According to a press release issued by the Ministry of Antiquities, the Egyptian Embassy in Amsterdam received a limestone bust which had been stolen from an illegal excavation. The artifact had also been illegally smuggled out of the country. Shaaban Abdel-Gawad, General Supervisor of Antiquities Repatriation Department, stated that the Ministry of Antiquities had observed and monitored this bust among the objects on display at the an art exhibition in Amsterdam, on March 2018. According to Abdel-Gawad, the Ministry immediately reported the incident to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs which reported the case to the concerned Dutch authorities and police. Legal procedures were taken in order to confiscate the bust and inform the hall as well as the possessor of the bust that it constituted a stolen artifact from Egypt. Abdel-Gawad explained that the statue was stolen from an archaeological site in Saqqara in the 1990s. The bust, depicts the upper part of a statue of a standing man with arms extended by his sides. He is depicted as wearing a short kilt. The hieroglyphic text carved on his right arm “Nekaw-Ptah”, reveals that he a top official from the…
