Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said Wednesday that it took measures to verify the documents of two Egyptian artefacts auctioned at Swan Fine Art auction house in Tetsworth village in the UK.
It added that these measures were taken in coordination with the Egyptian Foreign Ministry and the Egyptian embassy in London, with the aim of knowing how these two pieces got out of Egypt.
“We will take the necessary action to stop the auction, if we prove that the two pieces exited our country in an illegal manner,” Mustafa Waziri, the secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), the executive arm of the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, said.
He added that his council would coordinate with concerned agencies in Egypt and the UK to recover the two pieces, if they prove to have got out of Egypt illegally.
The two pieces auctioned at the Swan Fine Art are the head and the hand of an ancient Egyptian mummy, according to Shaaban Abdel-Gawad, General Supervisor of Antiquities Repatriation Department at the ministry.
“It is not ethical to put human remains on sale,” Abdel-Gawad said.
“They are not pieces of art that can be acquired in homes, but rather parts of human bodies that must be respected and appreciated,” he added.
Egypt has so far succeeded in recovering as many as 30,000 artefacts that were looted and illegally smuggled out of it in the past period.
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