wasabiroots
4. The Sekhemka Statue Sale
The statue of Sekhemka is an Ancient Egyptian artifact discovered by the Marquis of Northampton who brought it back to Northampton with him in 1850. His son then gave the artifact to the Northampton Museum around the year 1870. The statue depicts a royal scribe called Sekhemka with his wife Sitmerit who lived between 2,400 and 2,300 BC.
It has been at the Northampton Museum for years but by the year 2012, the local council carried out an insurance assessment and found out the true value of the statue. Because of the high price of the statue, the council had plans to cash sell the statue and use the money to further expand the heritage projects in the region with an excuse that the statue had been in their ownership for over 100 years but never been a centrepiece and that they need the money to expand their museum.
So in 2014, rumors of the proposed sales are now getting realised and an international outcry was made with the Egyptian ambassador calling it “an abuse to Egyptian archaeology”. Nevertheless, the council actually sold the statue in an auction to an unnamed private collector for around 28 million pounds.
There was uncertainties about the sale. Like, at first the present Marquis of Northampton, descendant of the one in 1850, protested to the selling, but after a private deal between them, the Marquis was then all for it. This made people from Save Sekhemka Action Group to question who really owned the statue in the first place.
Then because of all the protests, even the English Arts Council stripped the Northampton Museum of its official accreditation making it ineligible to receive future grants nor fundings and the UK government imposed an export ban that prevents the statue from leaving the country which was recently extended until March 2016.
Then there’s also an Egyptian group currently that is trying to buy the statue with a crowdfund of 25 million to return the statue to Egypt.