Authorities in Egypt are on the hunt for a 3,000-year-old gold bracelet, once owned by a pharaoh, which has disappeared from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
The gold bracelet adorned with a lapis lazuli bead was last seen in the restoration laboratory of the museum in Tahrir Square, Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said in a statement. The matter has now been referred to law enforcement and the public prosecution office, it added.
An image of the bracelet has been distributed to all airports, seaports and land border crossings in the country “as a precautionary step to prevent smuggling attempts,” the statement, posted on Facebook, said. The museum’s director general clarified that some pictures circulating of a bracelet online were not of the missing item but of another currently on display at the museum.
The priceless bracelet belonged to King Amenemope from the Third Intermediate Period (c. 1076 to 723 BC). According to the museum’s website, Amenemope was “a little-known but intriguing sovereign of Egypt’s 21st Dynasty” who was “originally interred in the modest single-chamber tomb NRT IV within the royal necropolis at Tanis, in the eastern Nile Delta.”
But several years after his burial, his body was reinterred to lie beside Psusennes I, one of the most powerful kings of the period. His tomb was rediscovered in 1940.
Christos Tsirogiannis is a forensic archaeologist based at Cambridge University who specialises in research into international trafficking networks in the antiquities and art markets.
He said news of the bracelet’s disappearance is “not surprising” given the huge market for antiquities and said there are several possibilities for what might have happened to it.
