LONDON: A 3,000-year-old head sculpture of an eternally-young Tutankhamun — the Egyptian pharaoh known as King Tut — goes under the hammer this week in London despite an outcry from Cairo.

Christie’s expects the 28.5-centimetre (11-inch) brown quartzite relic from the Valley of the Kings to fetch more than $5.1 million on Thursday.

The Financial Times reported that it was the first such Egyptian statuette to go on the market since 1985.

The pharaoh’s finely-chiselled head — its serene eyes and puffed lips emoting a sense of eternal peace — comes from the private Resandro Collection of ancient art that Christie’s last sold in 2016 for three million.

But Egyptian authorities overseeing the north African country’s unparalleled collection of antiquities want to see the auction halted and the treasure returned.

“The Egyptian embassy in London requested the British foreign affairs ministry and the auction hall to stop the sale,” Egypt’s foreign ministry said on June 10.

Former antiquities minister Zahi Hawass said on Sunday that the piece appears to have been “stolen” in the 1970s from the Karnak Temple complex of Egypt’s great monuments.

Published in Dawn, July 2nd, 2019