The History Blog

The 3,000-year-old neo-Assyrian gold earrings stolen from Iraq in the post-invasion chaos and almost sold by Christie’s 2 years ago have been returned to Iraq.

Christie’s claimed when they put up for sale that they were bought in 1969 and “similar” to the 8 identical pairs of elaborate gold earrings found in 1988 in the royal tombs at Nimrud, the ancient capital of Assyria. Iraqi officials spotted them in the catalogue and reported them to Interpol, stopping the sale.

Donny George, the former director of the Iraq Museum who was on the Nimrud excavation and who personally photographed the treasures, recognized the earrings as from Nimrud. He pointed out that the gold work at Nimrud was exceptional and unique, that there was no such thing as a “similar” piece.

The earrings were among the 613 items of jewellery and funeral ornaments that make up the Treasure, found in 1988 in two previously unexplored burial chambers, belonging to a ninth-century BC queen and princess, in the ancient city of Nimrud.

Sent to the central bank at the time of the first Gulf War in 1991, the Treasure has hardly ever been on show. But it was once described by an American investigator seeking to recover lost Iraqi artefacts as making the tomb of the Egyptian King Tutankhamun “look like Walmart”.

The treasure remained in the vault of the central for 20 years, surviving the 1990 Gulf War, depredations of Saddam Hussein’s son Qusay (he helped himself to almost a billion dollars in cash plus hundreds of gold bars from the bank), Shock and Awe, looters trying to break into it with rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47s, and a major flood. A team of Iraqi, US and British archaeologists, plus an awesome reservist Marine Col. Matthew Bogdanos who in civilian life is a New York prosecutor with a classics degree along with his legal one, were able to rescue the Nimrud treasure from the flood.

At the time they thought it was fully accounted for, but somewhere between the summer of 2003 and winter of 2008, those earrings migrated out of Iraq into Christie’s hot little ask-no-questions hands. Even now Christie’s refuses to say who the seller was or even comment on the story at all. New York Customs enforcement will only say that no legal action has been taken.

Inadvertantly, of course. Authorities in Milas, near Bodrum, Turkey (once known as Halicarnassus of Caria), spent 7 months investigating a gang of looters, eventually following them to an illegal dig. The area was large so it wasn’t until after police arrested the looters that they found out the wretches had made an enormous find: the 4th century B.C. tomb of King Hekataios of Caria, father of King Mausolos of Caria.

It was for King Mausolos that a tomb was built which was so large and lavish that it would become known as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. In fact, it was so wondrous that they named that whole category of grandiose tombs after Mausolos.

His father King Hekataois, also known as Hekatomnus, was a satrap of the Persian empire, but his success on the battlefield carved out an autonomous kindgom in Caria, a kingdom ruled by his descendants for 50 years, until Alexander swept through on his way to conquering the world.

So far what’s been found is a large tombstone that dates to 390 B.C., but who knows what else is on the site. There is some damage on the stone already, some caused by humans trying to dig it up in God knows what atrocious way, some by time.

“Even with its damaged parts the tomb stone is one of the most important archeological discoveries of all times. It has a very rare and precious workmanship.”

“The tomb stone could be as precious as Great Alexander’s, which is exhibited at the Istanbul Archeology Museum,” said [Undersecretariat of Culture and Tourism Ministry Özgür] Özarslan, adding that the relic first had to be saved. “The Ministry of Culture and Tourism will deal with that issue,” he said.

“The tomb stone has a length of 2.75 meters and a width of 1.85 meters,” said Culture and Tourism Ministry Properties and Museums Managing Director Murat Süslü.

Italian legislators attempted to sneak a little nasty into the state budget this year. The “archaeo-remittance” measure would give anyone who possesses antiquities a big ol’ way out of trouble: simply declare you’ve owned it from before December 31, 2009, pay a fee and get a 30 year license. No need to prove a history of ownership, certainly no need to know where it was originally found. This would legalize the ownership of looted goods on a massive scale.

The declared purpose of the law is to recover undocumented patrimony and to allow it to be catalogued. In reality the law will end up being an enormous boon to looters and organized criminals, the so-called “archaeomafia,” involved in illegal digging and international trafficking of antiquities.

We’re not dealing here with the remittance of the common earthenware jar or ceramic pot that a farmer happened to unearth in his field or that an enthusiast has misguidedly acquired, but of an indiscriminate legalization of archaeological antiquities from clandestine excavations, unethically removed from the collective archaeological record with irreparable harm to the finds themselves, especially in terms of provenance. [...]

