Egypt says 3000-year-old gold bracelet missing from museum

A 3000-year-old gold bracelet has gone missing from Cairo’s Egyptian Museum, prompting an internal probe. Photo / Getty Images

A 3000-year-old gold bracelet has gone missing from a restoration laboratory of Cairo’s Egyptian Museum, the country’s antiquities ministry said.

The bracelet, described as a golden band adorned with “spherical lapis lazuli beads”, dates to the reign of Amenemope, a pharaoh of Egypt’s 21st Dynasty (1070–945 BC).

The ministry, in its statement issued late Tuesday, did not specify when the piece was last seen.

Egyptian media outlets said the loss was detected in recent days during an inventory check before the “Treasures of the Pharaohs” exhibition scheduled in Rome at the end of October.

An internal probe has been opened, and antiquities units across all Egyptian airports, seaports and land border crossings nationwide have been alerted, the ministry said.

The case was not announced immediately to allow investigations to proceed, and a full inventory of the lab’s contents was under way, it added.

The ministry did not respond to an AFP request for comment.

According to Jean Guillaume Olette-Pelletier, an Egyptologist, the bracelet was discovered in Tanis, in the eastern Nile delta, during archaeological excavations in the tomb of King Psusennes I, where Amenemope had been reburied after the plundering of his original tomb.

“It’s not the most beautiful, but scientifically it’s one of the most interesting” objects, the expert, who has worked in Tanis, told AFP.

He said the bracelet had a fairly simple design but was made of a gold alloy designed to resist deformation. While gold represented the “flesh of the gods”, he said, lapis lazuli, imported from what is now Afghanistan, evoked their hair, he said.

The Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square houses more than 170,000 artefacts, including the famed gold funerary mask of King Amenemope.

The disappearance comes just weeks before the scheduled November 1 inauguration of the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum.

One of the museum’s most iconic collections – the treasures of King Tutankhamun’s tomb – is being prepared for transfer before the opening, which is being positioned as a major cultural milestone under President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s Government.

In 2021, Egypt staged a high-profile parade transferring 22 royal mummies, including Ramses II and Queen Hatshepsut, to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation in Old Cairo – part of a broader effort to boost Egypt’s museum infrastructure and tourism appeal.

-Agence France-Presse