From his decades of hunting for Egyptian antiquities, Mark Ragan has filled three display cases in his Anne Arundel home with amulets, pottery and doll-size mummy carvings called ushabtis.

He likes to tell of finding a supposed “Egyptian corn measurer” for sale, only to realize it was no corn measurer — it was a sacred canopic jar from the 18th Dynasty. He bought it for about $300. That might have been the climactic moment of his collecting.

Then an eBay seller caught his eye.

The seller’s photos showed ushabtis of alabaster and limestone, phallic figurines, even a faience amulet to the fish goddess Hatmehyt.

“Some woman in Texas had it all. She didn’t know what it was,” said Ragan, of Edgewater. “I’m looking at something like ‘antique wood carving,’ and it’s an Egyptian headdress.”

Where’d you get all this stuff? he messaged her.

More than 3,000 years of ancient Egyptian civilization have left the world with a deluge of artifacts, from the priceless gold mask of King Tut to mere bric-a-brac. Tut’s tomb held a modest stash of more than 5,000 objects. Lesser tombs contain hundreds of ushabtis. Egyptians believed the figurines of carved wood and stone became servants in the afterlife.

Ancient tombs, of course, hold the famous linen-wrapped mummies and gilt sarcophaguses but also canopic jars to store the preserved organs of the dead. Consider all the faience beads, turquoise ceramics and religious amulets. Everyone from pharaohs to farmers wore jewelry. Moreover, everything lasts in the arid climate.

That’s hundreds of thousands of Ancient Egypt tchotchkes — millions maybe.

In Anne Arundel County, Ragan received a message back from the eBay seller.

“She said, ‘I inherited it from my father when he died,’” he recalled. “Bingo! I thought I had hit the mother lode.”

‘Egyptomania’

Western collectors have been buying, selling, trading, stealing and smuggling Egyptian antiquities for hundreds of years.

A craze for the ancient art peaked in the 19th century. The British Museum caused a sensation when it displayed the colossal statue of Ramesses II known as the “Younger Memnon.” Moneyed tourists shopped for artifacts in the Cairo museum salesroom. Antiquities officials stacked the mummies for sale at the door.

With “Egyptomania” gripping Victorian England, the society class returned home and threw mummy-unwrapping parties.

By the 1930s Egypt started to limit the export of antiquities, but Western demand gave rise to an industry of fakes. Even the experts could be fooled.

One art forger famously duped the auction house Christie’s and an art museum in Manchester, England, with his homemade statue of King Tut’s granddaughter. The Brooklyn Museum stunned the art world when it disclosed that one-third of its Egyptian Coptic sculptures were fake.

Egypt declared all antiquities state property in 1983 and outlawed exports. By then, almost 75 years after Italy passed its own antiquities protections, hoards of Egyptian art had been carried off, sold and resold, lost and found. Some treasures ended up in museums; some, in Grandpa’s attic.

“As soon as there became an art market that valued Egyptian antiquities, you start to have a black market,” said Betsy Bryan, director of the Johns Hopkins University Archaeological Museum. “There’s no question that it intensified as the laws got more and more difficult to skirt.”

The 2011 protests known as the Arab Spring flooded the market with smuggled Egyptian art. The Antiquities Coalition in Washington, D.C., commissioned research that used satellites and on-the-ground surveys to identify illegal digging. The researchers estimate cultural racketeering cost Egypt $1 billion a year in stolen antiquities after the revolution.

“There are enormous numbers of tombs of wealthy priests, etc., that have never been found that would be real cash cows,” Bryan said.

Among the treasures looted in the revolution was a stunning, 2,100-year-old sarcophagus of a high-ranking priest. The Metropolitan Museum of Art bought the Coffin of Nedjemankh for almost $4 million. The gilt coffin had been smuggled out of Egypt through the United Arab Emirates, Germany and France on forged papers, according to investigators.

Authorities uncovered its illicit origins after a photo went viral of Kim Kardashian posing beside the coffin in a matching gold dress.

For museum curators and hobbyists alike, the antiquities market presents a minefield of forgeries, contraband, dodgy actors — and, sometimes, a jackpot.

Burned

A Civil War historian and author, Ragan, 68, ran a submarine school in Edgewater. He helped raise the sunken Confederate sub Hunley from waters off Charleston, South Carolina.

He also studied archaeology at the University of Maryland and joined a dig in Egypt in 1980. As a collector, he said, he’s learned to be wary of bargains and antiquities without provenance.

