As someone who has a deep appreciation for history, both recent and ancient, this story stings deep.
Someone stole a three-millennia-old gold bracelet from an Egyptian museum, and instead of being a respectable thief who sells it on the black market, this knucklehead did the unthinkable.
From the Associated Press:
Egyptians reacted with outrage this week after officials said that a 3,000-year-old bracelet that had belonged to an ancient pharaoh was stolen from Cairo's famed Egyptian Museum and then melted down for gold.
Museum security was sloppy while they were preparing a traveling exhibit to Italy. The thief managed to nab it from a lab.
The bracelet, containing a lapis lazuli bead, belonged to Pharaoh Amenemope, who reigned about 3,000 years ago. Authorities said it was taken from a restoration lab at the museum and then funneled through a chain of dealers before being melted down. The minister said the lab didn't have security cameras.
It's 2025. Can someone please get Cairo's Egyptian Museum a Ring camera off Amazon?
Four suspects have been arrested, including a restoration specialist at the museum who confessed to giving the bracelet to an acquaintance who owns a silver shop in Cairo's Sayyeda Zainab district. It was allegedly later sold to the owner of a gold workshop for the equivalent of about $3,800. It was eventually sold for around $4,000 to a worker at another gold workshop, who melted the bracelet down to make other gold jewelry.
A priceless relic ... sold off for $4,000.
The restoration specialist and their friends are in jail now, awaiting further investigation. Their bail is the equivalent to $207.
The other layer of irony here is that the collection this artifact was stolen from was once part of the collection at the Louvre in Paris until 2021 when, at the peak of wokeness, Western museums "returned" many artifacts to their home countries where they were discovered.
The necropolis' collection exhibits about 2,500 ancient artifacts, including golden funerary masks, silver coffins and golden jewels. The collection was restored in 2021 in cooperation with the Louvre Museum in Paris.
In other words, if the French hadn't given it back, history wouldn't have been destroyed.
Western museums display artifacts discovered in other countries to preserve human history, but because those countries now want the "stolen" items back, those museums are giving everything back ... all so someone can melt history down and sell it for a buck.
Sounds about right.
P.S. Now check out our latest video 👇
