Kim Kardashian is known for many things: she’s a reality TV personality, a businesswoman, an attorney in the making, and the ex-wife of Kanye West. What people don’t typically know about her is that she helped return a stolen coffin to Egypt.
In 2011, the coffin was looted from Minya. The coffin dates back to the first century BC. It once contained the mummy of a priest of Heryshef of Herakleopolis, the ram-headed god. Smugglers then trafficked it through the United Arab Emirates to Germany.
There, Roben Dib, the manager of Hamburg’s Dionysos Gallery, allegedly restored it and drew up fake export papers. The documents falsely claimed that the coffin had been legally exported in 1971.
Then, it went to antiquities dealers in France, who arranged for it to be sold in 2017 to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for $4 million. It was repatriated in September 2019.
Kim Kardashian posed with the coffin at the 2018 Met Gala. Of course, a picture of her in a gold dress that matched the gold coffin quickly spread across the internet.
The photo caught the attention of one of the coffin’s original thieves. His partners had double-crossed him. A source who knew about the situation emailed the photo to Matthew Bogdanos, the head of the district attorney’s antiquities-trafficking unit.
In the email, they explained that the looter had never been paid for unburying the coffin and smuggling it out of Europe, so now, they were ready to exact revenge.
They were more than willing to speak out against their partners. Bogdanos had actually been chasing this smuggling ring for five years.
Investigators traced the chain of trafficking and were able to confirm the artifact was genuine from a mummified finger bone. The thieves had dumped out the remains of the priest, but the finger bone had been missed.
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Once the Met was presented with evidence of the theft, the institution fully cooperated with the investigation. In August 2020, German police immediately took Roben Dib into custody.
Soon after, the coffin was returned to Cairo, Egypt, thanks to the influence of the iconic Kim Kardashian, who put the coffin on the map in the first place.
“Coming as we do from all over the world, New Yorkers place a strong value on cultural heritage, and our office takes pride in our work to vigorously protect it,” said Cyrus R. Vance Jr., Manhattan’s District Attorney.
“Returning stolen cultural treasures to their countries of origin is at the core of our mission to stop the trafficking of stolen antiquities. I am honored to repatriate this extraordinary artifact back to the people of Egypt, and I thank my office’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit as well as our partners at HSI New York for their diligence in this investigation.”
By Emily Chan
Emily Chan is a writer who covers lifestyle and news content. She graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in... More about Emily Chan
