The Night of the Counting of Years (1969)

On one of the artefact forums there is a discussion of a 1969 Egyptian film classic "The Night of the Counting of Years" (also known as "The Mummy") available on the Internet Archive. The story is a fictionalised version of the tale of the 1881 reporting of the Deir El-Bahari Cache of royal mummies (DB320/TT320 near the village of Qurna). A mountain clan had been robbing the cache and selling the artefacts on the black market. After a conflict within the clan, one of its members went to the police, helping the Antiquities Service find the cache. What is interesting is the way the neglected ruins and artefacts of the lost past are shown as affecting both local ways of life, but also identity. The hero Wanis grew up among the ruins of Western Thebes, the monuments of dead kings were his "childhood companions", and when he is shown the destruction of their graves to feed the greedy outside markets with saleable trinkets, he is horrified. There are a lot of themes in this admittedly slow-moving film.

Since an Egyptian film maker in 1969 was apparently aware of the political and ideological issues surrounding the movement of ancient artefacts from one milieu to another, from one place to another, it is all the more surprising to see the tub-thumpers of the US collecting milieu (e.g., Peter Tompa: When Ancient Artifacts Become Political Pawns ; the "Hooker Papers") trying to present these issues as some novel concept they have just discovered which allegedly overturns the logic of the arguments of the preservationists. Also it is worth noting where the position of the ACCG advocates of a free trade in portable antiquities fits in the picture portrayed in this film. Ayyub the dealer has not too positive a role to play here, neither do those who supply him.