvon. For the past nine decades the treasured objects have been in the possession of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. These small-scale objects are divided into two groups. Fifteen 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. They were later recognised to have been noted in the tomb records, although they do not appear in any excavation photographs. Two other pieces are 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 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 the 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, 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 Metropolitan 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 Metropolitan from the private collection of Lord Caernarvon in 1926 produced no 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 Metropolitan) 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 Metropolitan'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 Metropolitan'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 Metropolitan's director, Thomas P Campbell, consequently contacted Zahi Hawass, then secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) and until recently the minister of state for antiquities, to offer the 19 objects from the famous tomb to Egypt. The newly- recovered objects were placed on display with the Tutankhamun exhibition in Times Square, where they remained until January 2011. They then moved back to the Metropolitan where they were exhibited for six months in the context of the museum's renowned Egyptian collection. Mohamed Abdel-Maqsoud, secretary- general of the SCA, regards this as a "wonderful" gesture on the part of the Metropolitan, and points out that for many years the Metropolitan, and especially its Egyptian Art Department, has 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 helped recover a number of important objects. According to Hawass, last year the Metropolitan gave Egypt a granite fragment that joined with a shrine on display in the Karnak temple complex. Expressing his delight at recovering part of Egypt's ancient Egyptian treasure, Hawass told Al-Ahram Weekly that these 19 objects from the tomb of Tutankhamun could now be reunited with the other treasures of the boy king. Upon their return to Egypt on Tuesday, they will be placed on display in the Egyptian Museum for three months and will then be allotted a special place in the Tutankhamun galleries in the museum before being moved with the rest of the Tutankhamun collection to the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza, which is scheduled to open in 2013.
