That year I went with Czegledi to see first hand what those rooms of lawyers were like. We travelled to an International Council of Museums conference in Cairo. There was a bonus: Egypt was one of the oldest civilizations in the world, had had its cultural heritage pillaged for thousands of years—every colonial power of note had stolen from Egypt—and was where the first recorded trial of an art thief took place. Egypt was the ultimate source country.
3.
EGYPT
“They shouted, ‘Look over here! The loot is inside us! Rob me!’”
RICK ST. HILAIRE
ON THE hot sand an Egyptian teenager in a dirty T-shirt runs after me with a tray of sunglasses. “Shades! You buy shades!” The Sphinx sits behind him. Dozens of air-conditioned buses are parked in the open sun, and around them hundreds of figures holler for camel rides and photo ops. It all feels insignificant compared to the giant stone triangles that rise, alien-like, out of the desert: the only remaining of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
Most tourists to Egypt come home with pictures of themselves standing in front of Khufu’s pyramid—the Great Pyramid. When it was completed, in 2560 BCE, it was the tallest structure on earth. It remained the tallest until the Eiffel Tower was built over four thousand years later. Astronauts can see it from orbit. The pyramid was supposed to allow Khufu to live longer than everyone else, in the afterlife. He spent two decades creating his get-out-of-jail-free card, with the help of thousands of labourers who lived in worker-camps on site. When Khufu died he was sealed inside his pyramid with his earthly possessions for what was supposed to be eternity. Now it is a tourist site, and Bonnie Czegledi and I are part of a large crowd standing in front of it.
This afternoon two guards in dusty blue uniforms stand outside the entrance of Khufu’s pyramid. Up close, I can see the entrance is not so much a door as a dark crack in the tilting wall of ancient limestone that vanishes into the sunlight. The guards are stone-faced as well. Bad news, they tell the latest busload of tourists: cameras are not allowed. The guards collect dozens of them before allowing people to step into the darkness and crawl up a very narrow, hot passageway that leads into the centre of the ancient skyscraper. “This looks uncomfortable,” Czegledi says.
The tunnel is so small that sometimes we’re forced onto our hands and knees. One line of tourists crawls up, another line clambers down. When the space isn’t wide enough for both lines, there’s a bottleneck of sweat, khaki shorts, and sandy running shoes—extreme claustrophobia. And just when I think I can’t take it anymore, the tunnel opens into an almost perfectly square room with smooth black stone walls and a dim light hanging in the corner.
No sunlight penetrates here. It is eerily quiet. At the far end of the room rests a tomb, open and empty, where the body of a king of Egypt once lay. Bright flashes of light pulse. For every camera confiscated, a cellphone is retrieved from a pocket, a small camera from another. Trying to stop tourists from raiding the tomb with light is futile. There is no guard here—a person would go mad standing inside this room. And the only reason we’re here at all is because thieves found the way in first.
My visit to the pyramids coincided with the gathering of some of the world’s experts on international cultural crimes at the Marriott Hotel in Cairo. I was part of a Canadian group that included Czegledi, as well as two detectives from the Montreal art theft unit. The conference was supposed to be a chance for lawyers, law enforcers, and cultural specialists from around the world to trade information. And it was. We spent two afternoons in a dark, cavernous conference room in the Marriott. Each speaker presented a lecture and a Power-Point presentation.
The first speaker, from a museum in Greece dedicated to knives and guns, filled us in on how bad conditions were for the preservation of knives. By mid-afternoon, the man sitting beside me, who’d flown in from Britain to present on copyright law, was experiencing intense jetlag and, perhaps, was bored. He lay down on the floor, curled up under his chair, and fell asleep.
