3,200-year-old mummy mask to stay in US

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Court rules no proof artefact that went missing four decades ago from Egypt and ended up in Missouri was stolen St Louis A St Louis museum can keep hold of a 3,200-year-old mummy's mask, a federal judge has ruled, saying the US government failed to prove that the Egyptian relic was ever stolen. Prosecutors said the funeral mask of Lady Ka-Nefer-Nefer went missing from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo about 40 years ago and that it should be returned to its country of origin. The St Louis Art Museum said it researched the provenance of the mask and legitimately purchased it in 1998 from a New York art dealer. US District Judge Henry Autry in St Louis sided with the museum. The US government "does not provide a factual statement of theft, smuggling or clandestine importation," Autry wrote in the March 31 ruling."The Government cannot simply rest on its laurels and believe that it can initiate a civil forfeiture proceeding on the basis of one bold assertion that because something went missing from one party in 1973 and turned up with another party in 1998, it was therefore stolen and/or imported or exported illegally," the judge wrote. A message left with Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities was not returned.The 50-centimetre-long funeral mask of painted and gilded plaster-coated linen over wood with inlaid glass eyes was excavated from one of the Saqqara pyramids, about 25 kilometres south of Cairo, in 1952. Ka-Nefer-Nefer was a noblewoman who lived from 1295 BC to 1186 BC. Exhibit US government investigators suspect the mask was stolen sometime between 1966, when it was shipped to Cairo for an exhibit, and 1973, when the Egyptian Museum discovered it was missing. The art museum bought the mask in 1998 for $499,000 (Dh1.8 million) from a New York art dealer, and it has been on display at the museum in Forest Park ever since. US Attorney Richard Callahan said a decision on whether to appeal has not been made. "We're just looking to make sure we haven't missed the tiniest bit of circumstantial evidence," Callahan said. "We're back to the drawing board and studying it."