Welcome to the Egyptological Looting Database 2011
The Egyptological Looting Database was established by Kate Phizackerley on 31st January 2011 to record known (or strongly suspected) details of sites looted during the popular Egyptian uprising of January and February 2011. It was migrated into the main Egyptological site in January 2013 for preservation as an archive. The database is still occasionally maintained as news trickles in of sites, recoveries of artefacts and, mostly sadly, ongoing looting in some sites. In February 2011, the Ministry confirmed that 2% of antiquities stored in museums and magazines were looted; countless more were dug up illegally and without record.
If you have any new information, please use the comment form on the relevant page for the affected site; I will consolidate it into the text as soon as information can reasonably be verified. If you need another site added, please record the information in the comments and I will set up a dedicated site page as soon as I can. I will also split and re-arrange pages as information comes in. Comments are arranged with the newest at the top to reflect any developing situations.
You may also contact me using the comment form on this page, or by using my personal contact form to send me an email. If you would like editing permissions to help record information, please get in touch.
The site was established to respond to the fast-moving situation in Egypt. It is a working site, so please don’t expect lots of refinement. Text is not pretty: it is usually a case of adding new information quickly. All main sources are retained to maintain the historic picture, but text may be archived to the bottom of the page, or to an archive page.
Information is provided on a best endeavours basis. Even months later hard facts are not always available.
2012 etc.
I have decided to continue to add new incidents to the Egyptological Looting Database when I hear of them. These will be clearly dated 2012, 2013 etc. Reports without a year refer to the start of the Egyptian Revolution in 2011. A year (2011) will be added to clarify these when pages are updated.
NB – This section of the site is presently being migrated and will be incomplete until February 2013