A 3,000-year-old head sculpture of Tutankhamun, the youngest Egyptian pharaoh known as King Tut is set for a major sale this week in London amidst protest by the Egyptians.
Christie’s the oldest auctioning house expects the 28.5-centimeter (11-inch) brown quartzite relic from the Valley of the Kings to fetch more than £4 million approximately $5.1 million on Thursday. According to the Financial Times it will be the first such Egyptian statuette to go on the market since 1985.
The pharaoh’s finely-chiselled head reportedly originates from the private Resandro Collection of ancient art that Christie’s last sold in 2016 for £3 million.
But even as the hammer prepares to fall this Thursday, authorities tasked with collection of antiquities in Egypt want to see the auction halted and the treasure returned to Cairo.
“The Egyptian embassy in London requested the British foreign affairs ministry and the auction hall to stop the sale,” Egypt’s foreign ministry said on June 10.
Speaking to AFP on Sunday the then antiquities minister Zahi Hawass claimed that the piece appears to have been “stolen” in the 1970s from the Karnak Temple complex of Egypt’s great monuments.
“The owners have given false information and that they have not shown any legal documents to prove ownership, ” he said in a telephone interview.
But the French-owned British auction house on their part said the current lot was acquired by Resandro from a Munich-based dealer in 1985.
It traces its prior origins to the 1973-74 acquisition by another dealer in Austria from the Princely House of Thurn and Taxis in modern-day Germany.
Little information is available publicly as to how the statue found its way to Europe.
Christie’s in a statement said ancient objects by their nature cannot be traced over millennia.
“It is hugely important to establish recent ownership and legal right to sell which we have clearly done, we would not offer for sale any object where there were concerns over ownership or export.” the statement further said.
The British Foreign Office is not expected to intervene in the auction despite having been in talks with Egyptian authorities.
Down memory lane
Tutankhamun is believed to have become a pharaoh at the age of nine and died about a decade later three millennia ago.
His nearly intact tomb was discovered by Britain’s Howard Carter in 1922 which brought to the limelight his reign.
According to the international conventions and the British government’s regulations the sale of works that were known to have been stolen or illegally dug up is restricted.
Egypt has been on a quest to recover lost art especially after numerous works went missing during the looting witnessed after former president Hosni Mubarak was dethroned in 2011 during the Arab spring.
Mubarak turned the existing supreme council of antiquities into a separate ministry in the last year of his rule.The ministry has been working with the Los Angeles-based Getty Conservation Institute to repair Tutankhamun’s tomb from the damage it sustained from the soaring numbers of tourists over the recent past.
The ministry also sought help from the UN cultural body-UNESCO to halt Christie’s sale.
The North African country has however not been able to lodge its case with firm proof that the sculpture was illegally acquired.
The London auction house said in its defence that there was a “legitimate market for works of art of the ancient world in which Christie’s has participated for generations”.
The British Museum has been wrangling for decades with Greece over its remarkable room full of marble Parthenon friezes and sculptures.
