On Thursday, Kuwait returned to Egypt a group of antiquities based on a prosecutor’s decision that Kuwaiti customs confiscated in 2019 from a traveler on a direct flight from Luxor to Kuwait.
Sultan Al-Mutlaq Al-Dawish, director of the Department of Antiquities and Museums at the Kuwait National Council for Arts, Culture and Literature, said after handing over the exhibits to the Egyptian Ambassador to Kuwait, Usama Shaltout, this is the second time that the Gulf State has smuggled back Egyptian antiquities.
He explained to reporters, “In 2018, we handed over the lid of an Egyptian coffin, and today we are handing over five artifacts, which were identified by customs officers, and after consulting with specialists from Kuwait University who specialize in Egyptian civilization, it turned out that three of them are original, while there are doubts about the remaining two. The pieces are four statues of different sizes, in addition to a stone panel divided into three parts.
For his part, the Egyptian ambassador told reporters on the sidelines of the artifacts reception at the National Museum of Kuwait that the artifacts will return to Egypt on Thursday and will be subjected to further research to determine their importance, while the Egyptian judiciary is figuring out how to remove them from Egypt.
It comes at the height of a case involving the smuggling of millions of dollars worth of Egyptian antiquities, including from the Louvre in France and Louvre Abu Dhabi. Earlier this month, New York prosecutors confiscated five Egyptian artifacts that were in the possession of the prestigious Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The move was a new development in the context of the investigation by the French authorities of the smuggling of antiquities against the former director of the Louvre. This investigation into a large network that smuggles antiquities from the Middle East reveals large-scale illegal trade since the Arab Spring, experts interviewed by AFP said.
At the heart of this smuggling movement: looted artifacts from archaeological sites, including tombs resembling “real open-air supermarkets”, in “countries experiencing war or political unrest”, such as Syria, Iraq or Egypt, as well as “in Latin America and Africa,” and on the other, says Vincent Michel, professor of oriental archeology at the University of Poitiers. Although it is impossible to estimate its value in numbers, the smuggling of international antiquities definitely reaches “tens of millions or even hundreds of millions” of dollars.
