A 3,000-year-old head sculpture of an eternally-young Tutankhamun, the Egyptian pharaoh, goes under the hammer this week in London despite an outcry from Cairo.
Christie’s expects the 28.5 centimetre (11inch) brown quartzite relic from the private Resandro Collection of ancient art to fetch more than £4 million ($5.1 million) on Thursday.
But Egyptian authorities overseeing the north African country’s unparalleled collection of antiquities want to see the auction halted and the treasure returned. “The Egyptian embassy in London requested the British foreign affairs ministry and the auction hall to stop the sale,” Egypt’s foreign ministry said on June 10. Former antiquities minister Zahi Hawass said that the piece appears to have been “stolen” in the 1970s from the Karnak Temple complex of Egypt’s great monuments. “They have not shown any legal papers to prove its ownership.”
“Ancient objects by their nature cannot be traced over millennia,” Christie’s. “It is important to establish recent ownership and legal right to sell which we have clearly done,” it added.