Kim Kardashian’s Met Gala Photo Helps Solve Case For Egyptian Coffin Theft
Images via Sky Cinema / Shutterstock.com and Metropolitan Museum of Art / Wikimedia Commons (CC0 1.0)
Thanks to Kim Kardashian, investigators were successfully keeping up with the years-long case of a stolen ancient Egyptian coffin.
It all started at the 2018 Met Gala, when the reality star innocently posed next to the first-century BCE golden coffin of Nedjemankh, which coincidentally matched her metallic corseted Atelier Versace gown too.
As you can imagine, the photo got the world talking, eventually reaching the ears of Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Matthew Bogdanos, as an anonymous informant had phoned in complaining that they were never paid for discovering the artifact seven years ago. Things got crazier from there.
As detailed in his Art Bust: Scandalous Stories of the Art World podcast, journalist Ben Lewis described how a group of thieves had excavated the coffin in the al Minya region of Egypt in 2011, and then sold the relic to an antiquities dealer named Hassan Fazeli in Sharjah, an emirate in the United Arab Emirates.
Image via Metropolitan Museum of Art / Wikimedia Commons (CC0 1.0)
To mask the coffin’s dishonest discovery, Fazeli forged the coffin’s export form and falsely identified its origins as Greco-Roman. Later, he sold the coffin to Roben Dib, the manager of the Dionysos gallery in Hamburg, Germany, who also intentionally mocked up an export license claiming that the artifact had been legally transported from Egypt 40 years ago.
The coffin came into the possession of French antiquities scholar Christophe Kunicki and dealer Richard Semper, who sold it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for US$4 million in 2018. It’s unclear if the two knew that the documents were falsified.
As the original looters had carelessly left a finger bone in the coffin, investigators were able to trace Nedjemankh’s roots.
The coffin was then shipped back to Cairo, and German police arrested Dib in Hamburg last year.
[via Architectural Digest and New York Post, images via various sources]
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