THE Metropolitan Museum of New York on Saturday returned a pharonic sculpture to Egypt which was smuggled out of the country 50 years earlier. The sculpture represents King Sethi the first, the son of Ramses, and was brought from the United States by the Egyptian consul in New York, Mahmoud Allam, who showed it to the press on his arrival at the international airport in Cairo. It shows “a goddess feeding milk to King Sethi I, whose royal title is mentioned,” said the secretary general of the higher council of antiquities, Gaballah Ali Gaballah. “The goddess could be Isis or Hathor,” he said at a press conference. A Dutch Egyptologist, Jacob Van Dick, who specialises in antiquities from the ancient Egyptian capital of Memphis some 10km south of Cairo was responsible for tracing the sculpture. He recognised it from old photos on a visit to the New York museum. – AFP