Ancient

An ancient Egyptian bracelet once belonging to Pharaoh Amenemope has been stolen from Cairo’s Egyptian Museum and melted down, authorities revealed.

The gold bracelet, dating back 3,000 years, was taken on September 9 from the museum’s restoration lab while officials prepared artifacts for an exhibition in Italy.

The piece, a simple gold band adorned with a lapis lazuli bead, was part of the collection of Amenemope, a pharaoh of Egypt’s 21st Dynasty who ruled from Tanis in the Nile Delta.

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Tourism and Antiquities Minister Sherif Fathy said the lab where it was stolen lacked security cameras, leaving the priceless item vulnerable.

Pharoh’s 3,000-year-old bracelet stolen

Authorities say the bracelet passed through several hands before being destroyed after the museum heist. A restoration specialist at the museum confessed to giving the artifact to a contact who owned a silver shop in Cairo’s Sayyeda Zainab district.

From there, it was sold for around $3,800 to a gold workshop, and later resold for about $4,000 to another jeweler who melted it down to make other pieces of jewelry.

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Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and AntiquitiesThe priceless bracelet was melted down after being sold.

Security camera footage released by the ministry shows one suspect presenting the bracelet at a shop, weighing it, and being paid for it.

Four suspects have been arrested, including the museum restoration specialist. They reportedly confessed to their roles in the heist. The money earned from the sale has been seized, though the artifact itself is gone.

Amenemope’s tomb was discovered in 1940 by French Egyptologist Pierre Montet and forms part of the museum’s Tanis collection, which includes thousands of objects such as gold funerary masks and silver coffins.

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Under Egyptian law, stealing an artifact with intent to smuggle it can carry a life sentence and fines up to $100,000, according to AFP. Authorities have not yet announced specific charges against those involved.

The loss of the bracelet has sparked outrage among Egyptologists and historians, who consider it an irreplaceable part of the country’s cultural heritage.

This isn’t the only museum heist to make headlines. Back in 2024, at least four employees at the Van Gogh Museum were suspended after it was discovered that they reportedly stole Pokemon cards during the popular exhibition.

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About 500 million years ago, the Grand Canyon was a great sea, and among the creatures it harbored was a newly discovered type of penis worm, armed with many rings of teeth.

Penis worms are marine creatures with a distinctly phallic appearance. There are more than 20 known species living across the world’s oceans today, as well as a number of extinct ones, like this new discovery. The researcher who made the find was searching for fossils in the Grand Canyon and named the species Kraytdraco spectatus in honor of the huge burrowing krayt dragons that appear in the Star Wars universe. Details of the discovery were published in the journal Science Advances.

The authors believe that the worm fed using a retractible throat that could be pushed outward, inside out, before being drawn in on itself—like the finger of a glove being inverted. Lining this throat were rings and rings of teeth.

Courtesy of Rhydian Evans

Trying to imagine how the ancient worm might have fed, the researchers hypothesize that along this proboscis it combined strong, sharp teeth with more delicate feathered ones for a two-stage eating process. The former could have been used to pick up food such as algae and microorganisms dispersed in the sand where the worm would have lived, the latter to filter this food out of the substrate and chew it. But having only a fossil to look at, and not being able to see the worm at work, this remains only a hypothesis.

An adult specimen would have measured about 15 to 20 centimeters long. This is much larger than the species of penis worm that survive today, which have undergone miniaturization over the millennia and now do not exceed 2 to 3 millimeters.

Although the phallic worm monopolized scientists’ attention with its teeth, fossils of other creatures were also found in the same expedition. They’re estimated to date from before the beginning of the Cambrian period, roughly 500 million years ago, considered by experts to be the dawn of complex animal life. These other creatures, early types of shrimp and mollusks, are valuable because they suggest what the world’s first predators looked like.

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Thieves steal ancient Pharaoh’s bracelet in Cairo museum heist, sell it for just $4K

Pharoh’s 3,000-year-old bracelet stolen

An Ancient Penis Worm With Rings of Sharp Teeth Has Been Discovered in the Grand Canyon