The antiquities thus “legalized” will also probably be allowed to be bequeathed in wills or even sold. The department of cultural heritage will only have the power to contest the declared value of the artifact and request the difference.

Thus overnight, the law will officially transform looters and the “archaeomafia,” which the current legal system condemns and prosecutes, into collectors and managers of cultural heritage, who with the antiquities they have robbed from the public patrimony, can engage, legally, in commercial activities and with museums and art galleries.

Enjoying that chill running up and down your spine?

Similar laws have come up in the Italian legislature before, but they were always defeated by the subsequent uproar from the archaeological community and supporters. This time things were scarier because instead of being proposed as a law unto itself, it was a measure attached to the budget, and legislators tend to pass budgets no matter what heinousness lies within.

There is good news, however. The Italian National Association of Archaeologists (ANA) has raised hell and the story got traction in the Italian press and all over the Internet. There’s a Facebook group protesting the measure and an online petition. (The text of the Facebook page and the petition is the same as the open letter I link to and quote above, just fyi.)

In the space of just a few days, the ruckus has forced a retreat. The parliamentary majority has said they will not add the archeo-remittance measure to the state budget. Assuming they actually make good on that, the acute danger will settle into a chronic one. The measure will remain in the pipeline as proposed bill, so the ruckus must remain loud to keep the scoundrels from making this monstrosity law.

Not that it ever got supergreat. Since the invasion, there hasn’t been anything like sufficient security at the many sites of archaeological importance in Iraq. Coalition forces had been doing some policing, however, and containing the worst of the excesses seen in 2003. That was before the drawdowns began, and although police were supposed to be trained to replace them, the government has not made them a priority. The result is the devastatingly predictable recurrence of looting.

The looting today has not resumed on the scale it did in the years that immediately followed the American invasion in 2003, when looters — tomb raiders, essentially — swarmed over sites across the country, leaving behind moonlike craters where Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian and Persian cities once stood.

Even so, officials and archaeologists have reported dozens of new excavations over the past year, coinciding with the withdrawal of American troops, who until 2009 conducted joint operations with the Iraqi police in many areas now being struck by looters again. The antiquities police say they do not have the resources even to keep records of reported lootings.

Here in Dhahir, the looting is evident in the shattered bits of civilization — pieces of pottery, glass and carved stone — strewn across an expanse of desert that was once a Sumerian trading town known as Dubrum.

The bowls, vases and other pieces are destroyed and discarded by looters who seek gold, jewelry and cuneiform tablets or cylinders that are easy to smuggle and resell, according to Abdulamir al-Hamdani, a former antiquities inspector in Dhi Qar Province. The nearest city, Farj, is notorious for a black market in looted antiquities, he said.

“For me, for you, it is all priceless,” he said, “but for them it is useless if they can’t sell it in the market.”

The antiquities police force was supposed to have over 5,000 troops on the ground by now. They have 106, barely enough to protect the Ottoman mansion that houses their headquarters. The antiquities board, which has a lot more to fund than just the security force, asked for a budget of $16 million this year, but they got $2.5 million.

There’s no money, no personnel, and even when the prime minister himself orders more police on the ground, nothing comes of it. Then there’s the corruption of local government and law enforcement which gives looting operations easy access to archaeological sites. It’s a nightmare, and there’s no awakening in sight.

The enormous Tang Dynasty (618 – 907 A.D.) stone sarcophagus of Empress Wu Huifei (699-737 A.D.), looted from her tomb four years ago and smuggled to a buyer in the United States, has been returned to China.

The handsomely decorated sarcophagus was stolen from Wu’s tomb in southern Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi province, in 2006. Police didn’t even realize it was gone until they found photographs of it on a computer confiscated from a suspect in another tomb robbery. Archaeologists identified the artifact in the pictures as Empress Wu’s sarcophagus, setting the police off on an international hunt.

After two years of investigations, police discovered the sarcophagus had been smuggled out of China and sold to a businessman in the US for $1 million, police sources said.

“We contacted the businessman through mediators and told him we had to get the relic back. If necessary, we would seek help from Interpol,” said Han Yulin, head officer of the heritage investigation team of Xi’an’s public security bureau.

“After three rounds of negotiations, he agreed to return the relic to China unconditionally.”

Oh just three rounds? What a humanitarian. The sarcophagus was shipped from Virginia in March and arrived in Guangzhou a month later. It was put on display at the Shaanxi History Museum yesterday.

