Pharaoh’s priceless bracelet missing from Cairo museum

By Lianne Kolirin, CNN

(CNN) — Authorities in Egypt are on the hunt for a 3,000-year-old gold bracelet, once owned by a pharaoh, which has disappeared from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

The gold bracelet adorned with a lapis lazuli bead was last seen in the restoration laboratory of the museum in Tahrir Square, Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said in a statement. The matter has now been referred to law enforcement and the public prosecution office, it added.

An image of the bracelet has been distributed to all airports, seaports and land border crossings in the country “as a precautionary step to prevent smuggling attempts,” the statement, posted on Facebook, said. The museum’s director general clarified that some pictures circulating of a bracelet online were not of the missing item but of another currently on display at the museum.

The priceless bracelet belonged to King Amenemope from the Third Intermediate Period (c. 1076 to 723 BC). According to the museum’s website, Amenemope was “a little-known but intriguing sovereign of Egypt’s 21st Dynasty” who was “originally interred in the modest single-chamber tomb NRT IV within the royal necropolis at Tanis, in the eastern Nile Delta.”

But several years after his burial, his body was reinterred to lie beside Psusennes I, one of the most powerful kings of the period. His tomb was rediscovered in 1940.

Christos Tsirogiannis is a forensic archaeologist based at Cambridge University who specialises in research into international trafficking networks in the antiquities and art markets.

He said news of the bracelet’s disappearance is “not surprising” given the huge market for antiquities and said there are several possibilities for what might have happened to it.

“The first is that it was stolen and smuggled out and so it will show up sooner or later either on an online platform or at a dealer’s gallery or auction house,” he said, adding that the item would in that case be accompanied by “forged provenance or something vague.”

The second scenario is that it is melted down for gold. This would be less profitable than selling the artifact itself, said Tsirogiannis, but would reduce the risk of it being identified.

Alternatively, the bracelet could end up in a private collection. “The collector would know it’s stolen but it wouldn’t go outside their collection,” said Tsirogiannis.

“Another possibility is that the appropriator will return it or it might be found in the vicinity of the museum,” he said. “There have been such cases in the past, especially in Egypt during the Arab Spring, where some of the objects taken from museums were found a couple of days later in the garden or were left at the museums.”

All of the other artifacts in the restoration laboratory will now be inventoried and reviewed by a specialist committee, the ministry said.

The illegal trade in ancient Egyptian artifacts has long been a concern for the north African country. Last year, the Egyptian authorities arrested two men for attempting to steal hundreds of ancient artifacts from the bottom of the sea. The men took the artifacts from the sea floor of Abu Qir Bay, near the port city of Alexandria, the ministry said at the time. When confronted by authorities, the men admitted that they had planned to traffic the items.

Nadeen Ebrahim, Catherine Nicholls and Mostafa Salem contributed to this report

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