How the roster is built, and what we offer journalists and institutions.
The Port Said desk publishes the watch's working methodology openly so that any researcher, journalist or institutional reader can evaluate the roster's reliability. This page sets out the three public source streams, the weekly cross-reference cycle, the dispute-watch criteria, the correction process, and the formal data services for newsrooms and museum boards.
The three public source streams.
Source stream one is the Egyptian Antiquities Authority's quarterly dispatch register, published since 2009 on the EAA's official portal. The register lists every cultural-property dispatch authorised in the preceding quarter — the inventory identifier of the artefact, the lender museum (always an Egyptian institution), the receiving museum, the dispatch date, the contractual return date, and the loan agreement's reference number. The register is in Arabic with selective English translations of the larger high-profile loans; the watch's editorial team translates the full register into English each quarter and cross-references the translations against the original Arabic for accuracy.
Source stream two is the loan registers maintained by the receiving museums themselves. Most major lender-receiving museums — the British Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Louvre, Neues Museum, Pergamonmuseum, Smithsonian, Boston MFA, Tokyo National Museum, and approximately thirty more — publish their incoming-loan registers in some form, either on their public websites or through their published annual reports. The watch's team checks these registers monthly for entries marked as Egyptian-origin loans and cross-references the entries against the EAA's dispatch register.
Source stream three is the Port Said and Alexandria customs-cleared museum-shipping manifests filed under the cultural-property exemption code. Since 2018, Egyptian customs has published the cleared manifests under specific exemption codes (HS heading 9705 sub-codes for museum-eligible cultural property) in a public quarterly digest. The digest lists the dispatch crate, the destination port, the contents reference (typically the EAA loan agreement number), and the customs-cleared date. Hossam's working relationships with the Port Said and Alexandria customs offices supplement the published digest with the desk's pre-2018 customs records that he assembled during his own career.
The weekly cross-reference cycle.
Every Friday afternoon Marwan Saidy runs the cross-reference between the three streams against the working database. New entries — typically four to eight new dispatches per week, balanced by two to five returns — are added to the active-loans roster. Discrepancies between the streams are flagged and held for resolution. Approximately one loan in twenty-five shows some form of discrepancy across the three streams — usually a return date that does not match between the EAA register and the receiving museum's register, or a missing customs-cleared entry for a dispatch that the EAA register shows as authorised. The desk works through the discrepancies during the following week and publishes the resolved status by the next Friday.
Dispute-watch criteria.
A loan enters the dispute-watch when one or more of the following criteria is satisfied. First, the artefact is twelve months past its contractual return date with no formal extension agreement published by either the EAA or the receiving museum. Second, the receiving museum has filed a published request for a permanent transfer (acquisition or long-term loan conversion) that has not been formally accepted by the EAA within ninety days. Third, the artefact has been the subject of a public statement by either party that calls the loan's continuation into question. Fourth, the lender-museum has been unable to verify the artefact's current physical location for a continuous three-month period. The current dispute-watch lists twelve loans satisfying one or more of these criteria; the detailed criteria-by-loan documentation is on the dispute-watch page.
The correction process.
Corrections to published roster entries are issued within thirty days of confirmation. The correction is published in the next weekly roster update with a corrections-log entry, in the next monthly bulletin with a brief editorial note, and in the quarterly methodology supplement with the detailed reasoning. One hundred and twelve corrections have been published since 2015. The correction process is open to receiving museums, lender museums, the EAA, journalists and members of the public; we ask only that the correction request be specific (which entry, what is wrong, what the corrected reading should be) and that it cite a verifiable source.
Data services for newsrooms and institutions.
Three formal data services are available beyond the open public roster. Specific loan certificate — a written confirmation of the watch's current information about a specific loan, including all source-stream citations, the cross-reference status, and the dispute-watch status. Used by newsrooms with a publication deadline and by museum boards needing a documented external reference. Fee: ninety euros per certificate, completed within five working days. Custom roster extract — a filtered extract of the watch's database for a specific receiving country, time window, lender museum or artefact type. Used by university researchers, museum studies programmes, and journalists working on a longer-form piece. Fee: by quotation depending on the extract's scope, typically between two hundred and four hundred euros. Editorial consultation — a one-hour written consultation with the appropriate editor on a specific loan-related question. Fee: one hundred and forty euros per hour. All three services are described in detail with sample outputs on request to the desk.
The corrections log.
Corrections to the published roster are issued within thirty days of confirmation and consolidated into the public corrections log, which has been continuously maintained since the watch's first issue in 2015. The current log has one hundred and twelve entries. Each entry includes the affected loan identifier, the original published reading, the corrected reading, the date of the correction, the source citation that prompted the correction, and the editor's brief note explaining the discrepancy. The log is searchable through the corrections-search page (linked from the home-page lookup form) and is also distributed as a quarterly PDF supplement to all subscribers. Roughly half of corrections originate from receiving-museum registrars' offices noticing a discrepancy in our reading; about thirty percent originate from journalists or academic researchers; the remainder are caught by the editorial team's own internal review cycle.
