CAIRO — A full inventory of the Egyptian Museum has found that looters escaped with 18 items during the anti-government unrest, including a gilded wooden statue of famed boy king Tutankhamun, the antiquities chief said Sunday.
On Jan. 28, as protesters clashed with police, a handful of looters climbed a fire escape to the museum roof and lowered themselves on ropes from a glass-paneled ceiling onto the museum’s top floor.
About 70 objects, many of them small statues, were damaged. Until Sunday’s announcement, it was not known whether anything was missing.
Antiquities Minister Zahi Hawass said the museum determined 18 objects were gone. The most important of the missing objects is a limestone statue of the Pharaoh Akhenaten holding an offering table. Akhenaten is the so-called heretic king who tried to introduce monotheism to ancient Egypt.
Also gone is a gilded wooden statue of the 18th Dynasty King Tutankhamun, Akhenaten’s son, being carried by a goddess.
