MFA Boston (the Museum of Fine Arts) returned a looted Egyptian coffin to Sweden. Overall, this coffin was a burial place of an Egyptian child named Paneferneb between about 1295 and 1186 B.C.E. This process happened after a discovery, which showed evidence of the artefact being stolen from the Gustavianum, Uppsala University Museum, around 1970.
The coffin resurfaced in 1985… How?
In 1920, the British School of Archaeology in Egypt discovered the coffin in Gurob, Egypt. Flinders Petrie oversaw the excavation. He and his wife Hilda Urlin dug up several significant archaeological sites. One of his most important discoveries in 1896 was the Merneptah Stele. Additionally, in 1905, he found the Proto-Sinaitic script, which is the ancestor of nearly all alphabetic scripts.
The Egyptian authorities established a system of “partage,” or the dividing of findings, at that time. It divided up the findings of the archaeological digs between Egypt and foreign sponsors. As part of that arrangement, in 1922, the coffin transferred to Uppsala University’s Victoria Museum of Egyptian Antiquities. However, by at least 1970, the 43-inch-long, ceramic tomb vanished from sight.
The coffin resurfaced in 1985, when the MFA purchased it from one Olof S. Liden. Liden said he represented Eric Ståhl, the artist. He produced a fake letter in which Ståhl purportedly described excavating the coffin in 1937 near Amada, Egypt. Liden also produced forged certification papers for the coffin, allegedly from Swedish specialists. Ståhl, noted the museum in its announcement of the return of the coffin, “is not known to have participated in any excavation in Egypt”.
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MFA Boston – the Top Tier of Collections
When curators at the MFA saw a picture of the coffin during excavation in the 2008 book Unseen Images: Archive Photographs in the Petrie Museum, they immediately smelt rat foul. They got in touch with the Gustavianum staff after noticing the disparity. The procedure of retrieving the piece began, and the museum’s website said it got deaccessioned in October.
“It has been wonderful working with our colleagues in Uppsala on this matter, and it is always gratifying to see a work of art return to its rightful owner”, said Victoria Reed, senior curator of provenance at the MFA. “In this case, we were fortunate to have an excavation photograph showing where and when the coffin was found, so that we could begin to correct the record”, she also added.
The MFA Boston’s department of the art of ancient Egypt, Nubia, and the Near East includes some 65,000 artifacts. Also, sculpture, jewellery, coffins, mummies, mosaics, and more. This puts it in the top tier of collections of its kind worldwide. Also, there are other institutions, such as the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza and London’s British Museum. The Gustavianum houses a collection of about 5,000 examples.