The part that really blows my mind is the sheer size of this beast. It’s not like Roman sarcophagi or even those big outer sarcophagi that contain pharaonic mummies. It weighs 27 tons and is 4 meters (13 feet) long, 2 meters wide and 2 meters tall. How in the name of all that’s unholy did the looters get something so gigantic out of the tomb? To say nothing of the logistics of schlepping such a massive piece across at least one continent and an ocean. What about customs? How is it possible to sneak around with a 27-ton stone coffin taller and wider than an NBA player and longer than two of them?

It just goes to show how deep a problem looting is, how adept and resourceful the criminals are.

When US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) finds stolen and illegally exported antiquities in New York, the confiscated goods end up in a nondescript warehouse in Queens. There they stay in climate controlled comfort while cases wind their way through the court systems or they can be returned to their countries and institutions of origin. The process can take years.

Obviously ICE doesn’t divulge the location of its warehouses, but they recently gave the New York Post a rare peek inside the Queens facility. The reporters weren’t allowed take pictures and of course they can’t print where it is, but it’s still some Indiana Jones awesomeness to get to see where so many goodies are kept. There are over 2,500 artifacts in the warehouse right now.

Fishy-looking shipments may catch the eye of customs officers who look for phony countries of origin such as Babylon or suspiciously low values declared on packages.

Tipsters also alert [James McAndrew, the ICE senior special agent in charge of cultural property,] about particular shipments or smugglers. In one case, officials in India told him to watch for artifacts mislabeled as lawn furniture.

When a crate marked “garden table sets” arrived by ship in Newark, customs officers called McAndrew, who raced to the port along with a top official with India’s Consulate General in New York.

The crate was opened to reveal hundreds of statues of Indian deities looted from temples and private homes. McAndrew said he had a sense of satisfaction mixed with dismay. “At least call it trinkets,” he said. “It was such a blatant ruse.”

The 600 or so pieces, some dating to the 4th century, have been stored at the Queens warehouse for three years as an investigation went forward.

The most notorious piece mentioned in the article is a 7th c. Iranian silver griffin-shaped rhyton (ceremonial drinking vessel). Widely considered the premier griffin of antiquity, it was looted from Kalmakarra Cave, known as the Western Cave, in the western highlands of Iran between 1989 and 1992 along with untold other treasures. Over the next decade, bits and bobs of the reputed treasure turned up in various museums and markets around the world.

In 2000, the rhyton was hand-carried into the United States by art dealer Hicham Aboutaam of Phoenix Ancient Art. He described it in customs forms as Syrian, but that was a deliberate and knowing lie. When he sold it to a private collector in Manhattan for $950,000, the collector demanded guarantees of its authenticity, so Aboutaam actually brazenly got 3 expert reports confirming that it was part of the Western Cave treasure.

The sale took 2 years to go through, and 2 years later, after an ICE investigation Aboutaam was arrested for illegally importing the rhyton. Sadly, he just got a slap on the wrist. He pled guilty to falsifying a commercial invoice, paid a $5,000 fine and is still happily in business to this day, still dirty as the day is long. Just last year he and his equally dirty brother Ali “voluntarily” returned an astonishing 251 antiquities for a total estimated worth of $2.7 million to Italy. I put that “voluntarily” in quotes because you can bet your sweet patoo that the Italians threatened them with legal action to get them to cough up.

Meanwhile, the poor rhyton remains in that warehouse in Queens until relations between the US and Iran are normalized, which could be a long ways away.

The Western Prelacy of the Armenian Apostolic Church of America has filed a $105 million lawsuit against the J. Paul Getty Museum for the return of seven pages ripped out of a 13th century Bible. The church claims the pages were torn from the Armenian Orthodox Church’s Zeyt’un Gospels during the 1915 Armenian genocide and were illegally sold thereafter.

The Bible is was illustrated by T’oros Roslin, the premier Armenian manuscript illuminator of the Middle Ages, in 1256 and was considered not just sacred but magical. It was venerated by Armenian Orthodox for its powers of protection. In fact, when the dark days of the genocide dawned in 1915, the entire hierarchy of the Armenian church carried the Bible in a procession through every street of Zeyt’un to create a divine firewall of protection around the city. (It didn’t work.)

Some time after that, the Bible was given to descendants of the Armenian royal family because they had connections with the ruling Ottoman Turks that might keep them safe from deportation, or at least, you know, alive. They loaned it to a family friend but were suddenly deported, and thereafter the Bible moved around for the rest of World War I and in the immediate post-war period. Finally it surfaced again in 1928 and was returned to the Patriarchate of the Armenian Church. They asked the family friend who had held it for years to authenticate it in 1948, and upon its return the missing 7 pages were discovered.