One of the conference organizers was a handsome Egyptian man in his mid-thirties. My first contact with him was shortly after I arrived at the Marriott. I’d made reservations for $100 U.S. a night through a travel agent. When I checked in, the manager on duty that morning said that as part of the conference, I should be paying $140 U.S. a night. We haggled for half an hour until he agreed to let me pay the $100 for the room. Then, on the first afternoon of the conference, I was approached by the Organizer. He was wearing a suit and was flanked by a couple of serious but subservient-looking men. The Organizer informed me that I had to pay the conference rate for the hotel, but instead of making up the difference by Visa, I could simply give him the difference in U.S. cash. I told him I’d already settled the issue with the manager. The Organizer waved his hand imperiously. He said that he would be speaking to the manager about the matter. His tone was threatening. You should pay, he said.
Later that evening, I ran into Detective Alain Lacoursière from Canada. He had had a similar interaction. The detective had been thinking it over when he returned to his room and found a note on his pillow asking again for the money and wishing him a nice stay in Cairo. “I decided to pay,” the detective told me. “To be honest, it scared me. I’m out of my world here, and I don’t want to risk getting into trouble with anyone. So I paid.”
Unlike Lacoursière, I hadn’t been sent to the conference by a company or a police force; I’d had to pay for my own plane ticket and room. It was already a stretch for me, and I couldn’t afford the overhead.
Over the next few days, the Organizer hovered: at the conference, on the party boat on the Nile, on the Marriott’s epic back patio. He was figuring out how to handle me, I could tell, but he wasn’t ready to make a move. I wondered when he would. In the meantime, I’d met and was spending a lot of time with Rick St. Hilaire, at the time a county prosecutor in New Hampshire, who lectured on the impact of art theft in the United States and knew a lot about the impact of art theft on Egypt.
“Egypt,” he said, “is a great place to start with the history of art theft.” St. Hilaire has a boyish face and says he gets teased all the time about how young he looks. He got hooked on art theft in university, when he took an elective about Egyptian art and architecture. Several years later, when he was a prosecutor, he reconnected with his professor, Dr. John Russell, who told him to look into the black market. He did, and, like Czegledi, he was astounded at what he found—a giant mess, with billions of dollars of stolen work traversing the world, summarily ignored by most of the world’s police forces.
St. Hilaire’s eyes are green, friendly, and energetic, and he loves talking about Egyptian history. He also possesses the rare gift of being able to summarize huge swaths of history in easy-to-digest narratives. Just like Czegledi, he is a natural teacher, and on a day off from the conference, St. Hilaire took me for a tour of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo for a crash course on the history of art thieves. We strolled through Tahrir Square. It’s hard for me, even now, to believe that just a few years later the square would be filled with thousands of citizen-revolutionaries facing off against President Hosni Mubarak’s thugs. On that day, it was relatively peaceful and sunny. Crowds of men smoked and hung out in the garden in front of the museum.
The museum is grand and dusty, and its 177 halls are crammed with more than 120,000 artifacts, remnants of great dynasties taken from the pyramids and temples of the ancient royalty of Egypt. Also here are the preserved bodies of 27 of those kings and queens, some of them more than 5,000 years old. They lie in climate-controlled chambers under soft light, protected by thick coffins of Windex-clear glass: Ramses iii, Seti i. Some of the mummified corpses still have the hair they died with, brittle as straw. Their bodies were wrapped in cloth and locked in the black centre of pyramids. Now lines of tourists look down at their dead faces, gawking.
“This wasn’t the plan,” explained St. Hilaire. “Ancient Egyptians had no word for art. These were tools, and they served a purpose. The
pyramids and their treasures were all part of an elaborate machine that the ruling families of Egypt devised to move safely from their lives on earth to a world beyond death.” The afterlife was as real to them as water, sand, or stone. “The machine gets them to the other world and lets them live well there. But only if the machine stays intact,” St. Hilaire said. “The pyramids, unfortunately, were also these great big beacons to thieves, to the poor of Egypt. They shouted, ‘Look over here! The loot is inside us! Rob me!’”
He pointed to a stone statue in a glass case. It was tiny, about two inches tall. “Khufu was an ancient king, and one of the most powerful kings in the history of the world, but that little statue is the only image we have left of him.”
