The History Blog

The United States is returning a beautifully painted 21st Dynasty wooden sarcophagus to Egypt. Customs officials confiscated the coffin from a Spanish national at Miami International Airport in 2008 when they found it had no documentation of ownership.

They contacted the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities in October 2008 to let them know that they had the piece in custody. Since it had been shipped from Spain with the likely intent of selling it in the US without documentation, they figured (correctly) that it had been smuggled out of Egypt illegally at some point.

Egypt immediately provided documentation of their ownership of the coffin, but the Spanish dealer shamelessly refused to relinquish it until Zahi Hawass filed a suit against him in a US court.

The coffin of Imesy, a beautifully ornate piece with colorful religious scenes painted on it, had been a piece the council had been demanding be returned.

Zahi Hawass, the SCA Secretary-General said last year that the coffin likely belongs to pharaoh Ames from the 21st Dynasty, which ruled Egypt from 1070-945 BC.

A US investigation found that it was likely smuggled out of Egypt after 1970 (the dividing line established by the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property), kept underground for a few decades, only to surface in an exhibit in Madrid in 2007. The dealer who shipped it to Miami apparently has family ties with the owner of the Egyptian museum in Barcelona.

According to Hawass’ statement, the sarcophagus was first smuggled out of Egypt in 1884. It’s always challenging to pinpoint the movement of looted artifacts. That’s one of the many reasons looting sucks. David Gill at Looting Matters looks at the smuggling trajectory of the coffin, especially the Spanish connection.

The sarcophagus is scheduled to be returned officially in a gala ceremony on March 10th in Washington, D.C. Zahi Hawass, of course, will be there with bells on.

An appeals court in Pesaro, Italy, has ruled that the Greek bronze known as the Victorious Youth should be confiscated from the Getty Museum in Malibu and returned to Italy. This ruling comes as a surprise and not just to the Getty. Previous rulings on the ownership of the statue have all come down on the side of the Getty due to the nebulous circumstances of the bronze’s discovery and sale.

The life-size statue was fished out of the Adriatic off the coast of Fano in 1964. The fishermen never declared it to customs officials as required by law. Instead they buried it in a cabbage patch before selling it to Italian middlemen that same year for a measly $5,600. They hid it in a priest’s bathtub then smuggled it out of the country into the hands of dealer Elie Borowski in Switzerland, who in turn sold it to the Artemis Consortium. The Getty bought it 13 years later for $3.9 million.

The statue is thought to be from the 2nd or 3rd century B.C., possibly from the workshop of the great Greek sculptor Lyssipos, who was Alexander the Great’s court sculptor and the teacher of Chares of Lindos, the artist who built the Colossus of Rhodes. It is one of very few extant Greek bronzes. Most of what we have are Roman copies.

Italian prosecutors have tried to retrieve it for 40 plus years. In 1966 they prosecuted the Italian middlemen and the priest. They were convicted but their convictions were reversed on appeal in 1970 due to insufficient evidence. The statue itself was still in the shadowy antiquities underground at this point, so the prosecution didn’t even have stolen goods as evidence.

Most recently a case in 2007 prosecuted by Francesco Rutelli (who also prosecuted today’s case) was dismissed by the same Pesaro court who ruled in his favor today. It was a different judge though, and he ruled that the statute of limitations had expired, that since the fishermen were long dead there was no longer anyone to prosecute, and that the Getty had purchased the bronze in good faith.

So what changed, you asked? Some recent news cast serious doubt on the Getty’s good faith. An article in the LA Times last month pointed to a shady series of correspondence over the purchase of the bronse.

“It is clearly understood by us that no commitment is to be made by me on your behalf for the Greek Bronze until certain legal questions are clarified,” wrote Met director Thomas Hoving to Getty in a June 1973 letter. Hoving promised that the Met’s attorneys would talk with Italian officials to clarify the circumstances under which the statue had left Italy and whether the Italians were still pursuing a legal claim, records show.

The Met’s antiquities curator, Dietrich von Bothmer, raised legal concerns of his own, warning Hoving that the 1970 acquittal “does not permit the legal conclusion that the statue was . . . legally exported from Italy.”

In his acquisition proposal to the Met’s board, Von Bothmer wrote, “I recommend that legal opinions be solicited as to the possibility that a foreign government may at a later time, especially after publication of the statue, claim it as ‘artistic patrimony.’ “

The deal fell through for reasons neither the Met nor the Getty will discuss. After John Paul Getty died in 1976, however, the museum bought the statue for more than JP had offered and without the legal assurances from the Italian government that JP had required. Instead they just took the word of the dealers’ lawyers, which, let’s face it, is worth pretty much nothing.

