Reply #49: The Collector. (Off Topic)

[Scurrilous]

I attended a speech given by Moshe Dayan in the mid-70's. Among other topics, he discussed his extensive collection of Egyptian mummies and other artifacts. Looks like he hung on to his ill-gotten booty.

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2002/571/tr3.htm

<snip>
An agreement was signed between Israel and Egypt in 1992 stipulating that all antiquities excavated in Sinai during the Israeli occupation between 1967 and 1982 were to be returned, including those in private collections. Egypt recovered the plundered objects by 1995. They are on show at the Al-Qantara Sharq Museum on the east bank of the Suez Canal.

<snip>

What of the so-called Moshe Dayan collection? "There is a collection of which we know very little belonging to the late Israeli minister of defence who was a known antiquities collector," says Abdel-Halim Noureddin, dean of the faculty of archaeology, at Fayoum University. "This collection was illegally unearthed during the Israeli occupation of Sinai and was never registered. Consequently, we cannot demand its return."

Noureddin said it was rumoured that after Dayan's death some of the objects in his collection were sold by his wife to international museums, while others are on display "somewhere inside Israel."