The Mallawi Museum is the regional antiquities museum of the Minya governorate, situated on Sharia Tahrir in the centre of Mallawi town, fifty-six kilometres south of Minya and ten kilometres north of the modern village of Tell el-Amarna. It was inaugurated in November 1962 in a building converted from a former preparatory school, with a collection drawn principally from the long sequence of regional excavations conducted by the Egyptian Antiquities Service and by foreign missions in the Middle Egypt nome between 1900 and 1960. At the time of the August 2013 events, the collection numbered, according to the museum's last published inventory of 2010, one thousand and ninety-two registered objects, of which approximately seven hundred and twenty were on permanent display in the upper-floor galleries.
What happened on the afternoon of Wednesday 14 August 2013 — during the broader civil disturbance that followed the dispersal of the Rabaa al-Adawiya sit-in — has been documented in considerable detail elsewhere, and is not the subject of this essay. For the purposes of the present argument it is sufficient to record that, between approximately 14:00 and 23:00 on that day, the museum was forcibly entered, the security guards were unable to prevent the entry, fire was set in the lower-floor administrative offices, and approximately one thousand and forty registered objects were removed from the upper galleries by an unknown number of persons in an unknown sequence of removals. The museum was, in effect, emptied. The two pieces too large to be removed — a granite seated New Kingdom official from Tuna el-Gebel, and a basalt Late Period stela from Mer-Wer — were defaced.
This essay is concerned with the decade since: the recovery, the restitution, the conservation, the re-cataloguing, and the re-display work that has, over a longer time-frame than was originally projected, brought the museum back to a condition in which it can again function as a regional museum. The story is, in its particulars, more interesting than the standard "before and after" narrative implies. It is a case study in what provincial-museum practice can, with sustained effort and modest budgets, achieve.
The recovery campaigns
The recovery campaigns proceeded in three overlapping phases. The first phase, between September 2013 and approximately June 2014, was the immediate-recovery phase, conducted by the Tourist and Antiquities Police in coordination with the local antiquities inspectorate. This phase recovered, in roundabout numbers, four hundred and forty objects — approximately forty-two per cent of the loss — through a combination of community-led returns (objects abandoned at the gates of the museum or at police stations in the days immediately following), targeted recoveries from local houses where objects had been hidden, and seizures from initial-stage transactions in the antiquities market in Cairo and in El-Minya.
The second phase, from approximately mid-2014 through 2018, was the international-recovery phase, in which a coordinated effort by the Ministry of Antiquities (subsequently the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities), the Egyptian Embassy network, and international colleagues — particularly at INTERPOL, UNESCO, and the relevant national customs services — pursued objects that had passed into the international market. This phase yielded a further two hundred and ninety-six objects, recovered principally from auction houses, from private collectors who returned objects voluntarily on documentation, and from customs interceptions at points of entry into Western Europe and North America.
The third phase, ongoing since 2019, is what one might call the long-tail phase, in which individual objects continue to be recovered through the steady work of the Egyptian Antiquities Recovery Office in Cairo, often through tip-offs from museum colleagues abroad who recognise an object passing through a sale catalogue or appearing in a private-collection publication. As of December 2024 — the most recent published figure — the cumulative recovery stands at eight hundred and eight objects, or approximately seventy-eight per cent of the original loss. The remaining two hundred and thirty-two objects are presumed lost or held in collections that have not yet been identified.
The conservation challenge
The conservation challenge presented by the recovered objects has been considerable, and constitutes, in some ways, the more substantive achievement of the past decade. Many of the objects were damaged in the looting itself — small bronzes were broken from their stands, faience amulets were chipped or fractured, the painted-wood Tuna el-Gebel ibis sarcophagi had their inlaid eyes prised out for sale separately, and the small carved-limestone Tell el-Amarna fragments suffered the kind of point-impact damage characteristic of objects roughly bagged and transported. A second category of damage, more insidious, was inflicted in the months and years between the looting and the recovery, when objects were stored in conditions wholly inappropriate to their materials — typically in domestic settings without humidity control, often wrapped in modern plastic that, in the Egyptian summer heat, can release plasticisers onto the surface of porous objects.
The conservation programme that addressed this damage, between 2014 and 2022, was conducted in a combination of the Mallawi Museum's own (small, very modestly equipped) conservation lab, the much larger conservation department of the Egyptian Museum at Tahrir, and — in the most technically demanding cases — the Conservation Centre at the Grand Egyptian Museum, which had been undergoing a long ramp-up to operational capacity during exactly this period. The Grand Egyptian Museum's involvement in the Mallawi conservation programme is, indeed, one of the unsung early successes of that institution. Some four hundred objects passed, at one stage or another, through the GEM's labs for treatment, often by junior conservators acquiring training they would later apply to the Tutankhamun assemblage.