“The fakes are getting so good,” he said. “I’ve actually been burned a couple of times.”

The eBay seller Ragan started messaging in 2020 went by “CENTURYART,” and the rough wear on the canopic jar and limestone ushabtis indeed matched sculptures crafted long, long ago. The seller told him her name was Ivette Barrera, that she lived in Texas and that the artifacts had belonged to her late father. He paid more than $2,000 for eight ancient works of art.

Ragan had one nagging thought. The prices seemed too low.

“I was rolling the dice. I wasn’t sure if it was real,” he said.

Artifacts that have come out of Egypt after the 1983 law are generally considered stolen property, and it’s illegal to knowingly sell, buy or possess the loot. Critics have taken aim at eBay for facilitating a market for fakes and pilfered art. The online marketplace deleted its Antiquities category, but shoppers today can still drop $39,000 for supposedly “authentic mummy eyes.” Spokespeople for the company did not respond to a message.

Through eBay, smugglers and traffickers can avoid art galleries and sell directly to U.S. collectors. They may slash prices to move pieces quickly, British archaeologist Paul Barford said. He runs a blog about artifact smuggling and hunting.

“Many sellers are doing something illegal, so they do not want the items displayed online for lengthy stretches of time,” he said.

In Anne Arundel County, Ragan was waiting for the faience amulet to arrive when U.S. authorities called him.

They had intercepted the package; the import papers were missing. The federal agents turned to a museum curator who identified the supposed “antique pottery pendant” as an authentic Egyptian amulet more than 2,000 years old, investigators wrote in court records.

Over the next two months, authorities intercepted at least seven other shipments to Ragan of limestone ushabtis and other figurines.

Ragan didn’t have answers beyond his contact for an eBay seller in San Antonio, Texas.

These packages, however, were coming from Thailand.

Loot on the mantel

Trafficking networks routinely smuggle loot through middle countries. The artifacts are cleaned, repaired and provided false papers, then shipped to the U.S., London, Paris or China.

Former Los Angeles Times reporter Jason Felch has investigated the networks and co-wrote “Chasing Aphrodite” about illicit art at the prestigious J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

“Things are dug up across the Middle East, in Egypt and Afghanistan, and they pass through Thailand, which has lax regulations on the art market,” Felch said. “This is very much an active and ongoing crime scene, and something that’s really fueled by Western collectors who want to put this stuff on their mantel.”

Ragan said he messaged the eBay seller, Barrera, for an explanation. She told him that she and her husband had worked as teachers in Thailand.

The phone numbers listed for Barrera are no longer working. She could not be reached for comment.

Meanwhile, federal agents sent photos of one of Barrera’s ushabtis to a British museum curator who concluded the piece was “demonstrably recent loot,” connected to illegal digging at two archaeological sites in Egypt, investigators wrote in court records.

They seized Ragan’s packages in the summer of 2020 but continued to investigate. The matter was revealed only recently. On Sept. 23, federal prosecutors in Baltimore filed forfeiture papers in the U.S. District Court of Maryland.

The case has captured attention in the art world, not because of the artifacts themselves, which are relatively common, but because federal agents traced Ragan’s purchases back to a smuggling ring that stretches from looters in Egypt to shipping companies in Asia, then to buyers in North America — a case study in antiquities trafficking.

The network also trafficked a royal funerary statute estimated at more than 4,000 years old and worth $6 million, investigators wrote in court records. They intercepted the statue en route from Fada Trading Co. Ltd. of Bangkok to Canada.

They connected Fada Trading Co. to Ragan’s purchases, too.

When investigators questioned Barrera, she told them her husband and their five children lived in Thailand. She named her husband as Ahmed Javed — managing director of Fada Trading Co., investigators wrote. They found no U.S. passport for Barrera or record that she had ever traveled to Thailand, according to court papers.

Federal authorities have filed no criminal charges in the case. They declined to comment

Ragan, meanwhile, said he just wants to move on. “I’m not collecting like I used to.”

The case presents a warning for U.S. collectors.

“People need to know that when they’re buying ancient art, even when it’s cheap, if they’re not being careful and asking the right questions about where these things come from, they’re participating in a global black market that is really destroying the archaeological record,” Felch said.

And yet the market continues as it has for centuries. On eBay today, one can buy a supposed faience ushabti from 2,500 years ago, a statue of the god Ptah from Egypt’s last dynasty and a gemstone amulet from the reign of the pharaohs Ramesses. All ship from Thailand.