By Mark Tanos
Egyptian authorities launched a nationwide search after a 3,000-year-old gold bracelet vanished from Cairo’s Egyptian Museum, officials said Tuesday.
The piece, described as “adorned with spherical lapis lazuli beads belonging to King Amenemope from the Third Intermediate Period,” disappeared from a restoration lab where staff had been preparing it for transport to an exhibition in Rome, according to the Tourism and Antiquities Ministry. (RELATED: ‘Whoever Breaks This Will Die’: Scientists Reportedly Uncover Chilling Ancient Artifact)
Photographs of the missing artifact were circulated to all airports, seaports and land crossings to block smuggling attempts, the ministry said. The museum’s director-general warned that some images online showed different objects, not the missing bracelet.
The ministry said it delayed announcing the theft to avoid compromising the ongoing investigation. A special committee is now auditing artifacts in the museum’s restoration lab to confirm nothing else is missing.
The bracelet belonged to Pharaoh Amenemope, who reigned from 993 to 984 B.C. in Egypt’s 21st dynasty. French Egyptologists Pierre Montet and Georges Goyon uncovered his tomb in 1940, but excavation was postponed until after World War II, NBC News reported. His burial is one of only three fully intact royal burials ever discovered in Egypt.
Lapis lazuli, the deep-blue stone adorning the bracelet, was revered in ancient Egypt as a symbol of the gods and thought to carry healing powers.
The theft joins a long list of high-profile art crimes in Egypt. In 2010, Vincent van Gogh’s “Poppy Flowers” — valued at about $55 million — was stolen from Cairo’s Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Museum, decades after an earlier 1977 theft, according to the outlet. The painting has never been recovered.