Khufu had one of the largest tombs, and it was probably heavily looted. “The entrance to Khufu’s pyramid wasn’t created by the king; it’s a looter’s entrance,” St. Hilaire told me. “Most of the early looting in Egypt happened by locals.” The history of Egypt, he explained, was a history of plunder—first by Egyptians, and then by the world.
Locals started raiding the pyramids around 2200 BCE, while Egypt was still reeling from the reign of Pepi II, considered to be one of the longest-reigning kings in history (somewhere between sixty and eighty-four years). After Pepi’s rule, Egypt fell into what is now banally titled the First Intermediate Period, which means that Egypt was in chaos; with no one in charge, society collapsed.
“Think Iraq, after the fall of Baghdad,” St. Hilaire said. “There was no social structure in Egypt to make sure looting didn’t happen. The common person who lived in Egyptian society knew that the king was buried in the pyramid, with lots of great stuff in there. He also knew that the king had a special gate, to travel into the afterlife. And now there was no one stopping them.”
St. Hilaire paused in front of a large statue—of the pharaoh Djoser—with empty eye sockets. “This statue used to have beautiful crystal-rock eyes. You rarely find the glass eyes intact. Stolen,” he said. “Well, take the eyes out, and how does the king see? That’s why the punishment for looting was severe.” A few minutes later he pointed to a small scrap of something like paper, in a glass case. “That’s papyrus. It was the predecessor to paper.”
One of the earliest recorded trials of a thief in human history occurred during the New Kingdom Period in Egypt, and its details were captured on papyrus, after the man was caught stealing from a tomb. His punishment was death on the stake. “It’s not a great way to go,” mused St. Hilaire with a smile, “but gruesome punishments didn’t stop the looting.”
When tombs continued to be raided, Egypt’s ruling class regrouped. “Some priests-kings got together and said, ‘We now rule this kingdom.’” These new pharaohs decided that the buried kings and their treasures were vulnerable, so they moved all of them into one tomb—in the Valley of the Kings. Local thieves, though, quickly became a minor irritation compared to the invasions by a parade of foreign powers: Libyans, Nubians, Assyrians, Persians, and Macedonians. Alexander the Great fell in love with Egypt and wanted to be a pharaoh. Then the Romans arrived and carted off thousands of treasures to Europe. “Where are the most Egyptian obelisks found today? Not in Egypt. In Italy. So if you want to see an Egyptian obelisk, you go to Rome.”
When Napoleon invaded Egypt, he brought scientists from France to help him categorize and organize the artifacts he pillaged. Napoleon would never have considered it pillaging, though. “Both the Louvre and the British Museum started to collect around roughly the same time, so we know there was a healthy international trade in Egyptian artifacts.” The Louvre built up a lot of its early collection from Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, and after Napoleon was defeated by Lord Nelson, much of the loot was redirected to the British Museum.
“Archaeology and museums grew up together,” St. Hilaire explained. “It is important to understand that modern scientific archaeology is a relatively new idea. That practice started fairly late in human history, when the folks from Britain ended up in modern-day Iraq and Egypt. For many years, the difference between archaeology and treasure-hunting is indistinguishable. Looting was the norm.”
In the nineteenth century, Egyptomania hit Britain and other parts of the world full force. The aristocracy in London held mummy-unwrapping parties. Ancient Egyptians could not have predicted the value the world would place, thousands of years later, on the objects they created. Stealing cultural heritage became mainstream, and a group of collectors sprang up, first in the West and then in wealthy pockets around the globe. “What’s important to remember is that there was nothing illegal about taking these artifacts. It was all a free market at that point.” This was Indiana Jones for real. Men came to the desert from far-off lands and carried pieces of it home with them.