Anyway, nasty horsetrading shenanigans aside, the legal questions surrounding the find remain thorny and the precedent of several failed cases is on the Getty’s side. The Getty said in a statement that they would pursue the case to Italy’s highest court. Given the glacial pace of the Italian legal system, the Victorious Youth won’t be leaving the Getty Villa in Malibu any time soon.

Cyprus police raided a huge antiquities smuggling ring in southern city of Limassol that was set to sell dozen of antiquities worth an estimated $15.5 million. This is the biggest antiquities smuggling bust in Cyprus history.

Artifacts include urns, gold figurines and coins, some thought to be as much as 4000 years old. They were found in various homes, backyard sheds and vehicles belonging to the suspects, some in scarily casual arrangements.

The Cypriot police were alerted to the ring when one of its alleged members tried to sell some treasure to a man who ended up being an undercover Greek policeman. The Greek police then contacted the Cyprus authorities.

Ten Cypriots were arrested during the raids over the weekend, and authorities were searching for another five suspects, including a Syrian man, police spokesman Michalis Katsounotos said. The suspects face charges of illegally possessing and trading in antiquities.

Police said the smugglers had planned to sell the artifacts in Cyprus, but would not identify the buyer. Authorities also said they were investigating where the artifacts had been obtained.

Katsounotos said this was Cyprus’ largest antiquities smuggling case in terms of the amount of recovered artifacts, their archaeological value and the number of arrests.

Most of the artifacts are urns primarily found around the southern coastal towns of Limassol and Paphos, Hadjicosti said. Some of the coins could date to Hellenistic and Roman times.

Some of the most valuable artifacts are a miniature gold coffin and gold figurines. These don’t appear to be Cypriot in origin. The wee coffin looks like an Egyptian sarcophagus.

Other artifacts may have been looted from the Turkish north of Cyprus. (The spokesman wasn’t terribly forthcoming on that subject. Don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Cypriot police made a big deal out of the cooperation of the Greek police.)

The infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign which was stolen last month from its place over the entrance to Auschwitz has been returned.

Polish police handed the sign, broken into three pieces by the thieves, over to Auschwitz museum official in a small ceremony in Krakow on Thursday. It was then transported the 50 miles to the museum where conservation experts examined it carefully.

When the sign was first found two days after the theft, Auschwitz officials had hoped to have the sign repaired and back in place by January 27th, the 65th anniversary of the camp’s liberation, but that’s no longer in the cards.

There’s a replica over the gate right now, and officials aren’t even sure they’re going to put the original sign back even once it is restored.

The sign has been examined in recent weeks by police forensic experts for evidence, and the museum’s conservationists will assess the damage and determine how to repair it, Auschwitz spokesman Pawel Sawicki said.

“It’s a very long process,” Sawicki said, stressing that the sign would not be returned any time soon to its original spot above the main entrance at Auschwitz — if at all.

I wouldn’t blame them at all if they decided to keep it inside the museum and kept the replica outside. Even if weren’t even more of a target of neo-Nazi collector commissions than it was before, the exposure to the elements is probably bad for its long-term health, and Auschwitz already has more than its fair share of upkeep troubles.

A wee wooden guitar made by Pablo Picasso has been recovered 3 years after it was stolen by a con-man. Picasso made it for his daughter Paloma, but once it was finished he gave it instead to his friend, Italian artist Giuseppe Vittorio Parisi.

Parisi kept it for decades, but when he was 92 (in 2007), an unnamed “businessman” persuaded him to part with it. The fraudster promised he’d create a special special wood and glass display case for the piece, but once he had it, he disappeared never to be seen again.

When Parisi died in January 2009, his widow Wanda asked the police to retrieve the guitar. The Carabinieri searched for almost a year, finally finding the piece in a shoebox in the closet of a luxury apartment in Pomezia, a town south of Rome. The businessman has been charged with fraud and is currently out on bail.

A Picasso expert has authenticated the guitar, thanks in part to an inscription of “Paloma” in the artist’s own hand. Now the little guitar is on its way to Maccagno, a small town on Lake Maggiore where Parisi was born and where his vast collection of art is on display in at the Civic Museum of Contemporary Art.

Here’s a stolen Holy Mother and Child with a happy ending, for a change. Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna of the Yarnwinder was stolen from the walls of Drumlanrig Castle on August 23, 2003. Four men joined a tour group visiting the castle, then lagged behind the rest of the ground and overpowered the security guard who was guarding the painting. They hustled it into a waiting car and got away, discarding the frame just outside the castle walls.

