Belgium Returns Ancient Egyptian Sarcophagus
(MENAFN) Belgium has officially handed back a wooden sarcophagus estimated to be around 2,000 years old to Egypt, following an extensive investigation and legal process that lasted ten years, authorities in Brussels revealed on Friday.
This return is part of a growing trend in which stolen cultural treasures are being restored to Egypt, a nation that has seen numerous repatriations in recent years.
The coffin, which originates from Egypt’s Ptolemaic period—an era marked by the rule of a Greek lineage—was retrieved after it was discovered that it had been illegally trafficked into Belgium through underground art trafficking routes.
Authorities confiscated the artifact in 2015 after receiving an Interpol notification from Cairo. Since then, it had been stored at the Royal Museum of Art and History in Brussels, awaiting confirmation through judicial channels.
According to a declaration from the Brussels Public Prosecutor’s Office, the wooden casket, designed in the likeness of a mummified male figure, “undoubtedly belonged to a member of Egyptian high society.”
The office noted that the sarcophagus’s “golden face and bluish hair are divine attributes, indicating that the deceased transformed into the form of the god Osiris, ruler of the underworld.”
Carvings of hieroglyphs—Egypt’s ancient symbolic writing—on the surface of the coffin enabled researchers to determine the identity of the individual once interred within.
The man was identified as Pa-di-Hor-pa-khered, according to the same statement.
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