Ashraf AboArafe
With the support and coordination between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, the Embassy of the Arab Republic of Egypt in The Hague received three ancient Egyptian artefacts from the relevant Dutch authorities. The handover ceremony was held at the embassy headquarters in the presence of officials from the Dutch Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Science and Culture, in addition to officials from the Cultural Heritage Inspection Department and the Cultural Crimes Unit of the Dutch Police. The ceremony witnessed the signing of documents for the receipt of the artefacts by Ambassador Hatem Abdel Qader, Ambassador of the Arab Republic of Egypt to the Kingdom of the Netherlands, in preparation for their rapid transfer to Egypt.
The recovered artifacts included a ceramic ushabti statue of a deceased named Abithamos, dating back to the New Kingdom between the 26th and 30th Dynasties, dating back to between 664 and 332 BC, parts of a wooden coffin with inscriptions depicting the goddess Isis, believed to have belonged to the 26th or 27th Dynasty of ancient Egypt, dating back to between 663 and 504 BC, and the head of an unknown mummy, believed to be of a deceased from the Hellenistic period between 170 and 45 BC. The ushabti statue and parts of the coffin that were received by the Egyptian embassy were confiscated by the Cultural Heritage Inspection Department and the Dutch police after it was found that there were no documents regarding them and it was suspected that they had left Egypt illegally. Meanwhile, a Dutch citizen handed over the mummy head that was in his possession to the Dutch police after it had been inherited by his family, as part of his awareness of the importance of preserving cultural property and returning antiquities to their countries of origin, which was appreciated by the embassy and the Dutch authorities. The Ambassador took this opportunity to deliver a speech in which he stressed the importance of cooperation to protect cultural property and combat smuggling and trafficking in antiquities as an important and common heritage of humanity. He reviewed the efforts of the Egyptian government to recover antiquities smuggled abroad through various national monitoring and follow-up units and in cooperation and coordination with relevant international bodies or countries on whose territories these pieces are traded. He also shed light on the phenomenon of trading antiquities on some platforms on websites and in electronic auctions, stressing the need to devote more effort to controlling and governing this electronic space and tightening control over it in order to limit this phenomenon that has become a concern for many countries.
