Supreme Council of Antiquities

The first government body responsible for the preservation and protection of Egypt's rich historical landscape was the Department of Antiquities, established in 1858.

[5] It defined the boundaries around archaeological sites and required foreign archaeologists working in Egypt to report all discoveries and finds to the SCA before publication.

[citation needed] The SCA was also responsible for the recovery of antiquities previously stolen or illegally exported from Egypt: between 2002 and 2008, it retrieved 3,000 artefacts.

[1] The goals of the organization include conservation, preservation, excavations, and research of Egypt, its history, monuments, artifacts, and its peoples.

[10] In addition to these goals, the organization also was used to help promote tourism[11] and to bring attention to the fight to have artifacts returned to Egypt.

[14] At the end of 2011, Dr. Mohamed Ibrahim Aly was named antiquities minister and he promised to give new life to the body, by bringing in young archeologists and restarting projects which had been put on hold.

"[17] "Professor Maspero resigned his office of directorship on June 5, 1886, and was succeeded in the superintendency of excavations and Egyptian archaeology by M. Eugène Grébaut.

In the same month Grébaut started upon the work of unbandaging the mummy of the Theban king Seqenenra Tao, of the Seventeenth Dynasty.

After more than a century of existence, the Department of Antiquities was therefore renamed in 1971.The new title sounded less bureaucratic, and suggested a dynamic agency: reflecting the value of the past to the present.

This led to the upgrade, firstly to a Supreme Council in 1994, then - in 2011 - to a full Ministry of State, devoted exclusively to a judicious development of the nation's heritage.

Nevertheless, probably in the same year, Maspero, assisted by Emil Brugsch, began to make a selection of the less important pieces to sell before they were included in the Bulaq collection.

For this reason, a sale room (Salle de ventes) was opened in 1892 in the palace of Ismail Pasha in Giza, which became the seat of the Egyptian Museum in the last decade of the 19th century.

From a packing list as well as from other sources, such as the pages of the register of the sale room or the museums' inventories and archives, which have already been checked or reconciled, it can be deduced that the objects sold were: Reliefs, architectural elements, offering tables, coffins, complete or fragmentary statues, statue heads or torsos, headrests, capitals (mostly Coptic), canopic jars, as well as stone or glass vessels, ushabtis, weights, amulets and scarabs.