CAIRO: Egypt will get back the stolen eye of King Amenhotep III statue from the Basel museum in Switzerland after an agreement was reached with officials there. Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni announced yesterday that Egypt will retrieve the eye in October. The eye was stolen from Egypt 36 years ago. According to the agreement, an Egyptian archeologist will travel to Switzerland to receive the statue s eye from the museum. I reached a deal with the museum officials to return the 50 cm tall statue s eye, which was stolen from the statue during its relocation at Kom El Hetan in the western bank of Luxor after a fire broke out in 1972, said Zahi Hawass, secretary general of the Supreme Council for Antiquities (SCA). Hawass said the stolen eye was sold to antiquities merchant Norbert Shem, who then sold it in a Sotheby s auction to another German antiquities merchant who in turn lent it to the Swiss museum. In the two years of talks between him and Museum Manager Peter Bloom, the SCA refused to pay the German merchant anything in exchange of the eye, Hawass said. The museum decided to give it to Egypt as a gift, "unconditionally. Considered one of the biggest statues of King Amenhotep III, it was discovered in 1970 at the Amenhotep Temple in Luxor. In 2003, the SCA established the Department for Retrieving Stolen Artifacts to trace stolen artifacts and has since retrieved 5,000 monuments from different countries, including the mummy of King Ramsis, two Egyptian masks and the statute of King Amenhotep. The latest finds returned to Egypt are the remnants of hair, linen bandages and resin used in the mummification of the 19th dynasty King Ramsis, which had been in France for 30 years. Two alabaster duck-shaped food boxes from Dahshur were also returned. The SCA has been negotiating the return of the famous limestone bust of Nefertiti from Germany, which was taken out of the country in 1912 when Ludwig Borchardt, one of the excavators of Tel El-Amarna, found it in a sculptor's workshop.
