Two percent of historical artifacts held in government storehouses were stolen during the period of lax security that followed the 25 January revolution, Minister of Antiquities Mohamed Ibrahim Ali said Monday.
In a meeting with Parliament’s Culture, Media and Tourism Committee, Ali said Egypt has managed to retrieve 6,000 artifacts that had been smuggled into Israel.
Since January 2011, the Ministry of Antiquities has blamed increased artifact theft across Egypt on the security vacuum that followed the January uprising.
In March, the ministry said an estimated 800 artifacts from the Pharaonic, Roman and Islamic eras had been damaged or stolen since last February.
A statement issued by the ministry last April said the ministry did not have accurate statistics for the number of pieces stolen after the revolution.
Ali said all artifact storehouses are currently well-secured and that procedures have been undertaken to prevent the smuggling of artifacts outside the country. All pieces in storehouses and museums are documented, he said, though 35 percent of Egypt’s total artifacts remain undocumented.
The minister said his ministry will soon begin negotiating for the restoration of artifacts smuggled to Belgium, France and the US.
The minister told the committee that some artifacts have left the country by legal means in the past months under a former law that gave excavation teams the right to take half of the artifacts they discovered. The percentage has been cut to 5 percent, he said, and a ban has been imposed on the exit of skeletons and manuscripts.
