Repatriation: Louvre items returned to Egypt

Gone are the days when young French writer André Malraux, who would go on to become France’s minister for culture, could chip off four sculptures from a Cambodian temple and ship them back to France. Almost a century later, the French government has officially returned five frescoed fragments from a Luxor tomb to Egypt, ending a row that had poisoned relations between Cairo and Paris.

The artefacts, the last of which was handed over to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak by his French counterpart, Nicolas Sarkozy, in Paris on Monday, are thought to belong to a more than 3,200-year-old tomb in the Valley of the Kings. They were illegally carried out of Egypt in the last century, before the Louvre museum in Paris acquired them in 2000 and 2003.

The fragments’ return home is largely the work of a 62-year-old Egyptian, Zahi Hawass, who has spent the better part of the past decade scouring the world on the hunt for relics from the Pharaoh’s age. “This news fills me with joy. I have sent a delegation from the Cairo museum to fetch them in Paris,” he told FRANCE 24.com in a phone interview from Cairo.

A controversial figure, Hawass has been at the helm of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities since 2002. As such, he alone can grant archaeologists the permits required to carry out excavations in his country.

A few years back he embarked on a mission to repatriate some of the artefacts from Ancient Egypt that are currently held in Western museums. On his website, Hawass boasts of having recovered some 5,000 works of art that had been disseminated across the world. To lay his hands on the Louvre’s relics, he went so far as to withdraw Egypt’s collaboration with the landmark Parisian museum.