Nov. 3 (UPI) — The Netherlands will return a 3,500-year-old sculpture to Egypt, three years after the head turned up at an art fair and exhibition in Maastricht, Dutch Prime Minister Richard Schoof said.
Schoof made the announcement Sunday while in Egypt for a two-day visit that included the official opening of the new Grand Egyptian Museum, which houses more than 100,000 artifacts, including the full contents of Tutankhamun’s tomb and his gold mask.
He met with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, as well as leaders of Belgium and Luxembourg.
The treasure is to be returned by the end of this year.
The artifact is a stone head of a high-ranking official from the dynasty of Pharaoh Thutmose III about 3,500 years ago. The campaigns solidified Egypt as one of the region’s superpowers, according to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Cairo.
The object was stolen during the unrest of the Arab Spring in 2011 or 2012, the Dutch Information and Heritage Inspectorate said in a news release.
It was offered for sale at a fair for visual arts, antiques and design in 2022 in Maastricht in southern Netherlands, close to the borders with Belgium and Germany. It is one of the oldest cities in the nation.
“Following an anonymous tip about the object’s illegal origin, the dealer voluntarily relinquished the sculpture,” the news release said. “The Dutch police and the Inspectorate investigated the head’s provenance and determined that it was obtained through plunder and exported unlawfully.”
The value was “incalculable,” Christopher A. Marinello, a lawyer who helps recover lost art, said in a report by The New York Times.
The Inspectorate said “the sculpture is deeply meaningful to Egypt’s identity. The Netherlands is committed both nationally and internationally to ensuring the return of heritage to its original owners.”
The 1970 UNESCO Convention enacted rules “to prevent the unlawful export of cultural objects and to return unlawfully exported heritage, the inspectorate said.
In 2020, the Netherlands returned a 600-year-old Nigerian artifact smuggled out of the country in 2019 after Nigeria successfully proved its ownership.
And early this year, the Dutch government announced plans to repatriate 113 Benin Bronzes from the Wereldmuseum in Leiden. They were looted by British troops during the 1897 Benin Expedition and later scattered across Europe.
Grand Egyptian Museum construction began in 2005 and opened Monday after a ceremony Saturday. The cost was $1.2 billion, and it is the largest museum in the world dedicated to a single civilization.
“We hope the Grand Egyptian Museum will usher in a new golden age of Egyptology and cultural tourism,” Ahmed Seddik, a guide and aspiring Egyptologist by the pyramids on the Giza Plateau, told the BBC.
The original Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square, which opened in 1902, still contains artifacts on display.
