Public Lecture on Cairo Museum Looting in London

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Dr Wafaa El Saddik will be giving a public lecture, 'The Day of Rage' today (Monday, 15 October 2012)  from 19:00 to 20:30, at Leighton House Museum 12 Holland Park Rd London W14, looking at the impact of the past 12 months on Egyptian heritage and the challenges ahead.   If anyone's going, I'd love to hear from them what was said.

UPDATE 16.10.12
Margaret Maitland  of the BM went and Twittered a few comments and it would be great to see a more detailed account on the 'Eloquent Peasant' blog. At the moment she says the talk: "possibly raised even more questions than it answered!". I suppose one cannot expect much more, the woman was Director of the Museum for a goodly time and some of the security failures can presumably be blamed as much on her inability to deal with them as her successor's. Equally, it is clear that there has been a cover-up of the real course of events and I suspect that Dr El Saddik will be aware of the need still to protect some of her former colleagues in the museum by not saying everything. Thus it is we read on Dr Maitland's Twitter feed:

 She wouldn’t respond to query abt if it was an inside job but said she didn’t believe thieves could have removed 70 objs via a rope and roof 

We remember of course that it was her insistance that it was an inside job that was at the basis of virtually all the later discussion going on outside Egypt on that topic. Now it seems she is being more cagey than she was on 29th January 2011. No the objects were not removed by "rope" because I am pretty sure there was no rope. I find it odd to read this:

Saddik said that the roof windows of the museum were regularly left open at night b/c of lack of a/c 

first of all, it was my impression from looking at them from below that the majority of the skylight windows do not open. There is no mechanism that would allow this from the inside. The open windows at roof level (and I saw more than a dozen) looked to have had missing panes. I am not sure of the significance of this:

Saddik said that the security footage from the Egyptian museum from the night of the looting had been confiscated by the state security. 

Which "security" would this be in the final days of January 2011? The Army? Is this sinister (to prevent the identity of those in the Museum being discovered), or is it what one would expect if they were investigating a crime? What is more interesting is where those tapes are now. But in any case, which cameras are we talking about? It seems to me that the ones in the actual galleries many not have been turned on at the time of the raid, and as I reported here, they seemed not to be functioning when I visited a few weeks later. In any case, we learn from a later report that the lights were turned off to prevent the 'thieves' seeing what they were doing. The cameras on the outside of the Museum (on the south and east at least) were directed on the night of the 28th Jan not at the area around the Museum, but the square and streets outside its walls and were being used by the State Security services to film the anti-government demonstrations. They were still pointed there when I visited.

Two of the tweets refer to the stolen objects:

Saddik said she was sad that a statue of Nefertiti with an offering table that she’d found in storage and put on display was stolen [...] She said she’d heard that the Nefertiti statue had ended up in an Arab Gulf state and an Amarna princess head had been sighted in Munich 

Hmm.These two objects were in the same case on the ground floor (while most of the other stolen and displaced objects were from the first floor galleries). My feeling is that the objects are still in Egypt, so it would be useful to know how firm the information (which by its nature can only be rumour) is that the people who took the Amarna material have managed to get it out of the country. Did they both go to "an Arab Gulf State" as a number of stolen Egyptian artefacts have been doing in recent years (itself begging a few questions as to who has been involved) and then one sold on to Munich, or did they travel the other way, first to Europe? Were those who looted the Amarna case from the same group of men as those who got the other stuff? We recall the odd story about the figurine of Akhenaton which had also been taken from this case and was 'found' (abandoned, so the story goes) in a pile of rubbish just off Tahrir Square (though versions of that story too differ). Did the stolen Amarna objects have a different fate from the rest?

Photo: Is this unfinished statuette  43 cm tall JE 44867 really what an oil rich collector covets most from among the stolen material?