The Egyptian authorities have announced this Sunday that they have frustrated an attempt to smuggle more than 1,750 archaeological pieces, among which was a statue of the goddess Aphrodite, one day after a robbery occurred in a museum in the town of Sohag , in the south of the country.
The Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities said in a statement that the seizure took place in the seaport of Nuweiba, in the south of the Sinai Peninsula, where more than 1,750 pieces were confiscated from the hands of smugglers, among which there were also old coins.
According to the secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, Mustafa Waziri, these relics were found inside a truck that was transporting fruit and that was intended to take the pieces abroad to sell them.
Most of the pieces belong to the Ptolemaic period (309 BC-30 BC), as well as to the era of the Roman emperors Nero, Hadrian and Antonio Pio, in addition to the statue of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, sensuality and beauty.
The operation took place one day after a robbery occurred in a museum in the town of Sohag, in southern Egypt, in which a hitherto undetermined number of archaeological pieces were stolen, mainly from the time of Ancient Egypt and Islamic.
According to the local press, one of the managers of the museum of the Faculty of Archeology of the University of Sohag found the warehouse door open on Saturday morning, which housed some 700 archaeological pieces, and called the Police, who initiated the procedures relevant.
Egypt tries to prevent the smuggling of antiquities - which are usually sold at very high prices abroad - and makes great diplomatic efforts to recover the stolen objects, which are in private collections around the world and even in museums.
Cases similar to this weekend are frequent in the country of the Nile, with dozens of archaeological missions always active, a traditional looting culture, thousands of sites still intact or half-excavated and a low socioeconomic level. Almost 30 million citizens live below the poverty line and two million subsist on less than a dollar a day, according to data from the NGO Intermon-Oxfam.
In April, former deputy Alaa Hassanein and four other people were sentenced to ten years in prison, accused of taking archaeological goods out of the country. A well-known local businessman and 17 other people were also sentenced, in this case to five years.
In recent years, Egypt has stepped up efforts to stop the smuggling of antiquities, which grew exponentially after the chaos that gripped the country following the 2011 riots that brought down Hosni Mubarak.
Suspects have often been high-profile personalities. In 2020, an actor and brother of the country's former finance minister, Raouf Boutros-Ghali, was sentenced to 30 years in prison for the same crime.
Egypt still has dozens of intact sites, both from the Pharaonic era and from the Greek and Roman eras.
The increase in smuggling led the country to announce that it would not give pieces for temporary exhibitions abroad if those countries do not collaborate in the persecution of smuggling. Between 2016 and 2021, Egypt recovered around 1,000 goods and some 22,000 coins.
The return of pieces that have been looted has been continuous in recent years. One of the most notorious was the one that starred in 2019 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which determined that an ancient gold-plated coffin from the 1st century B.C. exhibited came from looting.
Less than a year ago, at the end of 2021, Spain returned 36 stolen antiquities, including statuettes of gods and goddesses and ancient vessels intended to contain human remains.
The objects - including a granite carving of the lion's head of the warrior goddess Sekhmet - were illegally stolen from archaeological sites, according to Egyptian authorities. The smugglers took them to Spain, where the police seized them after an investigation in 2014, and they were returned in a ceremony at the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid, presided over by the Egyptian ambassador to Spain, Youssef Diaeldin Mekkawy.
The objects, valued at more than 150,000 euros, were probably looted from the Saqqara and Mit Rahina sites, according to Spanish police.
