The Memphis Museum has been looted and Saqqara (particularly away from the pyramids) is being dug up as we speak, according to some of the Egyptological blogs and Facebook sites I have spen the last two hours checking. This is devastating. Abusir has been attacked by looters, and the Coptic Museum in Cairo was attacked as well. The Egyptian Museum itself is pretty well secured, although the mummies of Yuya and Tuya (the latter the woman one of my cats is named for) were damaged -- they apparently were the ones that had their heads ripped off, two of the statuettes from the tomb of Tutankhamun were smashed, and some of the pharaonic jewellery seems to have been stolen although there have been strident denials. The former director of the museum says that it was guards or antiquities police who looted it -- one has been arrested. The new (as of November of 2010) gift shop was looted and may have been completely emptied -- it is difficult to tell.
But the main museum seems to have been pretty well secured. The world is watching there. The main concern I have is not with what we know, but with what we don't know. More on that, and links for more info below the fold.
Luxor and the west bank of Thebes seems to have been pretty well secured, by both the army and local population. But the area of Abusir and Memphis have been attacked. From a paraphrasing on a Facebook Egyptologists' page:
Verified by Mohammad Megahed: Immense damages to Abusir and Saqqara, all magazines and tombs which were sealed were entered last night. Only Imhotep Museum and adjacent central magazines protected by the military. In Abusir all tombs opened. large gangs digging day and night everywhere
Egyptologists have been contacting border police, customs offices and customs departments all over the world, to look for looted antiquities coming out of Egypt from today onwards. Maguire Gibson, who was so prominent in the attempt to preserve and track Iraq's antiquities after both the Gulf War and the aftermath of the Iraq War and current occupation, has been contacted to lend his expertise. With a professional and widespread antiquities organization, an understanding of the importance to the economy of tourism and great pride in their heritage, I was hoping this would not happen. But the destruction that can be done by illegal digging (and everyone who lives in a town knows where the local antiquities are to be found) cannot be undone. I am worried about the museums, and the poorly-documented and even undocumented objects that are there, but the objects in storerooms that have been taken out are going to be next to impossible to retrieve, are likely to have been damaged if they are retrieved, and then there are the sites that have never been excavated.
I am in the process of publishing one of those unpublished sites, isolated but in the Nile Valley itself. I am hoping its very isolation will help it be preserved, even through this. But the sites that are much more available to locals -- the rock cut tombs on the cliffs above the villages, the pits at the edge of the desert, the cities that are under current houses -- these are ripe for "investigation" and we will be having issues with this for centuries to come, even if this looting is tamped down in a week.
For information and updates about the looting and damage and preservation of (largely pharaonic) antiquities, look at these sites:
Egyptology News
Ancient Egypt Online
News from the Valley of the Kings
An open Facebook group that updates regularly and quickly
The Eloquent Peasant