Three years after the seizure on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork in New York of a €3.5m golden sarcophagus, now restituted to Egypt, 5 different Egyptian antiques on the museum, value greater than €3m, have been confiscated by the New York District Lawyer’s Workplace.
The seizure is the most recent growth within the investigation into a global trafficking ring that led to a sequence of indictements final week in Paris, together with in opposition to the previous director of the Louvre, Jean-Luc Martinez.
The DA’s workplace confirmed to The Artwork Newspaper {that a} warrant signed on 19 Might by a Supreme Courtroom choose has been executed. The warrant says that the 5 artefacts represent proof tending “to show the crimes of prison possession of stolen property“ and “conspiracy to commit the identical crimes“.
4 of those items had been listed by The Artwork Newspaper as coming from Roben Dib, the German-Lebanese seller suspected to be the important thing determine within the trafficking ring. He’s now detained in Paris and denies any wrongdoing.
The Met has been questioned a number of occasions since 2019 concerning the destiny of this stuff, and if it could think about their return to Egypt; the museum has all the time declined to reply. However, after this week’s seizure, a spokesperson reaffirmed “its staff had been deceived by this prison conspiracy and the museum has been totally cooperative all through this investigation and can proceed to be so“.
Two of those objects are distinctive. A Fayum portrait of a girl in a blue coat, courting from Nero’s reign, was thought-about the jewel of the funerary Egyptian portraits’ assortment of the museum. And 5 fragments of a wall hanging illustrating the E-book of Exodus painted on linen, from the 4th or fifth century, represent one of many oldest representations of the crossing of the Purple Sea. Fewer than 10 related vintage ornament fragments are registered in museums just like the Met or the Louvre.
Each gadgets had been offered by means of Pierre Bergé public sale home in Paris, the place one of many investigation’s most important suspects, Christophe Kunicki, was working as professional. Within the catalogues of those antiquities, Kunicki gave “a European assortment“ as sole provenance. The investigators imagine it to be the Simonian assortment, coming from three brothers of Armenian descent, Simon, Hagop and Serop Simonian, for whom Roben Dib was working. In his report in 2019 for one of many golden sarcophagi bought instantly from Kunicki, the chief of the Antiquities trafficking unit of the DA’s workplace, Matthew Bogdanos, had already identified severe flaws within the provenance analysis by the Egyptian division of the Met.
Between 2013 and 2015, together with the Fayum portrait (value €1.5m) and the fragments from the E-book of Exodus (value €1.3m), the Met additionally purchased a limestone stele within the mannequin of a chapel devoted to Kemes, patron of the musicians, from the thirteenth Dynasty (round 1770 BC), for €250,000, and a twenty sixth dynasty (round 650 BC) stele representing a singer in entrance of an choices desk with choices to the god Hathor for €80,000.
The DA’s workplace didn’t touch upon the motives for its motion, however, in keeping with paperwork seen in Paris by The Artwork Newspaper, all these items had been placed on sale by Dib, in a single case beneath the identify of his mom. They had been seized on the museum alongside a sarcophagus masks, valued by the DA’s workplace at $6,500 (€6,000).
The work of the exodus and the Fayum portrait had been by far essentially the most useful items on a listing of 29 Japanese archeological items, offered between 2007 and 2019 and investigated in Paris by the Workplace in opposition to Artwork Trafficking (OCBC). Fourteen had been placed on sale by Dib, in 4 circumstances beneath the identify of his mom or his sister. Certainly one of them was a stele, from the Simonian’s assortment, representing a excessive priest in entrance of an providing desk, which was seized in New York on its method to The European Advantageous Artwork and Antiques Honest (Tefaf) and returned to Egypt in 2020.
A French officer from the OCBC has arrived in New York to listen to proof from a number of witnesses, together with representatives of the Metropolitan, and change data with Bogdanos, who initiated the trafficking investigation in 2013.