Eleven years on the canal route, four editors at the desk, one open registrar's record.

How it started.

Hossam el-Bedawi joined the Port Said customs office in 1995 as a junior clearance officer. By 2002 he was the senior officer responsible for the cultural-property dispatches — the museum loan crates moving northbound out of Egypt toward European, North American and East Asian receiving museums, and the returning crates moving southbound back to Cairo. He retired from the customs service in 2014 and spent his first retirement year on the documentation project he had been quietly assembling for the previous decade: a cross-referenced register of every cultural-property dispatch he had personally cleared, with the receiving museum, the contractual return date, and the actual return date where the crate had come back through Port Said.

The first publication was a forty-page private document circulated to seven journalists Hossam had come to know during his customs years. The reaction was strong enough that he decided to formalise the work. In March 2015 the Cartouche Loan Watch published its first online register, with one hundred and eighty-two active loans documented from the EAA's then-current dispatch records cross-referenced against Hossam's customs archive. The cooperative was incorporated as Nile Repatriation Notes S.A.E. in November of the same year. The first monthly bulletin went out in February 2016. The cooperative now publishes the weekly roster updates, the monthly bulletin, the quarterly dispute-watch and the open methodology document.

The four editors.

Hossam el-Bedawi — founder and lead registrar. Born Port Said 1968. Twenty-year customs career at the Port Said canal authority, focused on cultural-property dispatches from 2002 to 2014. Reads classical Arabic and conversational English and French. Maintains the desk's working relationship with the EAA's quarterly dispatch register and writes the editorial introduction to the monthly bulletin. Signs the dispute-watch updates personally.

Layla Mursi — managing editor and lender-museum liaison. Born Alexandria 1981. Trained as an archivist at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (2003–08) and then nine years at the Greco-Roman Museum's records office. Joined the watch in 2017. Maintains the lender-museums list, handles the routine correspondence with receiving-museum registrar's offices, and writes the lender-profile essays that run in the monthly bulletin. Speaks Arabic, English and French.

Marwan Saidy — data and customs specialist. Born Damietta 1989. Trained as a logistics analyst at the Suez Canal Authority's training college (2008–10) and then six years at the canal authority's shipping data centre before joining the watch full-time in 2020. Maintains the cooperative's database, runs the weekly cross-reference between the three source streams, and writes the technical notes on data quality that appear in the methodology document.

Iman Tantawi — researcher and writer. Born Cairo 1992. Trained in museum studies at the American University in Cairo (2012–16) and then four years at the Cairo Museum's loans office before joining the watch in 2022. Writes the long-form Tutankhamun tour history file and the registrar's glossary, and conducts the long-form interviews with current and former receiving-museum registrars that appear in the bulletin once or twice a year.

The administrator, Salem Abdelhamid, has handled subscriptions, accounting, the public correspondence inbox and the office Tuesday-Wednesday-Saturday opening hours since 2018. Salem does not write for the watch.

How the desk is governed.

The cooperative is governed by the four editors as the editorial board, with the administrator attending without voting rights. Major editorial decisions — admission of a loan to the dispute-watch, removal of a loan from the watch following clarification, change to the methodology document, addition of a new source stream — require a three-of-four board vote. The chair role rotates between Hossam, Layla and Marwan on a three-year cycle; Layla holds the current term until December 2026. Iman does not yet hold the chair role under the cooperative's own internal seniority arrangement.

The funding model.

Reader subscriptions covered approximately fifty-eight percent of the watch's revenue in 2025. The Ahmed Lutfi al-Sayyid Foundation research grant — a recurring annual sum of eighty-five thousand Egyptian pounds, paid each January under a renewable five-year agreement first signed in 2018 — contributed thirty-one percent. The remaining eleven percent came from two consultancy contracts that Hossam and Marwan privately hold with logistics firms in the canal zone, neither related to cultural-property work; both are declared and logged in the December transparency note. No museum, antiquities-trade entity, advocacy organisation, government department or political body funds the watch at any point. Four sponsorship approaches have been declined since 2015, all from cultural-advocacy organisations (the watch's editorial board judged that any one of them, while sympathetic, would have compromised the desk's neutral documentary stance).

The Ahmed Lutfi al-Sayyid Foundation is an Egyptian private foundation established in 1992 to support cultural-property records and bibliographic documentation work; its grants are made on a research-output basis and carry no editorial conditions. The foundation's annual report (separate from the watch's) describes the grant as part of the foundation's broader cultural-record programme.

The documentary stance.

The watch's central editorial choice — and the one that journalists ask about most often — is the deliberate refusal to advocate for or against repatriation. The watch publishes what the public record shows. Readers, museum boards, journalists, university curators and the EAA's officials draw their own conclusions. The desk's view, articulated repeatedly in editorial notes, is that the consolidated public record is itself the most useful contribution it can make to the wider debate, and that advocacy by the data-publisher would compromise the data-publisher's role.

The position has cost the watch some readers who wish we would take a clearer side, particularly during the high-profile dispute periods (the 2019 Rosetta Stone discussion, the 2022 Aga Khan museum Cairo agreement, the 2024 Berlin reinstallation question). The board has consistently held to the documentary stance and considers the four refused sponsorship approaches to be the practical proof of the position.

What we publish — and what we do not.

We publish the active-loans roster with inventory identifiers, lender and receiving institutions, dispatch dates, contractual return dates and known status. We publish the recent-returns log. We publish the dispute-watch with the specific reasons each disputed loan is on the list. We publish the lender-museums list with the institutions' loan-policy summaries. We publish the methodology document, the annual transparency note, the corrections log and the December financial breakdown. We do not publish private collection inventory beyond what the EAA's public dispatch register includes; we do not publish unverified accusations or politically-coloured commentary; we do not publish the identities of the staff at receiving museums beyond their published institutional roles.

The Port Said office.

The office is the ground floor of a 1930s commercial building on Sharia Mohammed Ali, two blocks back from the canal corniche in the El-Manakh district. The building's upstairs neighbour is a third-generation maritime-insurance brokerage; the back yard borders the cooperative's own small archive room with the printed bulletins since 2016 and the paper-archive transcripts of Hossam's customs-era records. Visitors are welcome by appointment Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday from 10:00 to 14:00 Cairo time. The office has tea, a working table for archive use, and an air-conditioning system that struggles with the canal humidity in August.

Visiting researchers and the office library.

The cooperative office in Port Said hosts visiting researchers throughout the academic year. Approximately twenty visiting researchers come through the office each year — primarily PhD students working on cultural-property thesis topics, mid-career journalists researching long-form pieces on the international museum loan system, and occasional museum-board members from receiving institutions who want to understand the desk's working method first-hand. The office library, while small (around four hundred volumes plus the cooperative's own bulletin archive), holds several reference works that are difficult to find elsewhere in the canal zone — the complete published EAA quarterly dispatch registers from 2009 onward in printed form, the bound annual reports of the major lender-receiving museums for the 2015 to 2025 period, and the cooperative's own corrections log in its original handwritten form before digitisation began in 2017. Visiting researchers are welcome to use the library during office hours and are asked only to leave their working notes in the office's visitor logbook so that future visitors with overlapping interests can be put in touch.

Correspondence.

Write to [email protected] for any matter. Telephone Salem on +20 66 3215 740 during office hours. Postal correspondence to the address above. The watch reads every message and replies; the response time is normally two working days for routine matters and longer for substantive registrar questions.