It is one of the few Leonardos in private hands and the only Leonardo in Scotland. The 9th Duke of Buccleuch took it with him wherever he went. Needless to say, he was devastated by the theft. The painting had been in his family for generations.

Then, out of the blue, 4 years later the painting turned up in a Glasgow law office. Unfortunately, the 9th Duke died just a few weeks before the Madonna was found.

Valued in the region of £50 million, the work, owned by the Buccleuch Heritage Trust, was considered so important that it was placed on the FBI’s list of the world’s ten most wanted stolen artworks.

“One very much hoped we would see it again,” said [director Michael] Clarke. “Very often these great works do come back — though not always, sadly — and they are recovered often through clever police work. I know it was extremely upsetting for the previous Duke of Buccleuch. I know he was really, really knocked back by this theft. It is a pity the recovery did not come in time for him to enjoy it.”

Michael Clarke is the person who authenticated the work after the police found it. He had been there in 1992 when the 9th Duke had loaned it to the National Gallery for display, so he knew right away it was the real deal.

The 10th Duke asked the conservators of the National Gallery to cared for it after it was returned. They carefully examined it for damage — there was none, thankfully — and reframed it. Now the 10th Duke has now lent it to the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, where it takes pride of place in the Old Masters gallery.

From a letter by a contemporary of Leonardo’s, we know he was painting it for Florimond Robertet, a French diplomat. Leonardo was less than reliable at completing his commissions, however, so we don’t know if Robertet ever got the painting.

We also don’t know how much of it was painted by the master’s hand. His studio filled in a lot of blanks when he got behind on his delivery dates. In this case, the overall design, the figures and the rocks in the foreground all appear to be Leonardo’s. The background was likely added, possibly quite a bit later, by another artist or artists.

Eight men have been with the theft. They are scheduled to go on stand trial next year. Apparently they didn’t even know its real value. They were just using it as collateral for drug deals, the bastards.

One of Caravaggio’s last paintings (painted in 1609, a year before he died), the Nativity with Saints Francis and Lawrence, was stolen from the oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo in 1969. Despite many appeals from authorities, scholars and art lovers at the time and since, the painting has never been recovered.

The meager hope, if it can be called that, was that the theft had been commissioned by a mafia don and the painting was hanging in some private collection, possibly to turn up after a death or search warrant or trial.

Those hopes both flickered and dimmed in the mid-80’s when during the trial of former Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti a heroin dealer and mafioso named Francesco Marino Mannoia said he’d been one of the thieves in 1969. According to him, they damaged the painting in removing it from the frame, and the private collector who commissioned the theft wept at the sight of it.

Still, that was better than some of the other theories, like that it was moved to Naples and destroyed in the 1980 earthquake or left the country alltogether. Now a former mafia hitman who has turned state’s evidence says he heard from his boss 10 years ago about the sad fate of the masterpiece.

Gaspare Spatuzzo, who was imprisoned in 1997 on multiple counts of murder and turned informer last year, has told magistrates that Filippo Graviano, a Mafia boss for whom he was a hitman, told him in 1999 in prison that the painting was destroyed in the 1980s.

He said that Graviano, who with his brother Giuseppe Graviano ran one of the most powerful Cosa Nostra clans, had told him that the painting, said to be worth at least £20 million [$32 million], was handed for safe keeping to the Pullara family, part of the Santa Maria di Gesu clan in Palermo, who hid it in a farm outbuilding. “There it was eaten by rats and pigs, and so was burnt,” Spatuzza said.

There’s no way to confirm the story, of course, so there’s still a chance the Nativity could be hidden away somewhere instead of destroyed, but I’m afraid it’s a slim one.

You probably read about it the theft of the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign at the entrance to Auschwitz. It was major news, of course, which is why I didn’t post about it because I figured y’all would have heard about it already. Now that the thieves have been captured and the backstory is coming out, I can’t let it go uncommented.

Just to lay it out clearly for those of you who haven’t seen the story, the infamous wrought iron sign at the entrance to Auschwitz was stolen in the wee hours of Friday morning. It caused a furor, needless to say, and Polish authorities went whole hog to get it back. They deployed a full force of police, roadblocks, security checks and airports and border crossings, sniffer dogs, a reward for information, the works.

Investigators found that the sign had been partially unscrewed and partially torn off the gate. The thieves then carried the 16-foor-long, 90-pound sign 300 yards to a gap in the concrete wall. The bars blocking the gap had been cut apart and footprints nearby indicated the thieves carried the sign to a waiting vehicle.