The re-display, and the museum we have now
The museum reopened in stages between 2016 and 2018. The lower floor — the section that had suffered fire damage — was rebuilt with a new entrance hall and a small temporary-exhibition gallery, both of which had not been part of the pre-2013 layout. The upper floor was returned to substantially its pre-2013 plan, but with a number of significant curatorial revisions that have, to my mind, made the museum better than it was. I will note three.
1. The case of recovery
In the upper-floor entrance hall, immediately on the right as one enters the gallery, is a single case — designated case 1 in the new numbering — that was not present before 2013. Its contents are seven objects from the looted-and-recovered group, displayed beside their pre-2013 catalogue photographs. Three labels run along the case: the original 2010-catalogue description; a description of the damage observed on recovery; and a description of the conservation work undertaken before re-display. The case is, in effect, a small didactic essay on the museum's recent history, set into the museum itself. It is the right register, and it is well-judged.
2. The Late Period bronzes, re-displayed in dialogue
The Late Period bronzes — small votive figures of Bastet, Sekhmet, Osiris, and Apis, recovered from the regional sites at Tuna el-Gebel, Hermopolis (Ashmunein), and the smaller sites in the Beni Suef plain — have been re-displayed in case 14 (the Late Period case) with a new arrangement that pairs each recovered bronze with the photograph of its findspot. This is a curatorial decision that goes against the dominant museological convention of arranging votive bronzes typologically. The arrangement at Mallawi is geographically organised. The case, taken as a whole, reads as a small map of late-period votive practice in the region, rather than as a typological series. It is, in my view, the better arrangement for a regional museum.
3. The Beni Hasan upper case, with the model boat
The model boat from BH9, mentioned in passing in Article I of this issue, is in case 4 of the upper floor. The case has been redesigned with new lighting — a fibre-optic system at about 4500 K — and the boat is now visible at a scale and in a register that the pre-2013 case did not allow. The original 1962 case had a single overhead spotlight that produced a heavy reflection on the painted wood; the new case has light from below the platform, which the painted-wood object can take and which the original spotlight could not.
The Mallawi Museum after 2013 is not the same museum that was looted in 2013. It is a smaller museum, materially. But it is, in some ways, a more thoughtful one. The decade of reconstitution has produced a curatorial seriousness that the original 1962 installation, with its more or less eclectic regional gather, did not have.
The institutional lesson
The institutional lesson of the Mallawi reconstitution is, to my mind, twofold.
First, that a provincial museum's vulnerability is, fundamentally, a function of the security investment its parent ministry is able to make. The 2013 events occurred during an extraordinary period of national disturbance, and no museum in Egypt — at any scale — had the protective infrastructure that subsequent events would show was necessary. The post-2013 security upgrade across the regional museum network, which has included physical hardening, electronic monitoring, on-site police presence, and improved community-engagement programmes, has been substantial; the cost of these upgrades, however, falls disproportionately on the regional museum budgets, which are typically a small fraction of the budgets of the metropolitan institutions. The Mallawi case is therefore both a recovery story and a warning.
Second, that a long-tail recovery programme — patient, internationally-coordinated, and willing to operate over a decade — can recover the substantial majority of looted material, provided the political will and the international cooperation are sustained. The seventy-eight per cent recovery rate at Mallawi is, in comparative international terms, very high. (The typical recovery rate for institutional thefts in the international market over a similar time-horizon is in the twenty to forty per cent range.) The Mallawi result reflects the seriousness with which the Egyptian recovery office has pursued the case, the cooperation of foreign colleagues and customs services, and the somewhat unusual fact that the looted objects were all already photographed and catalogued before the loss, which substantially aided identification.
What is missing
The remaining two hundred and thirty-two objects are presumed lost. Among them are a small but significant group of the Tuna el-Gebel ibis sarcophagi, which are particularly distinctive and which would be hard to dispose of unrecognised on the international market — a circumstance which makes their continued absence puzzling, and which suggests they may be held in private collections that have not yet been brought to inventory. The Egyptian Antiquities Recovery Office continues to work the case. Each year, on average, three or four further objects are recovered. The expectation is that the long tail will, over the next decade, return perhaps a further fifty objects. The museum's cumulative recovery may, by 2034, stand at around eighty-three per cent.
Eighty-three per cent is, on any honest reading, a remarkable result for an event of this magnitude. The museum that one walks into in Mallawi today is the museum that the decade of patient work has made. It is not the museum of August 2013. It is, in many small and considered ways, a better museum.
Acknowledgements: Dr Hassan El-Sayed, director of the Mallawi Museum, for repeated conversations between 2018 and 2024 on the conservation programme. Mr Adel Selim of the Egyptian Antiquities Recovery Office, for sharing aggregate recovery figures used in this article. The conservators at the GEM Conservation Centre, for guided access to the Mallawi treatment files in 2022.