volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

330 The Smuggling of Antiquities.
may ask, "What about Grebaut's magnificent 'find' of
the cofiins and mummies of some of the priests of
Amen-Ra in 1891 ? " It is quite true that Grebaut
cleared out the tombs near Der al-Bahari, where they
were hidden in ancient days, but he was led to these
tombs by natives ;
they had discovered them, and only
showed them to him on payment.
As soon as possible I had an interview with de Morgan,
and I found him courteous, sympathetic and broadminded.
He told me that he had not the least objection
to the exportation of certain classes of antiquities {e.g.,
Greek papyri and inscriptions, Coptic papyri and vellum
manuscripts and funerary inscriptions), always provided
that they immediately found safe and secure deposit
in great national museums like the Louvre and the
British Museum. He disliked the idea of breaking up
" finds " and sending the objects to places throughout
the world where all trace of them would be lost. He
wanted all the great museums in Europe to acquire all
they possibly could, whilst the British occupied Egypt,
for he had no belief in the purely native direction,
management or custody of the collections in the Egyptian
Museum in Cairo. He told me that he thought it
impossible to prevent clandestine digging for antiquities
by the natives, and the smuggling of antiquities out
of Egypt, for it was rumoured that the representatives
in Egjrpt of certain Powers sent antiquities home in
their Foreign Office bags. But he believed that it was
possible to control the digging and to make the smuggling
of antiquities unprofitable, and the plan by which he
hoped to do this was as follows : He
proposed to employ
the staff of the Service of Antiquities in making excavations
on a large scale on all the promising sites throughout
the country, one after the other, and to transport
all the objects found, both big and little, to the Museum
in Cairo. Every unique object, of every kind, was to
be reserved for the Museum in Cairo, and kept in the
country, and these were to be registered and numbered
and exhibited to the public as soon as possible. The
remaining objects were to be carefully catalogued and