Free Republic

Goneim dubbed the woman Ka-Nefer-Nefer: the Twice-Beautiful Ka. So taken was Goneim with Ka-Nefer-Nefer (pronounced caw nef-er nef-er) that he would publish photographs of the mask in three subsequent books about the excavation. But amid the excitement of the dig in 1952, her fate was obscured. She would disappear from public view for nearly 50 years. More precisely, until 1998, when the Saint Louis Art Museum purchased the mask for a half-million dollars from Phoenix Ancient Art, an antiquities dealership owned by the Lebanese brothers Hicham and Ali Aboutaam.

A recent Associated Press article reports that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is now looking into the provenance of the Ka-Nefer-Nefer mask, a 3,000-year-old Egyptian relic acquired in the late 1990s by the Saint Louis Art Museum. The mask, said to date back to the Nineteenth Dynasty (1293-1185 B.C.), was unearthed early in 1952 by an up-and-coming Egyptian archaeologist named Mohammed Zakaria Goneim. It is now at the center of a long-running ownership dispute between the art museum and the Egyptian government. The set-to was the topic of an in-depth Riverfront Times story by Malcolm Gay, "Out of Egypt,"...

CAIRO -- Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities said on Thursday that it has asked a US museum to return a Pharaoh's golden mask, which it said had disappeared from a storage area in Cairo's Egyptian Museum. It asked the Saint Louis Art Museum in Missouri to return the mask of Ka-Nefer-Nefer, which it said dated to the XIX dynasty and had been spotted by an Egyptologist in a recent tour of the Missouri museum collection. The mummy mask "was discovered by Egyptian archaeologist Mohammed Zakaria Ghoneim in 1952 and was placed in the museum's storage area in 1959", said a...