Tutankhamun relic sells for $6m despite outcry

A 3,000-year-old quartzite  head of Egyptian “Boy King” Tutankhamun was auctioned off for $6 million yesterday in London despite an outcry from Cairo. Christie’s auction house sold the 28.5-centimetre (11-inch) relic for £4,746,250 ($5,970,000, 5,290,000 euros) at one of its most controversial auctions in years.

No information about the buyer was disclosed. The famous pharaoh’s finely-chiselled face -- its calm eyes and puffed lips emoting a sense of eternal peace -- came from the private Resandro Collection of ancient art that Christie’s last auctioned off 2016 for £3 million. But angry Egyptian officials wanted Thursday’s sale halted and the treasure returned. Christie’s decision “contradicts international agreements and conventions,” Egypt’s foreign ministry said on Wednesday.

Former antiquities minister Zahi Hawass told AFP that the piece appears to have been “stolen” in the 1970s from the Karnak Temple complex just north of Luxor. “We think it left Egypt after 1970 because in that time other artefacts were stolen from Karnak Temple,” Hawass said. Christie’s countered that Egypt had never before expressed the same level of concern about an item whose existence has been “well known and exhibited publicly” for many years.

“The object is not, and has not been, the subject of an investigation,” it said in a statement. The auction house has published a chronology of how the relic changed hands between European art dealers over the past 50 years. Its oldest attribution from 1973-74 places it in the collection of Prince Wilhelm of Thurn and Taxi in modern-day Germany.

Yet that account was called into doubt by a report from the Live Science news site last month suggesting that Wilhelm never owned the piece. Wilhelm was “not a very art-interested person,” his niece Daria told the news site.