Two centuries ago, they walked like Egyptians. Now they're on the move again.

The Land of the Pharaohs exhibition was a huge hit with families at the Hancock Museum in Newcastle from 1993 until April this year, when the museum closed for a major renovation.

Children and adults alike got a taste of the everyday lives of the ancient Egyptians, exploring farming, personal adornment and religious beliefs.

But yesterday, two of the exhibition's mummies were being carefully boxed up in preparation for the exhibition's move to Segedunum Roman Fort, Baths and Museum...

Mummies on the move, Helen Rae, The Newcastle Evening Chronicle, UK, July 14, 2006.

Greece is to reclaim hundreds of looted art works and antiquities from museums and private collections around the world, the government said yesterday.

Emboldened by the J Paul Getty Museum's move to return two prized antiquities to Greek ownership, Athens had decided to demand more repatriations, said the culture minister, Giorgos Voulgarakis. A list is being made of items believed to have been illicitly removed.

"Whatever is Greek, wherever in the world, we want back," Mr Voulgarakis told the Guardian. "This development with the Getty is a very important step, but just the beginning." Asked how many works were in question, he said: "We're not talking about a handful, we're talking about hundreds of artefacts that have ended up in many different places..."

Greece demands return of stolen heritage, Helena Smith, The Guardian, UK, July 11, 2006.

Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni refused to budge an inch over the planned removal of the statue of Ramses II from Ramses Square. The move is scheduled for August 25 [2006].

At a press conference last month, Hosni explained that the statue was originally slated to be moved after the construction of the Grand Egyptian Museum wraps up, but the ministry has decided not to wait. Hosni said delays at the GEM and the fact that the massive statue stands in the way of urban development plans for Ramses Square factored into the decision.

While it waits for the GEM to open in 2011, the statue will be housed in a special hangar where experts will begin restoring it.

Culture 101: Carved in Stone, Egypt Today, Egypt, Volume 27, Issue 07, July 2006.

After well over two centuries of excavation, it is almost impossible to fathom the number of discoveries that have been made in Egypt — to the point that many have receded into history.

“If you dig anywhere in Egypt, you’ll find something,” says Azza Shawarby, national project director of the recently formed Egyptian Antiquities Information System (EAIS). She smiles and adds, “Even if you fall down, you will probably land on an artifact.”

And as the number of historical sites being excavated in Egypt continues to increase, so do the threats to their preservation. Natural menaces such as sand and wind remain threats, and their impact has only been compounded by man-made factors. Urban expansion have already covered many sites, as well as the agricultural growth needed to feed the expanding population. Forgotten sites, many of which are partially excavated and unprotected, easily fall prey to antiquities smugglers and developers.

The need for a single comprehensive database has become more pressing than ever, and since 2000, the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) has been working with the Finnish Foreign Ministry to create an organization to map and describe all of Egypt’s historical sites.

EAIS recently inaugurated its Geographic Information System for use by various branches of the SCA. The cutting-edge system is a multi-functional computerized tool capable of collecting, storing, retrieving, transforming, displaying and analyzing massive amounts of data...

Site-ing the Source, Egypt Today, Egypt, Volume 27, Issue 07, July 2006.

It was to be a book like no other: bigger, more beautifully bound, more lavishly illustrated. But the man behind the world's most expensive travel book was no gentleman adventurer. He was a painter and decorator from Edinburgh with a big talent, and an even bigger ambition.

David Roberts travelled through the Middle East in the 1830s when such journeys were virtually unknown, sketching as he went. He published his work, The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt and Nubia, in six immense, folio-sized volumes. Three of these volumes, covering the Holy Land and the surrounding area, bound in two magnificent books, will be auctioned at Lyon & Turnbull in Edinburgh on Tuesday.

Valued at between £8,000 and £12,000, these books are increasingly rare. "So many copies have been broken up and sold as prints, it has reduced the number of complete copies enormously. It is very likely that this copy has been in Edinburgh since it was bought by an original subscriber," says Simon Vickers, a books specialist at Lyon & Turnbull...

The big draw, Susan Mansfield, The Scotsman, UK, July 08, 2006, via EEF News.

David Roberts Gallery at Museum Tours

Search for books on at Amazon.

For decades, scholars at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute have painstakingly pieced together ancient clay tablets they had on loan from the government of Iran — deciphering the cuneiform writings and studying what these thousands of fragments revealed about the history of Persia.

But now, this treasure trove sits in the middle of a politically charged legal battle that has museum professionals worried about the willingness of other countries to loan artefacts to the U.S.

A federal court last month upheld a decision to seize and sell off the collection, in order to raise funds to compensate Americans injured in a terrorist attack in the Middle East. The reasoning, according to court documents, is that the Islamic Republic of Iran is a state sponsor of terrorism...

Patty Gerstenblith, a professor of cultural property law at DePaul University College of Law in Chicago, said this was believed to be the first case to link cultural artefacts on loan to terrorism litigation.

"The question now becomes, 'How do you treat cultural artefacts? Are they to be seen like any other kind of property, like land?' " Gerstenblith said...

Not a good direction to be heading in really. If these are seized to be auctioned merely for their monetary value then they are lost to the world and the archaeological community as they will end up in private collections.

Antiquities Stuck in Legal Limbo, P.J. Huffstutter and Kasra Naji, Los Angeles Times, California, USA, July 13, 2006.

cf. Iran wants disputed clay tablets returned from US, Edmund Blair, Reuters via Yahoo! News, USA, July 12, 2006.