Egypt’s antiquities czar took his campaign to recover the nation’s lost treasures to a new level today by cutting ties with one of the world’s premier museums, the Louvre, over disputed artefacts.

EGYPT’S top archaeologist made his version of a sales pitch yesterday, presenting 22 coins, 10 mummies, and a fragment of a mask with a cleft chin as evidence that the discovery of the lost tomb of Mark Antony and Cleopatra is at hand.