Alongside running her numerous businesses, training to become an attorney-at-law, and handling North’s constant trolling – Kim Kardashian has recently helped to crack a long-running criminal court case of a stolen Egyptian coffin.
Yes, you read that right. According to The New York Post, a photo of the reality TV star posing next to a gold coffin at the 2018 Met Gala has helped officials locate the whereabouts of the stolen artefact.
The coffin – which was purchased by the Met in 2017 – originally contained the mummified body of high-ranking first century B.C. priest Nedjemankh. During Egypt’s 2011 revolution, the coffin was looted from Minta and trafficked through the United Arab Emirates to Germany – there, Roben Dib, the manager of Hamburg’s Dionysos Gallery, restored the item and supplied it with fake export licenses.
From there, it landed in France, where antiquities dealers sold it to the Met for $4 million. Fast forward one year, and the coffin provided the perfect backdrop for Kim K’s sparkling gold Met Gala look, eventually leading to its rightful return to Egypt… and they say she’s famous for no reason.
As explained in an episode of Ben Lewis’s Art Bust podcast, a looter involved in digging up the coffin contacted the DA's antiquities-trafficking unit after they did not receive their share of the payment for the job. Head of the DA unit Matthew Bogdanos, who had been trying to locate the smuggling ring for five years, then immediately opened up a case for the item and informed the Met of the development. The museum was able to confirm its identity through a mummified finger bone still lurking inside the coffin.
Shockingly enough, this isn’t Kim’s first experience with missing ancient artefacts. Just last year, the reality TV star faced accusations by the US government that she smuggled a stolen Ancient Roman sculpture to America.
Kim, who originally bought the sculpture – Fragment of Myron’s Samian Athena – in 2016 from Belgium’s Axel Vervoordt Gallery, was allegedly detained at the US border after attempting to import it with the wrong documentation. Soon after, it was confirmed that the work was “looted, smuggled, and illegally exported” from Italy. Better luck next time, we guess.
