Australian Museum Repatriates Ancient Egyptian Carving

CAIRO, EGYPT—One of four fragments of a relief thought to have been smuggled out of Egypt in the 1990s has been found in Australia’s Macquarie Museum, according to an Ahram Online report. The relief, which belonged to an official named Seshen Nefertum, was unearthed in the El-Assasif necropolis on Luxor’s West Bank by an Italian archaeological mission sometime between 1976 and 1988. An inventory of an antiquities storehouse revealed it was missing in 1995, explained Shanan Abdel-Gawad of Egypt’s Antiquities Repatriation Department. The other three pieces of the carved stone were recovered in Switzerland in 2017. To read in-depth about excavations at Heliopolis, once the most sacred site on the Nile, go to “Egypt's Eternal City.”