Al Ahly Bank returns 200 Egyptian objects | drhawass.com

Primary links

People often ask me, ‘well, it’s not really as exciting as Indiana Jones, now is it?’
I reply, ‘to an archaeologist, yes, it certainly is!’

— Zahi Hawass

Al Ahly Bank returns 200 Egyptian objects

Minister of Culture, Farouk Hosny, announced that the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) received 200 artifacts from Al-Ahly National Bank yesterday and have stored them in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo for restoration and documentation.

A delicately carved wooden hand, broken off from a piece of statuary. This hand, along with 200 other objects, were given to the SCA by Al-Ahly bank (Photo: SCA)

Dr. Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of the SCA, said that the recovered collection was stored in the treasury of the bank since the early 20^th century and that it included objects from the ancient Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Coptic and Islamic eras. Among the objects are limestone statuary heads of ancient Egyptian and Greco-Roman deities such as Horus, Hathor and Ptah, as well as Roman terracotta statues and twenty coins from the Islamic and Modern period. Hawass added that two archaeological and legal committees inspected the collection and confirmed the objects’ authenticity.

Chairman of the Al-Ahly Bank, Dr. Tarek Amer, stated that these objects were in the possession of foreigners who lived in Egypt during the late 19^th and 20^th centuries. The foreigners were obviously antiquities collectors and had stored their collection inside two treasuries of the bank. Since the early 20^th century nobody had asked about the objects and they remained under the banks care until the executive board of the bank decided to offer the pieces to the SCA.

A marble head of Serapis, a Greco-Roman deity in Egypt. This and 200 other pieces are now under conservation at the Egyptian Museum, Cairo. (Photo: SCA) Dr. Hussein Abdel Bassir, head of the committee who inspected the objects, said that all of the objects, which were stored in three boxes in the bank’s vaults, are totally genuine and most of them are very well preserved.