In Egypt, that changed in the mid-twentieth century, when the country began to wrestle back control of its cultural heritage from foreign-interest groups. The Department of Antiquities was created to take stock of ancient treasures and move forward on archaeological work. Of the sixty-three tombs excavated from the Valley of the Kings when it was rediscovered in 1992, not one dig had been led by an Egyptian. But by 2002, Zahi Hawass, an Egyptian archaeologist and showman, had taken charge of Egyptian antiquities and seemed to rule the billion-dollar industry with the power of a pharaoh. Hawass, head of what’s now called the Supreme Council of Antiquities, told a writer at The New Yorker, “To control all this, you have to make them fear you and make them love you at the same time.” He controlled the pyramids at Giza and all the archaeological digs in the country. He also began exporting Egypt’s cultural heritage to the world—for big money. When you saw King Tut's treasure on tour, that was a Zahi Hawass production. Perhaps for the first time in the ancient kingdom’s history, Egypt was profiting from its cultural heritage.
By this time, though, the world seemed addicted to “free” loot courtesy of Egypt, and stolen antiquities remained a major draw for thieves and corrupt dealers. Case in point: in 2005, a Manhattan-based art dealer was convicted of smuggling a bust of Amenhotep iii—likely King Tut’s grandfather—into the United States. Frederick Schultz, who was sentenced to three years in prison, was linked to a vast network of middlemen spread out over a number of different countries. “There are constants in the history of human desire,” St. Hilaire told me. “There is a desire to loot that is constant. There’s also a desire to preserve. In Egyptian history, both of those are plainly evident.”
On the last night of the conference, Bonnie Czegledi, Rick St. Hilaire, and I had dinner in a beautiful old restaurant in Cairo. We were all flying out the next morning. I said goodbye to St. Hilaire, who was staying at a smaller, less expensive hotel. When Czegledi and I returned to the Marriott, we decided to check out and then have a drink on the patio. We queued up at the front desk. When it was my turn, the desk clerk calmly informed me that I owed an extra $40 U.S. per night on my room. I felt a chill. “That can’t be right,” I said.
The clerk assured me it was. There was a note attached to my account, he said. I asked to speak to the manager. The clerk looked nervous. I explained to him that I’d already had this conversation when I checked in, and the issue had been resolved. At first I was successful. He began preparing me a second bill, without the extra charge. Then he informed me that he had called the Organizer, who was coming downstairs to the lobby. “What does he have to do with this? Does he run the Marriott Hotel?” I asked. The clerk said, “Please wait here. He is coming soon.” Czegledi stood in the lobby while all of this unfolded. I watched as the new bill was printed up. I gave the clerk my Visa card and hoped the payment would go through before the Organizer arrived. Everything was happening very slowly. Finally, the card number was entered into a machine and the receipt began to print just as I saw the Organizer walk into the lobby.
“Did you pay?” he asked in a loud voice as he approached.
“Yes,” I answered, “I paid.”
He turned to the clerk and they had a quick, terse exchange in Arabic. It e
nded with him berating the desk clerk. Then he stepped very close to me, until our faces were just inches apart.
“You must pay the rate I told you to pay.”
“I’ve already paid the bill with my Visa card. The bill is settled.”
“I don’t care about that bill. You will pay the rate I gave you.”
“Do you understand that I’m a journalist from North America, writing about the corruption in the art world?”
“I don’t care what you are writing about,” he said. “You will pay.”
“I’ve paid. It’s over.” I wasn’t sure what to do. I stood still, didn’t step back. But the Organizer stepped closer. The clerk, other staff in the lobby, and a few guests circulating near the desk looked frightened. Czegledi watched intently from a few feet away. I thought the Organizer was going to punch me. Instead he poked me with his finger.
“You haven’t paid me!” he shouted.
I did not respond. His eyes were wide with rage, and he was shaking. We stood like that for what seemed like a long time, but it was probably less than a minute.
Then he collected himself and lowered his voice to a whisper.
“I am leaving now. I will leave instructions for you on your phone, in your room. They will include my room number. You will follow those instructions. You will follow those instructions and leave the money at the room that I tell you. There will be a message on your phone in your room.”
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