The History Blog

I’ve posted before about the extensive looting of archaeological sites and museums in Iraq since the US invasion.

The reports were picked up on some news channels and blogs, but it wasn’t until The Art Newspaper posted this that Fox News and the pro-war bloggers wrote a battery of stories on looting in Iraq.

An international team of archaeologists which made an unpublicised visit to southern Iraq last month found no evidence of recent looting—contrary to long-expressed claims about sustained illegal digging at major sites.

This topic sentence lit a fire under blogs I’ve never once seen mention Elizabeth Stone’s work or the Chicago exhibit on looting. According to them, the reports of looting were all a big lie meant to denigrate the valiant war effort, and those 8 unlooted sites visited proved it.

The rest of the Art Newspaper’s article explaining why those few sites out of many might not have been looted in a while didn’t make the same splash. Now the actual report is out, and Larry Rothfield has a handy summary of the context for each site.

A couple of examples:

3. Uruk: “There is no evidence of looting at the site which is protected by 15 SPF (Special Protection Force) personnel (one of whom arrived to check the presence of the inspection team) and an on-site guard (the German institutional system is able to maintain constant payments for the on-site guard).” The assessment team surely knew beforehand that this site was protected at this very high level, yet they chose to visit it anyway — just as they chose to visit Ur (which a British Museum team had visited a year earlier). […]

5. Tallil airbase: one of the largest military airbases in the middle east, it contains two sites within its perimeter. Unsurprisingly, neither was looted.

Basically, the 8 sites are not exactly characteristic of all the archaeological sites in Iraq. Some of them are protected by coalition guards. Some of them are still hot, complete rocket craters. Some of them are surrounded by military installations.

Looters aren’t stupid, and trying to use this story to dismiss the reality of what has happened to the Cradle of Civilization is just good ol’ fashioned political expediency.

In fact, if anything the conditions at these sites indicates that what Elizabeth Stone and the other archaeologists who have reported on the looting were saying was true: if coalition forces made an effort to protect the sites as many of these 8 sites were, so much loss could have been prevented.

A government audit of 1600 museums has found jaw-droppingly massive inventory shrinkage.

The lost items were worth a total of “several million dollars,” he said, adding most of the disappeared inventory was pre-Revolutionary and Soviet-era medals, weapons and clothes.

Precious works of art were among the missing items but separate investigations were being conducted for those, [Interior Ministry Col. Ilya] Ryasnoi said.

“Yes, there have been thefts. Museum staff have used their contacts to steal some of the artifacts without a trace,” he said. “But most has simply been lost during transportation.”

Wow. I thought “they fell off the back of a truck” is what the thieves are supposed to say, not the victims.

A hundred museum employees have been charged with various minor infractions, but it looks officials are writing the bulk of this one off as “the Soviets lost them”. They don’t have a lot of choice, really, given the deplorable record-keeping at most of these museums.

Hopefully this inquiry will inspire Russian museums to take inventory for real now.

The Italian government has declared Pompeii, the Roman town destroyed once by the eruption of Vesuvius and now again by 250 years of crappy excavation/looting/tourist hoards, in a state of emergency.

Archaeologists and art historians have long complained about the poor upkeep of Pompeii, dogged by lack of investment, mismanagement, litter and looting. Bogus tour guides, illegal parking attendants and stray dogs also plague visitors. […]

The “state of emergency”, which the government said would last for a year, allows for extra funds and special measures to be taken to protect the site.

“Every year at least 150 square metres of fresco and plaster work are lost for lack of maintenance,” Antonio Irlando, a regional councillor responsible for artistic heritage, told the newspaper.

“The same goes for stones: at least 3,000 pieces every year end up disintegrating,” he said.

A third of the town is still underground, lucky bugger. Had it been excavated it would be as hosed as the rest of the site, and it can’t be excavated because it is currently covered by garbage from Naples, currently mired in a refuse crisis.

