Cairo - A two-day conference on bringing back ancient relics to their home countries opened Wednesday with Egypt's chief archeologist appealing for affected nations to unite to pressure Western museums to send them back. “We need to cooperate,” Zahi Hawass, who heads the Supreme Council of Antiquities, told delegates from 15 other countries. “We need to fight together.” The delegates should produce one list of artifacts that should return home, he said. The meeting, held at an administration building next to Cairo's opera house, included delegates from Italy, Greece and China, all of which have pressed from relic restitution. Hawass has been lobbying for the 3,300-year-old bust of Queen Nefertiti from Berlin's Neues Museum and the Rosetta Stone from London's British Museum. Among other prominent demands: Greece wants the British Museum to return the Elgin Marbles, sculptures removed from the Parthenon in the early 19th-century; Mexico seeks the feathered headdress of Montezuma, the Aztec ruler deposed by Spanish conquistadors, which is now in Vienna's Museum of Ethnology; Nigerians wants bronzes back from the British Museum. International rules and treaties are of little use in getting key relics back, Hawass said in an interview today. Several international conventions since 1954 have prohibited wartime looting, theft and resale of artifacts. The agreements don't apply to items taken abroad before national or global laws were in force. “Forget the legal issue,” Hawass said. “Important icons should be in their motherland, period.” Hawass, 62, banned France from exploring ancient sites in Egypt last October to get Paris's Louvre Museum to return frescoes removed from Egypt in the 1980s. The Louvre complied because “serious doubts” emerged about “the legality of their exit from Egyptian territory,” France's Culture Ministry said at the time.
