Kim Kardashian and the golden coffin of Nedjemankh

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A photo of Kim Kardashian taken at the Met Ball helped international agents solve the mystery of a looted treasure.

Kardashian attended the annual bash at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2018. Dressed in a metallic gold gown and sporting heavy black eyeliner, Kardashian posed for a photo next to a similarly flashy gold Egyptian coffin — bearing an image with eyeliner as thick as her own.

When the photo went viral, according to the Daily Mail, it helped solve a lengthy criminal case involving the gold coffin, forged documents and an international antiquity-looting-and-trafficking ring.

The golden coffin is from the 1st century BC and is dedicated to Nedjemankh, a high-ranking priest of the god Heryshef of Herakleopolis. In 2018, it was the centrepiece of an exhibition at the Met visited by about 500,000 people, but once the museum discovered their treasure was stolen, the show closed early.

The coffin was returned to Egypt in 2019 and put on display at Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

The Met paid $4 million for the coffin, not knowing it had been looted from the Minya region of Egypt during the 2011 revolution. The museum had been given fake documents at the time of purchase to make the item look legit.

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On his podcast Art Bust: Scandalous Stories of The Art World, journalist Ben Lewis talks about the big role the Kardashian photograph played in uncovering those responsible for the antiquities theft.

One of the looters, annoyed because he didn’t get paid for helping dig the coffin out of the ground in 2011, saw the viral photo with Kardashian and brought it to the attention of someone else — an informer who forwarded it to Manhattan assistant district attorney Matthew Bogdanos.

Bogdanos was head of the Manhattan DA’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit and had been working on an international antiquities case for five years.

The Kardashian photo was the clue that broke the case.

Artnet reports the coffin was made in Egypt sometime between 150 and 50 BC and remained buried for more than 2,000 years. It  was smuggled out of Egypt and illegally transported to a warehouse in Dubai, changing hands there or four times before the Met acquisition. At least three people have been arrested in the case.

The Antiquities Trafficking Unit recovered valuables worth more than $150 million in 2019, but only one item that involved keeping up with the Kardashians.

Many of the items have been repatriated to the countries where they originated.

lbraun@postmedia.com