An exhibition for Tutankhamen monuments will be held in the US city of Chicago on May 21 [2006], after a tour by the exhibition of a number of European and American cities including the Swiss city of Basel and the German city of Bonn.

The exhibition, which also moved to Los Angeles and Colorado as part of a two-year tour ending late next year, would achieve returns estimated at $20 million .

Dr. Zahi Hawass, Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni approved the travel of an archaeological delegation under his chairmanship to open the exhibition.

Hawass said the exhibition returns will be used to renovate Egypt's monuments and establish museums.

Tutankhamen Antiquities Exhibition in US harvest $20M, Egypt State Information Service, Egypt, May 18, 2006.

Back in 1998, with help from prominent local donors, the St. Louis Museum of Art cobbled together $499,000 to buy a beautiful ancient Egyptian burial mask. The piece, one of the gems of the museum's collection, recently became controversial when the Egyptian government demanded its return, contending it had been stolen from a warehouse in the late 1980s or early 1990s.

"We regard this as a very serious charge," says Brent Benjamin, the museum's director. "We've spoken with [Egyptian authorities] and asked them to provide documentation. We'll make a disposition based on the facts."

The case is one of many indications that the scandals in the antiquities trade are far from over. Indeed, high-profile disputes have hit the headlines recently. New York's Metropolitan Museum — without admitting fault — agreed to return 21 artefacts that the Italian government alleges were stolen. Marion True, former antiquities curator at Los Angeles' Getty Museum, is on trial in Italy on charges of conspiracy to traffic in antiquities...

Hey, That's Our Art!, Business Week, USA, May 16, 2006.

For the next five months Berliners can dive to the Mediterranean seabed and explore the submerged world of ancient Egypt. Nevine El-Aref reports from the German capital on the influx of visitors to the Egypt's sunken treasures exhibition.

Against the 19th-century colonnaded façade of the Martin Gropius-Bau Museum, smiling girls wearing costumes modelled on those of ancient Amarna and with gilded cobra crowns on their heads greet visitors to Berlin's “Egypt’s Sunken Treasures” exhibition, which opened last week. In this innovative scenario visitors can enjoy the lost treasures of the Pharaohs which have lain underwater off the Alexandria coast for more than 1,500 years.

With the strains of classical music interrupted from time to time by the echo of waves, the aura of the Mediterranean Sea is everywhere apparent. French Art director David Delice has converted the Martin Gropius-Bau Museum's galleries into a replica of the ancient sunken cities of Herakleion and Canopus in Abu Qir Bay, near Alexandria. The walls and floors of the galleries are covered with a black sparkling material to reflect sea water, while the sound of the waves can be heard in all parts of the exhibition. Enormous colossi are shown against black wooden panels, while small artefacts are displayed inside very fine plexiglass showcases lying on black granite bases. Giant plasma screens showing films documenting the progress of the marine archaeologists as they uncovered the mysteries of Alexandria's ancient Eastern Harbour are also placed in each gallery of the exhibition. A prologue and an epilogue provide information about the underwater missions of the Institut Européen d'Archéologie Sous-Marine (IEASM) and the natural disasters that led to the submergence of the area more than 1,500 years ago. Audio-visual technology and visual effects are used to invoke the Mediterranean ambiance from which the antiquities were retrieved...

Taking a plunge, Al-Ahram, Egypt, Issue No. 795, May 18 - 24, 2006.