Looters have broken into several cases at the famed Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Egypt’s antiquities chief, Zahi Hawass, told the Associated Press that the celebrated King Tutankhamun treasures were safe. But The Eloquent Peasant [via]—the blog of Margaret Maitland, a D.Phil. candidate in Egyptology at the University of Oxford—has matched images (from the Al Jazeera news service) of some of the damaged fragments with existing images of intact Tut objects.
UPDATE: Rania Abouzeid of Time magazine reports: “The intruders broke into some 13 glass panel display cases as well as one case in the Tutankhamun exhibition….Citizens, as well as three police officers who refused to leave their
posts, apprehended the nine alleged culprits as they tried to flee the
museum with their loot, including two mummy skulls and a statue of Isis.”
Here’s an AP video, posted on YouTube, of the army securing the museum and surveying the woeful damage. (The idiotic ads that Google placed at the end of this video, when I watched it, offered “Cheap Flights to Egypt” and a deluxe Nile River cruise.)