Museum, Egypt at odds over mask

The Saint Louis Art Museum will keep a 3,200-year-old mummy mask unless it gets more proof that it belongs to Egypt.

The museum won’t meet a Monday deadline set by Egyptian antiquities authorities to return the mask, museum director Brent Benjamin said Friday. He noted that the Supreme Council of Antiquities never officially gave the museum a deadline.

Zahi Hawass, secretary general for the council in Egypt, said the mummy mask was probably stolen before it was obtained by the art museum in 1998.

“Nothing that we have seen to this date supports his claim,” Benjamin said.

The museum bought the mask from an art dealer in the United States in 1998 for about $500,000, only after checking with authorities and the international Art Loss Register to see if the item had been stolen.