Finally, just before midnight on Monday, less than 72 hours after the theft, the Krakow police found the sign and arrested 5 men on suspicion of having stolen it. The sign was found in the home of one of the suspects outside of Czernikowo, a village 180 miles north of Auschwitz. It was cut into three pieces, one word per section, missing the “I” in “Frei” which the thieves were unable to remove from the gate.

Investigators are still questioning the suspects. They’ve brought three of them back to the scene of the crime to have them re-enact the theft to plug security holes. It turns out these rats actually stopped midway when they realized they didn’t have the proper tools for the job, left the camp, bought a spanner then came back to finish.

The theft was commissioned by a non-Pole. Prosecutors aren’t releasing any details about the commission, but media reports suggest the sign was heading to Sweden. Two of the suspects were apprehended in the port city of Gdynia, where ferries and container ships to Sweden depart.

None of the five men have known neo-Nazi ties, although they have criminal records including robbery and some violent crime. Four of the suspects are unemployed; one owns a small construction company. It was that last guy’s truck which was used to transport the sign.

The five suspects will likely be charged with “theft of a special cultural item” which could garner them as much as ten years in prison. The $40,000 reward provided by the Polish government and various donors will be divided among several people who provided information leading to the culprits’ capture. Interpol is involved now to follow the trail to whatever neo-Nazi collector scum commissioned this outrage.

The sign will be welded back together by conservators and put back in place in time for the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the camp by the Soviet Army on January 27th. Security will be drastically improved, one hopes, before they do that. Auschwitz is strapped for cash, unfortunately, and in desperate need of extensive conservation. Germany recently pledged $86 million to an endowment fund to help preserve the camp, but they need twice that to keep the camp from falling apart.

Italian police announced today that they’ve broken up a huge looting ring, recovering thousands of artifacts destined to be smuggled to countries including the United States.

During more than a year of investigations, authorities recovered nearly 1,700 statues, vases and other artifacts dating from pre-Roman times to the heyday of the empire. Police flagged 19 people for possible investigation by prosecutors.

The artifacts were mainly dug out from tombs near Naples and Venice and included a bronze bust of the emperor Augustus, customs police in Rome said.

Some pieces were already in the United States. Italian authorities worked with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Connecticut to repatriate 47 6th and 5th centuries B.C. statues that had been looted from a tomb in southern Italy.

This is the second time in two weeks that the ICE has returned artifacts from that period looted from southern Italy. Just last week they returned a Corinthian column krater from 580 to 570 B.C. that had been trafficked by Giacomo Medici (the now-convicted felon who directed the looting and sale of the Euprhonios krater) and wall panel fresco from Pompeii that had been stolen in 1997.

The Corinthian krater, incidentally, was recovered from Christie’s in June. It has first gone on the market at a Sotheby’s auction in 1985. Dirty, dirty, dirty.

Iraq’s National Museum in Baghdad, so brutally looted after the US invasion in 2003, is getting a boost into the 21st century thanks to Google. Google CEO Eric Schmidt announced in Baghdad that they would make virtual copies of all the artifacts in the museum at their own expense and put them online by early next year.

Ambassador Christopher R. Hill described the project as “part of an effort spearheaded by the State Department to bring technology to Iraq. We thought, what better way to do that than bring Eric Schmidt here?”[...]

Jared Cohen, the State Department official who organized the visit, disputed a suggestion that the event seemed like a government-sponsored infomercial for Google. “This is a really good example of what we’re calling 21st-century statecraft,” he said. A dozen other companies are involved in the project to digitize the National Museum’s collections, so “it’s not an exclusive club,” he added.

The museum sort of re-opened in February of this year, but not really, because it wasn’t open to the public, just to a select few scholars and dignitaries and whatnot. Securing the extensive collection from the Cradle of Civilization has been an insurmountable obstacle to a full re-opening so far.

Digitizing the collection means people will finally really be able to see its full splendor, and not just what’s on display (only 8 of the 26 galleries have been restored), but the treasures in storage as they become available. Google has already taken 14,000 pictures, with many more to come.

Some of the collection has already been digitized by Italy’s National Research Center: The Virtual Museum of Iraq. That’s more of an overview, though, a greatest hits collection, if you will.

Google’s digitization will be done on site, which means you’ll get more of a tour feel than with the Italian site. Also, Google’s will be searchable and not Flash-dependent, a major bonus as far as I’m concerned.

I’m very much looking forward to getting to peruse 4000 years worth of history that has been out of reach for over 5 years.