The Return of the Mummy.

Illicit trafficking in antiquities totals perhaps $2 billion a year, says the U.K.'s McDonald Institute for Archeological Research. But it's getting harder to get away with. Witness the recent repatriation of antiquities from Iraq, Guatemala and China; new rules that make it tougher to plead ignorance for a collector caught with a questionable piece; and a muscular U.S. Customs Service. In May, Representatives Philip English (R-Pa.) and James Leach (R-Iowa) introduced legislation to restrict importation of antiquities from Iraq and other sensitive parts of the globe. Meantime, foreign governments, particularly Egypt and Italy, have stepped up efforts to find antiquities they believe were stripped from their lands by grave robbers and smuggling rings. They're taking aim at dealers, museums--and collectors. Amenhotep III, the 14th-centurey B.C. Egyptian pharaoh, could hardly have foreseen the problems he would cause 3,300 years after his death. A stone bust of the pharaoh is in Britain's Scotland Yard. The police don't know what to do with it. The Cairo government claims the head was taken out of Egypt illegally and is poised to sue for it. Collectors have to meet difficult legal standards. They must avoid objects that they know violate so-called patrimony laws, which allow governments of "source" countries to declare ownership of all antiquities within their borders that have not yet been unearthed. Collectors are on their own to prove provenance--authenticity or past ownership; the antiquities business is unregulated. The International Foundation for Art Research, a New York nonprofit art law research outfit, has spent years updating and excerpting patrimony laws. INSET: Raider of the Lost Art.