Serendipity aids Egypt in struggle to recover stolen heritage

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By Stephen Kalin and Tom Perry CAIRO (Reuters) - When French Egyptologist Olivier Perdu saw a fragment of a pharaonic statue on display in a Brussels gallery last year, he assumed it was a twin of an ancient masterpiece he had examined in Egypt a quarter of a century earlier. The reality was an even more remarkable coincidence: the fragment was part of the very same artifact - a unique 6th century B.C. statue hewn from pale green stone - that Perdu had received special permission to study in Cairo in 1989. "What I had between my hands in Brussels was the object that I had studied in the Cairo museum in 1989." Thanks to his chance encounter, the piece excavated in 1858 has found its way back to Egypt. It is now back in Cairo, where conservation experts have reunited it with the rest of the statue.




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