AI Summary
5 min readIn 2017, the Metropolitan Museum of Art paid nearly $4 million for a stunning, fully intact gilded coffin from ancient Egypt, a first-century BCE artifact belonging to a high-ranking priest named Nedjamon. It was a blockbuster acquisition. Then Kim Kardashian posed next to it at the Met Gala, wearing a shimmering gold Versace dress. The photo went viral—and a looter in Egypt saw it. He had dug the coffin out of the ground himself under cover of civil war, and he had not been paid for it. He was furious. That tip, passed through an informant to a New York prosecutor, unraveled the coffin’s entire fabricated history and exposed how easily even the world’s most prestigious museums can be duped by the antiquities trade.
The $4 Million Coffin and the Looter’s Revenge
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What you'll learn
- 1 (05:38) **The Gold Coffin Heist** - Matthew Bogdanos introduces the case of a looted Egyptian coffin that ended up at the Met.
- 2 (15:28) **The Coffin's Fate and the Bigger Problem** - The coffin is repatriated to Cairo, raising the question of how many other museum treasures were stolen.
- 3 (20:36) **Myth-Busting the Antiquities Market** - Jim Marone explains why the illegal antiquities trade is smaller and more complex than commonly believed.
- 4 (25:45) **The Job of a Provenance Curator** - Victoria Reed of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, describes the work of researching ownership histories.
- 5 (27:48) **Looting is Still Happening** - The problem of fresh looting is ongoing, not just a historical issue.
- 6 (29:48) **The "Saving" Argument vs. Colonial Harm** - A debate on whether Western museums should keep artifacts from unstable regions.
- 7 (33:27) **Nazi Loot and the Complexity of Ownership** - The episode compares antiquities theft to Nazi-era looting, noting both similarities and differences.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
How did a freshly looted Egyptian antiquity end up in the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Why did it take Kim Kardashian to crack the case? And how much of what you see in any museum is stolen? (Part 1 of “Stealing Art Is Easy. Giving It Back Is Hard,” first published in 2023.)
- SOURCES:
- Andrea Bayer, deputy director of collections and administration at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
- Matthew Bogdanos, assistant district attorney in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office and chief of the Antiquities Trafficking Unit.
- Patty Gerstenblith, professor emeritus of law at DePaul University College of Law.
- Jim Marrone, staff data scientist at StubHub.
- Victoria Reed, Bettina Burr chair for provenance at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
- RESOURCES:
- "Is the Metropolitan Museum of Art Displaying Objects That Belong to Native American Tribes?" by Kathleen Sharp (ProPublica, 2023).
- "More Than 1,000 Artifacts in Metropolitan Museum of Art Catalog Linked to Alleged Looting and Trafficking Figures," by Spencer Woodman, Malia Politzer, Delphine Reuter, and Namrata Sharma (International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, 2023).
- "The Art Market 2022: An Art Basel & UBS Report," by Clare McAndrew (2022).
- "The Tomb Raiders of the Upper East Side," by Ariel Sabar (The Atlantic, 2021).
- "Kim Kardashian’s Met Gala Photo Helped Solve Looted Gold Egyptian Coffin Case," by Samantha Ibrahim (New Y
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