Following almost four decades in the hands of a private collector in England, a collection of 454 ancient artefacts has been returned to Egypt, Nevine El-Aref reports The story of the retrieval of the items began in 2006, when the family of a London-based Egyptologist, the late Ron Davey, gifted his collection to the Myers Museum at Eton College along with an assemblage of photographs, slides and other useful study documentation. This archive and collection was offered to Davey in about 1992 by his friend and fellow Egyptologist Peter Webb. On examining the Webb-Davey antiquities collection when they arrived at Eton, Nicholas Reeves, curator of the Myers Museum, was concerned to discover that a high proportion had been demonstrably acquired in Egypt during the period between 1972 and 1988, in other words after the 1970 UNESCO convention that ended the export of antiquities from Egypt. "I searched very carefully through the Webb-Davey documentation but was unable to discover any proof that permission had ever been granted by Egypt for an official export of these item," Reeves said. He added that the full background of the remainder of the pieces in the Webb- Davey collection was unclear. "They had seemingly been purchased by Webb or Davey in good faith on the London antiquities market during and after this same period," he said. The Myers Museum and Eton College voluntarily raised the matter of the proffered collection with Zahi Hawass, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, and decided that the right and honourable course was for the Webb-Davey collection to be declined by Eton College and returned to Egypt in its entirety. Davey's family, with whom Eton consulted, was fully in accord with this decision. In the middle of last month Hussein El-Afuni, director of Red Sea antiquities, travelled to London and was handed the objects before bringing them home. Hawass told Al-Ahram Weekly that the collection was now at the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square, where the items would be restored and placed on special display. He said the collection consisted of 109 ushabti or votive figurines, 94 beads, amulets and fragments, 60 pieces of textiles, 99 potsherds, pieces of basketry and rope, pottery vessels, flint tools, coins, bronze objects, faience objects, cartonnage and fish mummies. The Myers Museum at Eton possesses one of the United Kingdom's oldest collections of ancient Egyptian antiquities. Its principal holdings were bequeathed to the college by Major William Joseph Myers in 1899.
