The Metropolitan Museum of Art has returned a handful of odds and ends found in King Tut's tomb to their home in Egypt, after the museum determined that it had no rights to hang on to the antiquities.
“Because of precise legislation relating to that excavation, these objects were never meant to have left Egypt, and therefore should rightfully belong to the government of Egypt,” said Thomas P. Campbell, the director of the Metropolitan Museum, when the return was first announced last year. The 19 pieces, which include a small bronze dog and a collar of beads, were shipped out yesterday.
The objects came from the estate of archaeologist Howard Carter, who discovered the tomb in 1922 and bequeathed his findings to the Met. (Hey, at least he didn't get caught up in an illicit mummy smuggling ring.) “It was the right thing to do,” intentional art law expert Derek Fincham told WNYC, though he added, “I have a sense these are not objects that will be terribly missed." So those lines at the museum haven't been for a rare glimpse of Tut's tube socks?
