Hot Art by Joshua Knelman Read Free Book Online

black market. He did, and, like Czegledi, he was astounded at what he found—a giant mess, with billions of dollars of stolen work traversing the world, summarily ignored by most of the world’s police forces.
    St. Hilaire’s eyes are green, friendly, and energetic, and he loves talking about Egyptian history. He also possesses the rare gift of being able to summarize huge swaths of history in easy-to-digest narratives. Just like Czegledi, he is a natural teacher, and on a day off from the conference, St. Hilaire took me for a tour of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo for a crash course on the history of art thieves. We strolled through Tahrir Square. It’s hard for me, even now, to believe that just a few years later the square would be filled with thousands of citizen-revolutionaries facing off against President Hosni Mubarak’s thugs. On that day, it was relatively peaceful and sunny. Crowds of men smoked and hung out in the garden in front of the museum.
    The museum is grand and dusty, and its 177 halls are crammed with more than 120,000 artifacts, remnants of great dynasties taken from the pyramids and temples of the ancient royalty of Egypt. Also here are the preserved bodies of 27 of those kings and queens, some of them more than 5,000 years old. They lie in climate-controlled chambers under soft light, protected by thick coffins of Windex-clear glass: Ramses iii, Seti i. Some of the mummified corpses still have the hair they died with, brittle as straw. Their bodies were wrapped in cloth and locked in the black centre of pyramids. Now lines of tourists look down at their dead faces, gawking.
    â€œThis wasn’t the plan,” explained St. Hilaire. “Ancient Egyptians had no word for art. These were tools, and they served a purpose. The pyramids and their treasures were all part of an elaborate machine that the ruling families of Egypt devised to move safely from their lives on earth to a world beyond death.” The afterlife was as real to them as water, sand, or stone. “The machine gets them to the other world and lets them live well there. But only if the machine stays intact,” St. Hilaire said. “The pyramids, unfortunately, were also these great big beacons to thieves, to the poor of Egypt. They shouted, ‘Look over here! The loot is inside us! Rob me!’”
    He pointed to a stone statue in a glass case. It was tiny, about two inches tall. “Khufu was an ancient king, and one of the most powerful kings in the history of the world, but that little statue is the only image we have left of him.”
    Khufu had one of the largest tombs, and it was probably heavily looted. “The entrance to Khufu’s pyramid wasn’t created by the king; it’s a looter’s entrance,” St. Hilaire told me. “Most of the early looting in Egypt happened by locals.” The history of Egypt, he explained, was a history of plunder—first by Egyptians, and then by the world.
    Locals started raiding the pyramids around 2200 BCE , while Egypt was still reeling from the reign of Pepi II , considered to be one of the longest-reigning kings in history (somewhere between sixty and eighty-four years). After Pepi’s rule, Egypt fell into what is now banally titled the First Intermediate Period, which means that Egypt was in chaos; with no one in charge, society collapsed.
    â€œThink Iraq, after the fall of Baghdad,” St. Hilaire said. “There was no social structure in Egypt to make sure looting didn’t happen. The common person who lived in Egyptian society knew that the king was buried in the pyramid, with lots of great stuff in there. He also knew that the king had a special gate, to travel into the afterlife. And now there was no one stopping them.”
    St. Hilaire paused in front of a large statue—of the pharaoh Djoser—with empty eye sockets. “This statue used to have beautiful crystal-rock eyes. You rarely find the glass eyes