Hawass Biding Time?

There was much discussion about the recent appointment (Sept. 29th) a few weeks before his departure by President Bush of Brent Benjamin as one of his cultural property advisors despite his St Louis museum being famously involved in a scandal over an item which seems to have been stolen from a museum storeroom in Egypt. The Bush regime in this way seemed to be thumbing its nose at world opinion concerned by the apparent rapaciousness of US collections for looted and stolen archaeological artefacts of which this was seen by some of us as symptomatic.

One of the puzzles about this whole affair was that Egypt's Minister of Culture and the usually very vocifereous Zahi Hawass had remained relatively silent on the issue. It now turns out that (according to recent reports) they probably knew that extradition proceedings were under way for Ali Aboutaam, since the beginning of September 2008 sitting in detention apparently in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Aboutaam not only had been convicted in absentia in a 2004 hearing in a Cairo court for alleged involvement in a smuggling ring, but was also the seller of the Ka Nefer Nefer mask in question in the St Louis case. No doubt Egypt thought that very soon they would have the opportunity to question Mr Aboutaam personally about how he got his hands on this object and obtain more details about the collectors which Pheonix Antiquities says gave the object a watertight alibi.

At the beginning of this year, however, it appears that Bulgaria refused to hand over Mr Aboutaam to the Egyptians. Soon after that, the Egyptians made their announcement that he had been detained, presumably in order to provoke discussion of the case.