Egypt may sue to get mask back

CAIRO, Egypt -- Egypt's chief archaeologist Zahi Hawass asked state attorneys on Tuesday to sue the Saint Louis Art Museum to regain possession of a 3,200-year-old mask from the Pharaonic era that was allegedly stolen.

Hawass, the secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said he would also be writing to Interpol and the U.S. State Department "to ask them to intercede to bring back the mask."

"I have the evidence that this mask was stolen," Hawass said.

Saint Louis Art Museum director Brent Benjamin said the museum intends to keep the mask because it has received nothing to support the claim that the mask was stolen.

Hawass said he gave the museum documents, including a register that recorded the burial mask of Ka Nefer Nefer in 1959.

The museum said the register only begs more questions because it fails to say what happened to the mask.

It is not known who Ka Nefer Nefer was, except that she was a woman who lived in the 19th dynasty, about 3,200 years ago. Hawass said she was probably the wife of a nobleman.

The mask -- made of wood and plaster inlaid with glass for the eyes -- was excavated from one of the Saqqara pyramids, about 16 miles south of Cairo, in 1952.

Hawass has said that because records were poorly kept in those days, the mask was documented only once -- in 1959.

The museum bought it from an art dealer in the United States in 1998 for about $500,000 after checking with authorities and the international Art Loss Register that it was not stolen.

Benjamin said the museum approved the purchase with the Egyptian Museum.

But Hawass said the director of the Egyptian Museum at the time denied such approval and that Benjamin had failed to produce proof.

Hawass had set a May 15 deadline for the museum to return the mask, but Benjamin said the museum had never officially received a deadline.

Hawass, who urged St. Louis schools to boycott the museum, said that it was impossible that the mask could have reached the United States legally because there is no record that the Egyptian Museum ever sold it.

He suspected the mask was stolen in the 1980s when one of the Egyptian Museum's storage rooms was looted.