In any case, days after the Unesco decision, Mr. Hawass went after France and Germany. When questioned about the timing, he insisted there was no connection, saying he had asked the French to return the artifacts two months earlier. But that was when Mr. Hosny’s campaign had already started to fall apart. Likewise, Mr. Hawass had also said that his sudden announcement, in late August, of restoration work on an Egyptian synagogue had nothing to do with Mr. Hosny’s bid. It was just as clear back then that this was an attempt to assuage growing Jewish opposition to the minister.

Over the years Egypt has occasionally made a bid for Nefertiti, when the political climate is ripe. Germans point out that Ludwig Borchardt, who discovered Nefertiti at Tel el Amarna in 1912, had Egyptian approval to take it to Berlin. Just the other day, Iraq repeated its demand that Germany return the Gate of Ishtar from the ancient city of Babylon, excavated and shipped to Berlin before World War I.

In Iraq’s case, the government seems to be wagering that German ambivalence about the current war may help swing popular opinion here about giving back the gate, just as Saddam Hussein’s regime played the repatriation card in 2002 as a tactic in negotiating with the United Nations over letting weapons inspectors into the country.

For the Egyptian public, Mr. Hosny’s defeat was another condemnation of the country’s stagnant leadership. “Defeat and failure and regression will keep following this regime, whose members’ policy is to stay in office forever,” wrote Muhsin Radi, a Muslim Brotherhood Member of Parliament, in the daily Al-Dustour.

The country’s only potent weapon left may be antiquities. It plays to popular sentiment and national pride. While the art world likes to ponder the merits or misfortunes of seeing art from one place in another place or the inequities that have resulted from centuries of imperialist collecting, the real issue behind the Egyptian claims, as with so many others, is nationalism.

Laws are laws, of course, and looting can’t be tolerated, although when decades or centuries have passed, laws have changed, populations shifted, empires come and gone, legal arguments can be dubious. But the larger truth is that all patrimony arguments ultimately live or die in the morally murky realm of global relations, meaning that modern governments like Egypt’s and Iraq’s may win sympathy today by counting on Western guilt about colonialism when asking for the return of art from ancient sites within their current borders. At the same time there’s no international clamor for Russia to return storerooms of treasures it stole from Germany at the end of the war, or, for that matter, for Sweden to fork over the spoils of a war 350 years ago with Denmark. It’s about emotion, not airtight logic and consistent policy.