Scrooge McHawass' money bin

Gold stater of Nectanebo II (360-342 BC)

The last native Egyptian pharaoh issued this coin,
proclaiming it to be "good gold" (nub nefer) in the
hieroglyphically-derived reverse design.
A literate example of "cultural heritage", it combines
Egyptian and Greek characteristics.
© Trustees of the British Museum

As part of an agreement between the current (what time is it?) Egyptian government and the United States of Monsanto, the genetically modified Zahi Hawass has been released from his hermetically-sealed and climate-controlled sarcophagus at the back of a shawarma shop in Cairo where he had been kept under sedation. He is currently drying out on a clothesline in the back alley while builders are completing his money bin deep in the bowels of the Egyptian Museum. Officials of the Imperialist Department of Archaeology are overjoyed and even the Taliban have issued their congratulations saying "It is definitely a better solution for public relations purposes than the one we implemented with Bamiyan".

[cough] Sorry about that, I am still suffering from a mild gonzo attack this morning. I should be feeling better, momentarily. It all started a few days ago when I was looking on the web for pictures and information about ancient coinage in Egyptian Museum web sites.

An important selling point that is employed by the Imperialists, their archaeology dupes and the latter's pseudo-numismatist boot-lickers, is that ancient coins should belong to the people. For the benefit of my non-English speaking readers who are relying on a machine web translator, I should explain that the people is term popularly used in English by Imperialists to refer to themselves. It replaces the previously used, but now unpopular, term dictator. Its usage is inspired by Jungian enantiodromia and it is really just an expression of the big lie.

Anyway, I just could not find anything at all on Egyptian museum web sites. Normally, I am pretty good at Googling things, but not this time. It was starting to disturb me. Perhaps I just not had enough sleep the previous night. I thought that I would make it a bit easier for myself by looking for an image of the Nectanebo stater, surely even Zahi Hawass would approve of that one ― perhaps he just didn't like the Ptolemies. I found some images, but none of them were from Egyptian sites. Now I was starting to get alarmed. I decided to avoid the direct approach and reasoned that if I just Googled the names of Egyptian numismatists who had published standard references on Ptolemaic coinage, then these would lead me to where all the information was hidden, after all, the Imperialists are always going on about education. I found lots of references to Ptolemaic numismatics, Greek, English, American and more but there were no Egyptian names among the results.

Then it dawned on me ― while Scrooge McHawass' money bin was being constructed to accommodate all of the confiscated coins so that they could be seen by no one, and he was drying out from the sedation, his henchmen had managed to remove all the references from the web. A note hiding at the bottom of the museum web page confirmed my suspicions. It said that no cameras were allowed in the museum. I had previously thought it was just part of his copyright thievery ― copyright is supposed to protect creators of works, not the owners of such works. That was William Hogarth's goal anyway. I now realize that the removal of all of that vast amount of information was part of an Orwellian plot to prevent any knowledge getting out. No wonder the Taliban were impressed!

If you are interested in this coinage, here are the top two surviving (Google) links in order:

Ptolemaic Bronze Coinage - The PtolemAE Project

The House of Ptolemy: Ptolemaic and Roman Egyptian Numismatics

You had better hurry though, these are American sites, as are many that they link to and it can only be a matter of time before their owners are dragged from their beds in the night by hundreds of FBI agents of the United States of Monsanto and everything vanishes.