I’ve been reading a book about Pompeii over the past week, a lovely glossy book with all the latest finds and gorgeous pictures. It’s amazing how often they describe something that was excavated years ago and now only exists in some Grand Tour watercolors and journals, or described in 100-year-old books.

Here’s an example to chill your bones. To the left is a painting of a wall fresco of Venus from when it was found in the House of the Vestal Virgins in the 18th century. On the right is what is left of that wall fresco today.

Like a kick in the groin, ain’t it?

Don’t even get me started on that bastard Charles III, Bourbon king of Naples and Spain, who brutally mined the site for his personal collection after its rediscovery in 1748, even going so far as to knock down frescoed walls that were not deemed good enough to steal for his personal museum.

Pompeii has been looted pretty much non-stop since that day, and earlier by locals who knew where it was. Even as I type someone is tunneling in with a chisel and stripping entire walls of frescoes off to sell to art dealer pieces of shit like Giacomo Medici and Bob Hecht, may they rot in jail for seculum seculorum amen.

Here’s hoping the extra money this state of emergency declaration brings with it will help stem the tide of destruction. I can’t say I’m hugely optimistic at this point.

(For more on the neato photomontage above, visit Pompeii - A Different Perspective.)

First Syria, now Jordan. Jordan has Syria beat by almost 1800 or so looted artifacts intercepted at the border with Iraq.

In the chaos following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, looters snatched some 15,000 priceless artifacts and smuggled them out of the country. In the last few months, Jordanian authorities seized 2,466 items as they were being taken across the border.

Samples of the silver coins, necklaces, ancient Sumerian scrolls, ceramic pots and other artifacts were displayed for journalists during a brief ceremony at the Jordanian Antiquities Department in Amman.

Iraq’s acting state minister of tourism and archaeology, Mohammed Abbas al-Oreibi, told reporters the recovered antiquities will be packed and sent back to Iraq in the coming days.

Slowly, slowly, the pillaged cultural patrimony of Iraq is coming home. I wish Iraq’s archaeological sites were getting the protection they so desperately need as well, and it would be nice if the museum were fully repaired and operational, but still, repatriation of stolen antiquities is great to see.

The story as we know it gives Yale University explorer Hiram Bingham III the honor of having been the first Westerner to exploit the Inca ruins in 1911, but a team of historians say one Augusto Berns, a German adventurer and con man, got there way earlier.

Berns made a (sucker’s) deal with the Peruvian government to grab as much loot as he could from Machu Picchu back in 1867.

Berns purchased land across from Machu Picchu in 1867, and an 1887 document even shows he set up a company to plunder the site, Greer told The Associated Press.

Berns wrote that Machu Picchu “‘will undoubtedly contain objects of great value, and form part of those treasures of the Incas,’” Greer said.

Peruvian historian Mariana Mould de Pease backs Greer’s claim. She said she found in Yale University archives a letter of understanding between Berns and Peru’s then-president to pillage the site, as long as the Peruvian government received 10 percent of the profits.

See what I mean about the sucker’s deal? Because, damn, 10 percent is just embarrassing. If you’re going to let foreigners take your country’s cultural patrimony and run, shouldn’t you at least get a decent cut?

This insensate generosity flummoxes me. “Sure, buddeh. Go ahead and take all the piles of painstakingly worked ancient gold you can find. Just leave me a Krugerrand in the tip jar on your way out. Oh, and don’t forget to tell your friends about our great selection and rock-bottom prices!”

Who knows were the stuff Berns took has ended up. We know that Bingham’s loot, a massive collection of over 4000 artifacts ranging from mummies to ceramics to gold jewelry, ended up on display at Yale where it remains to this day, although after much negotiation it is finally slated to return to Peru in 2011.

The obelisk is one of seven 80-foot high basalt monoliths erected in the Ethiopian city of Axum to celebrate their adoption of Christianity in the 4th c. A.D.

