Stolen Mummy Hand Makes Its Way Home

This mummy hand, from the eighth century B.C., had been smuggled into the USA from Egypt.

Credit score: Josh Denmark/ICE

The blackened, cloth-wrapped hand arrived in a parcel at Los Angeles Worldwide Airport in January 2013. It was listed as a sci-fi film prop, valued at $66. However as officers with U.S. Customs and Border Safety realized, the hand was from an actual Egyptian mummy, practically three,000 years previous.

The hand was apparently voluntarily forfeited by the importer, and this week, U.S. authorities repatriated it and 4 different illegally smuggled artifacts to Egypt as a part of an ongoing investigation referred to as "Operation Mummy's Curse."

"It is kind of superb the issues individuals will attempt to ship throughout worldwide borders," archaeologist Fredrik Hiebert, a Nationwide Geographic fellow, mentioned in a video assertion. [See Photos of the Mummy Hand and Other Artifacts Returned to Egypt]

Along with the eighth-century-B.C. mummy hand, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, additionally returned intricately painted historic sarcophagi in a ceremony on the Egyptian embassy in Washington, D.C., on Thursday (Dec. 1).

"Whereas we acknowledge that cultural property, artwork and antiquities are assigned a greenback worth within the market, the cultural and symbolic price of those Egyptian treasures far surpasses any financial worth to the individuals of Egypt," ICE Director Sarah Saldaña mentioned throughout her remarks.

ICE launched "Operation Mummy's Curse" in 2009 to bust a community of antiquities smugglers bringing illicit artifacts from different international locations into the USA. Saldaña mentioned her company has made 4 arrests and two convictions on this investigation.

The operation has additionally recovered about 7,000 artifacts, not simply from Egypt, but additionally from Greece, India and Iraq. ICE has already returned a lot of these cultural objects in previous repatriation ceremonies. In March 2015, for instance, ICE returned artifacts to Iraqi officers, together with an historic Sumerian ax that was being offered on Craigslist in 2012 in addition to a gold-plated cleaning soap dish from Saddam Hussein's palace that turned up in Connecticut. In April 2015, ICE handed over dozens of different artifacts to Egypt, together with a nesting sarcophagus the company recovered from a storage in Brooklyn, New York.

Although worldwide treaties and Egyptian legal guidelines shield Egyptian artifacts, a black marketplace for antiquities thrives. Utilizing satellite tv for pc knowledge, researchers have documented an uptick in unlawful excavations throughout archaeological websites in Egypt during the last decade.

Smugglers utilizing solid papers can convey looted materials into the U.S. beneath the guise of a strong authorized antiquities market. Census Bureau paperwork present that about $26 million price of artifacts had been exported from Egypt to the USA simply in the course of the first 5 months of 2016. However that might change. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry signed an settlement with Egypt on Tuesday (Nov. 29) that imposes harder import restrictions on Egyptian archaeological materials that dates from 5200 B.C. to A.D. 1517.

Authentic article on Reside Science.

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