The Director of the Swiss Federal Office of Culture on Monday handed over to Egypt’s Ambassador to Switzerland Wael Gad, a model of part of the head of Ramses II, which was stolen from an archaeological site in Abydos.
The artifact dates back to more than 3,400 years.
This comes as part of efforts to recover smuggled Egyptian antiquities by the Egyptian Foreign Ministry and the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.
It also reflects the continued close cooperation and coordination between the Egyptian Embassy in Berne and the Swiss Federal Office of Culture, which resulted in the embassy receiving seven artifacts belonging to the ancient Egyptian civilization in August 2021, and then receiving another bronze statue of the goddess Isis carrying the child Horus in September 2022, as well as 28 other artifacts.
Egypt recovered many artifacts from around the world in 2022, most notably:
- Six artifacts from the Metropolitan Museum.
- A wooden coffin covered with a layer of colored plaster depicting the face of a woman.
- A limestone plate with hieroglyphs inscriptions.
- A piece of linen decorated with colorful drawings that tells the story of the crossing of the Red Sea, divided into five small pieces.
- A bronze statue of a man kneeling.
- A cabin made of limestone decorated with colorful carvings of the chief musician.
- A funerary painting from the Fayoum portraits depicting a woman from the Roman era.
- Nine rare artifacts, including a piece of gold coin dating back to the Ptolemaic era.
