On August 16, 2013 while Egypt was witnessed the aftermath following the dispersal of Rabaa and Nahda sits in ,the Mallawi museum in the city of Mallawi , Minya governorate was completely looted and destroyed.
For hours the museum was looted completely and the police did nothing , it did not stop the looters. I ran through the photos of the looted antiquities and one thing for sure the looters did not come individually but they came in big pick up in order to transfer that large amount of artifacts. Here is a slide show for the museum from “Egypt’s heritage task force”
It is very sad.
Officially 1089 artifacts were stolen from that museum. Only 216 artifacts have been restored so far.
Of course people and media back in Cairo accused the Muslim brotherhood and Islamists especially that there were on going attacks against Churches and shops owned by Christians in the same governorate at the same time. Well I do not think they are Islamists but rather the antiquities traders and their thugs in the area. I believe the looters and their bosses of antiquities traders seized the opportunity in the chaos.
Well regardless of the police ,I wonder why all those years since the inauguration of that valuable museum in 1960s, it did not have enough modern security systems at all !!
To be honest I admit that as Egyptian , it is the first time I know that there is a museum in Mallawi in the first place let alone a very rich and important museum like that despite it was founded in 1962 !!!
Anyhow in an attempt to save what we can save from our stolen heritage , archeological Facebook pages published some of the stolen artifacts including some of their descriptions.
Many of the antiquities go back to the Greco-Roman age. There are antiquities from more ancient times.
I gathered dozens of the photos in a Storify slide show, may be we can save some of these artifacts and stop them of being sold in auctions and so on.
I will post the rest of the photos in another post. Please spread them as much as you can especially if you are in country that got auction houses that sell ancient artifacts.
You must know that the illegal digging and excavation are spreading like epidemic through out Egypt. Looters do not give a damn for the police or the army.
For decades we saw our history while it is stolen in front of us. This has to be stopped.
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