When French Egyptologist Olivier Perdu saw a fragment of a pharaonic statue on display in a Brussels gallery last year, he assumed it was a twin of an ancient masterpiece he had examined in Egypt a quarter of a century earlier.
The reality was an even more remarkable coincidence: the fragment was part of the very same artifact — a unique statue from the sixth century B.C. hewn from pale green stone — that Perdu had received special permission to study in Cairo in 1989.
The statue, a 29-cm-tall (11-inch-tall) representation of a man wearing a pharaonic headdress and holding a shrine to Osiris, the god of the afterlife, was smashed by looters who broke into the Cairo Museum during the 2011 uprising against Hosni Mubarak.
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