After a decade of lying hidden in storehouses at auction halls in Melbourne, Australia, a collection of 122 ancient Egyptian and Greco-Roman artefacts is to return to Egypt on 5 November. An archaeological mission led by Ahmed Mostafa, director general of the Retrieved Antiquities Department at the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), travelled early Friday to Melbourne to receive the items which are now at the Egyptian embassy in the city.

Following comprehensive investigations carried out by the Tourism and Antiquities Police (TAP), a collection of missing ancient Egyptian artefacts were recovered buried by antiquity smugglers in the desert south of Saqqara necropolis. According to a release submitted by TAP, the restituted collection includes of an anthropoid painted wood sarcophagus, two wooden statues depicting the god Ptah and seven pieces of inscribed limestone which were parts of a false door. The objects were stolen from Saqqara necropolis and taken out of the archaeological space in order to be sold.

The Egyptian Tourism and Antiquities Police have succeeded in recovering two well-preserved limestone reliefs stolen in 1986 by an international antiquities smuggling gang from Saqqara archaeological storehouses. The objects belong to the Fifth Dynasty tomb of the king's royal hairdresser Hetepka, discovered by British archaeologists Geoffrey Martin in the late 1960’s at the Old Kingdom cemetery at Saqqara necropolis.

Egyptian Tourism and Antiquities Police succeeded in recovering an ancient Egyptian limestone relief which had been reported missing during the chaos that followed the January 25 Revolution. The relief, which was discovered by the Czech archaeological mission in Abusir, was one metre tall and 60 centimetres wide. It depicted four walking geese with a hieroglyphic text.

A spokesman at the British Museum said museum directors received a request from Egypt to borrow the Rosetta stone for the opening ceremony of Grand Egyptian Museum. Esmi Wilson said the museum secretary is studying this request, as there are reports saying the Egyptian government wants the stone back permanently.

The Egyptian ambassador in Australia, Omar Metwali, received 122 archeological pieces from Australian authorities. The pieces were retrieved from an auction house in Melbourne in November 2010. The Egyptian embassy in Australia issued a statement announcing the Australian authorities caught these pieces after the Egyptian embassy presented an official request to retrieve them. The archeological pieces date back to the Pharaonic, Greek and Roman eras.

Four antiques from the time of King Amnehotep III will be returned to Egypt by the UK within days, said Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities Mohamed Abdel Maksoud in a statement on Saturday. They were seized when an American amateur collector tried to sell them in London. The pieces had been removed from the base of an ancient statue of Amnehotep III in his mortuary temple in Luxor

After nearly nine decades of pertaining to New York's Metropolitan Museum collection, artifacts from Tutankhamun’s tomb return in Egypt to be displayed. The pieces were acquired by Carter's niece after they had been probated with his estate and were later recognised to have been noted in the tomb records, although they do not appear in any excavation photographs.

Federal authorities announced on Wednesday that they had broken up an international ring that had been smuggling Egyptian antiquities into the United States. The items seized had a market value of $2.5 million and they include a Greco-Roman style sarcophagus, a nesting set of three sarcophagi that dates from about 664 to 552 B.C., and limestone figures. It is not clear when or how the objects were taken out of Egypt, but they have been authenticated and carbon dated.

Following archaeological investigations, a committee from the ministry of state for antiquities (MSA) approved the authenticity of five bronze coins and twenty-two clay vessels which were found in the possession of Bedouins at the canal city of Port Fouad. Youssef Khalifa, head of the archaeological committee, said that the newly recovered objects were among the objects reported missing from Qantara East warehouses following the security vacuum that overwhelmed Egypt following the January revolution.