Receiving-museum policy summaries.
For each of the thirty-eight receiving institutions in the lender-museums list, the watch maintains a working summary of the institution's loan-policy framework. The summaries are written by Layla Mursi after the annual contact with each registrar's office and are updated when the institution publishes a material change to its policy. The summaries cover the institution's standard initial loan period, the typical extension cycle, the climate-control specification, the display restrictions, the security requirements, the insurance arrangement and the published exit-conditions for repatriation conversions. Twelve institutions have published a clear repatriation-conversion policy; the remaining twenty-six handle conversion questions case-by-case through diplomatic and museum-board channels rather than through a published policy. The summaries are intended for journalists, museum-board members and academic researchers; they are not legal documents and do not substitute for the institutions' own published policies.
The Tutankhamun tour history project.
The watch's longest-running editorial project is the consolidated history of every Tutankhamun-assemblage object that has left Egypt for an overseas tour, from the first 1961 Soviet tour through the most recent 2022–24 international touring exhibition. The Tutankhamun tour history file is the watch's most-cited single page; it is maintained by Iman Tantawi and is updated whenever a new Tutankhamun object enters or leaves an overseas exhibition. The file is open and free to read; the underlying source data is available as a custom roster extract to subscribers and to qualified researchers on request.
Reader questions on methodology and services.
How current is the active-loans roster?
Updated every Friday afternoon Cairo time. The published timestamp on the home page reflects the latest update. The data lag between an event happening at a receiving museum and the watch's roster reflecting it is typically between one and four weeks, depending on which source stream first picks up the change.
Can I cite the watch's data in an academic publication?
Yes, with attribution. The watch's roster is released under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA. Academic publications should cite the specific roster version (date of the Friday update) and the methodology document version. We are happy to confirm the citation format on request.
Do you offer machine-readable exports?
Yes — the full roster is available in CSV and JSON formats on quarterly export Mondays (the first working Monday of January, April, July and October). The export is sent by email to subscribers and is downloadable from the watch's public catalogue page for non-subscribers. The schema documentation is included with each export.
What if a receiving museum wants to dispute a watch entry?
Write to Layla Mursi at the desk's general inbox marking the topic as "Receiving museum dispute". The desk holds the publication of any disputed reading until the museum's correction request has been substantively considered, with a maximum hold of fourteen days. We have resolved sixteen receiving-museum dispute requests since 2015; eleven resulted in corrections to our roster, three were declined after the watch's review, and two are still under discussion.
Can a journalist visit the desk in person?
Yes, by appointment on Tuesday, Wednesday or Saturday afternoons. Most visiting journalists come for half a day to review the paper archive of Hossam's customs-era records and the corrections log. We provide tea, working space at the office table, and time with whichever editor is most relevant to the visiting journalist's specific story.
How does the dispute-watch differ from advocacy?
The dispute-watch records the existence of unresolved questions about specific loans against publicly documented criteria. It does not say which party is correct, does not call for any specific action, and does not align with any advocacy organisation's campaign timing. The criteria are documented on the dispute-watch page; readers, museum boards and the EAA evaluate the listed disputes against their own judgement.
What happens to a loan in dispute that is then resolved?
The dispute-watch entry is removed from the active dispute list at the next quarterly update following resolution. The resolved-dispute record is retained in the corrections log indefinitely. Twenty-eight loans have moved out of the dispute-watch since 2015 — sixteen through formal extension agreements, eight through return to Cairo, two through permanent transfer agreements with the EAA's published consent, and two through the conclusion of legal proceedings.
What is the watch's relationship to the Cairo Museum and the Grand Egyptian Museum?
Collegial and informal. Both institutions use our public roster as a cross-check against their internal loan-tracking records. The Grand Egyptian Museum's registrar has visited the Port Said desk twice; the Cairo Museum's loans office has invited Iman Tantawi to give two staff seminars on the watch's methodology. No formal partnership, contract or funding relationship exists with either institution; we maintain the editorial distance that the documentary stance requires.
Why a paid data-service tier rather than an open API?
The paid services cover the editor time required for the specific certificate, extract or consultation work — they are not a paywall on the public roster, which is and will remain open. An open API for automated programmatic access is on the editorial board's medium-term agenda; the technical work to build a stable public API is non-trivial and the watch's current four-editor capacity does not yet stretch to maintaining it.
Three subscription tiers, three formal data services.
Subscriptions support the editorial work that keeps the public roster open. The data services cover specific certificates, extracts and consultations beyond the open record. Both run through the contact form.