Mussolini stole it in 1937 and erected it near the Circus Maximus to celebrate his 15th anniversary in power, and although Italy signed a UN treaty in 1947 promising to return the monument, many successive Italian governments had something better to do until 2005.

But even when Italy did get around to it 50 years late, the obelisk’s return to Axum would not be an easy one. They had to cut it into three pieces and commission a specially-built cargo plane to ship them one at a time.

Then once the eagles finally landed, the Ethiopian authorities had to figure out how to put them together and restore the obelisk to its former glory as a royal grave marker without damaging the grave it marks.

Now, at long last, the moment has come. By the end of June, the obelisk should be back in its place.

The January raids on four California museums resulted in the arrest of art historian Roxanna Brown on Friday.

Yesterday, she died in a federal prison of an apparent heart attack.

As is routine with all inmates upon booking, Brown was given a medical screening at the prison. A spokeswoman for the detention center did not disclose the status of that screening.

By Monday, Brown was too ill to appear in court, but did appear briefly Tuesday. She had been charged with one count of wire fraud, allegedly for allowing art collectors to use her electronic signature to overstate the value of items they donated to several Southern California museums. The collectors then claimed fraudulent tax deductions, investigators said.

Brown was a vocal anti-looting advocate. Her position was that buyers of antiquities should only consider purchasing finds from well-documented official digs. Anything short of that was likely to result in buying stolen goods.

How to reconcile this highly ethical stance with the tax fraud charges, I have no idea. Now she will never have the chance to clear her name, although I’m certain the investigation will continue.

More yuge loot news out of Spain, only this time it’s not massive quantities but just plain massive.

Italian police from the stolen artwork squad were in Barcelona on business when they happened past an antiques store. In the store, they noticed a solid marble oval bathtub that looked suspiciously familiar.

It was billed as a reproduction of a Roman bathtub and priced at €6000 ($9230). Only it isn’t a reproduction, and it’s actually worth €300,000 ($461,500). It was made in the second century A.D. under Hadrian’s reign and was stolen from the garden of an Italian villa in 2005.

The store owner had bought it a couple of years ago from some total idiots for €3000. Here’s the thing that really gets me, though: this tub weighs half a ton. How in God’s name did the thieves get it out of that garden? It can’t have been any kind of stealth operation. I mean, cranes and vehicles that make loud beeping sounds must have been involved.

Then to go through the trouble of shipping their half-ton of ill-gotten gains across the Mediterranean for a pittance …. It’s like a Mack Sennett short: The Keystone Bathtub Thieves.

Spanish police have arrested two people for smuggling an enormous cache of looted pre-Colombian artifacts.

Seven hundred antiques including masks, sculptures, jewelry and ceramics, dozens made of gold, all of them extremely valuable museum-quality artifacts looted from archaeological sites in Peru and Ecuador were weeks away from the auction block.

It is alleged that the historic treasures were plundered from archaeological sites - mostly in Peru and Ecuador - and then sold on to the couple through middlemen in Colombia.

The couple had just returned from a trip to the Colombian capital, Bogota.

The Spanish police seized documents and a computer which allegedly detailed a trade in cultural contraband stretching back years.

One interesting thing about these low-down dirty no good sons of bitches “antiquities dealers” is that they tend to keep excellent records. If police can manage a surprise raid, they can get loads of information about the criminal organization.

I hope they throw every book they have at them.

Syria has returned 700 artifacts looted from Iraq in the aftermath of the US invasion and smuggled across the border.

Objects include gold jewelry, coins, daggers and clay jars. Some date from the Bronze Age and the early Islamic era.

“These objects stolen in Iraq were seized by Syrian customs officials,” Naassan-Agha said, according to the official SANA news agency, adding that other “very precious” artefacts will be returned soon.

He also urged “all the countries of the world and UNESCO to strive to return to Iraq all the antiquities which were stolen under the eyes of American occupation soldiers.”

Nice little dig there.