The bronze trumpet was among items stolen from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo during the Egyptian looting and riots of 2011, mysteriously returned to the museum some weeks later. According to "Al-Ahram", after its return Hala Hassan, curator of the Tutankhamun collection at the Egyptian Museum, claimed that it had "magical powers" and that "whenever someone blows into it a war occurs. A week before the revolution, during a documenting and photographing process, one of the museum's staff had blown into it and a week after revolution broke out. The same thing had happened before the 1967 war and prior to the 1991 gulf war, when a student was doing a comprehensive research on Tutankhamun's collection."