Wooden Coffins Mouldering in Egyptian Museums "to be restored"

More than 600 wooden coffins at Egyptian Museum in Cairo to be documented and restored by a team of conservators ("Hundreds of coffins to be restored in Egyptian conservation project" 17 January 2017). 

Egypt will restore hundreds of coffins dating back thousands of years to the time of the pharaohs as part of an American-Egyptian project to preserve and document one of the world’s oldest civilisations, a director of the project said. The conservation effort, funded by a US grant, will restore more than 600 wooden coffins that date to various eras of ancient Egypt and which are currently stored at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. [..]  Egypt was awarded the conservation grant worth $130,000 (£105,000), in December 2015. That project is part of a larger US-Egypt treaty signed in 2016 to curtail illicit trafficking of the country’s rich cultural heritage [...]  “One of the main goals of the project is to ensure that the [Egyptian] Museum has a full inventory of the objects and understands their conservation needs so that the coffins can be made available for research by scholars but also for the public.

 Antiquities theft flourished in Egypt in the chaotic years that immediately followed its 2011 uprising, with an indeterminate amount of heritage stolen by locals from museums, mosques, storage facilities and illegal excavations. One cannot help but think this world heritage would be safer outside Egypt than remaining at risk there of poor stewardship and theft.