To this day nobody knows who stole the pages. All we know is they turned up on display at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City in a 1994 exhibit called “Treasures in Heaven: Armenian Illuminated Manuscripts”, on loan from an anonymous private collector. That’s when they came to the Getty’s attention. The Getty bought the pages from the still-anonymous collector and have had the pages ever since. I like how vague they are about the pages’ bloody history on their website: “These canon tables were separated from the manuscript at some point in the past and eventually acquired by the Getty Museum….”

Separated from the manuscript. Like they got a divorce or lost at the mall or something. Getty representatives don’t mince quite so many words in their response to the suit, though.

“The Getty is confident that it has legal ownership of these pages, known as Canon Tables, which have been widely published, studied and exhibited,” the museum’s spokeswoman, Julie Jaskol, said in a statement. [...]

“At no time in the 90 or so years that the Canon Tables have been in the United States has anyone questioned their ownership,” Jaskol said in the statement. “The Getty believes the lawsuit is groundless and should be dismissed.”

The plaintiff’s lead attorney, Vartkes Yeghiayan — who often represents victims of the Armenian Genocide — was researching the atrocity when in 2007 he discovered the Getty Museum was housing the pages, said Michael Bazyler, a Chapman University law professor speaking on behalf of the attorney.

“We have asked the Getty to give it back to the church, but they declined to do so,” he said.

The rest of the Bible is in the Mesrop Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manuscripts in Yerevan, Armenia, where it has been kept since 1948. The plaintiffs want the 7 stolen pages returned to Armenia so they can be restored, or at least kept together with the Bible itself.

The Getty’s rationale — that the pages were published extensively from 1994 on and nobody questioned the legal title so therefore their sale was legal — is something you see a lot when museums justify shady acquisitions. Something hides in a private collection for a few years/decades, then is loaned to a famous institution where it gets published thereby establishing provenance. It’s a looted antiquities laundering system, basically.

The shadiness is old enough, however, that it most likely falls before the 1970 cut-off of the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Cultural Property. We’ll see what the courts say.

TMZ, oddly enough, has a pdf of the entire complaint. It’s an interesting read, with lots of details about the history of the Bible during the genocide.

Police in Greece busted two men in the act of loading a rare matched pair of ancient statues into a truck to smuggle them outside the country where they planned to sell them for 10 million euros ($12.43 million). The police are also looking for a third member of the gang who was going to help get the works out of Greece.

They haven’t commented yet on where the statues were headed or who was meant to be on the receiving end.

Archaeologists said Tuesday the statues are “outstanding works of art” and may have come from a temple or cemetery in a lost ancient city in the Peloponnese region in southern Greece. Both are in excellent condition, but lack sections of their lower legs and were gashed by a plow or digging machinery.

They stand 1.82 meters (5 feet 9 inches) and 1.78 meters (5 feet 8 inches) high, and were probably carved by the same sculptor out of thick-grained island marble between 550-520 B.C, at the height of the archaic period of sculpture.

“They are exactly the same, with a slight variation in hairstyle and a small difference in height,” said Nikos Kaltsas, director of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens where the finds were temporarily housed for conservation and study. “The artist may have wanted to produce two similar figures that would form part of a group.”

The statues are in the kouros style, the stiff, posed style of sculpture that preceded the Hellenistic embrace of naturalistic statuary.

Archaeologists hope to find the missing pieces of the legs since the breaks are recent, but they haven’t pinpointed the exact location where the statues were excavated. Authorities suspect the site might be lost ruins of Tenea because a similar but slightly earlier statue was found in what may be Tenea’s cemetery. Here’s hoping the men they arrested spill all the details.

For now, the kouros will remain in the National Archaeological Museum for further analysis and conservation.

Four tomb robbers from a gang of 27 have been sentenced to death for looting hundreds of artifacts from dozens of tombs in China’s Hunan Province. The rest of the gang got jail terms ranging from 13 years to life.

The looters used explosives and heavy machinery to steal artifacts from tombs as much as 2500 years old between April of 2008 and January of 2009.

“Police have retrieved all of the relics stolen by the gang,” said Wang Lifu, a court investigator.

He said one of the stolen relics, a seal of a Changsha King, from a tomb of the Western Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. 25 ), was under the state first-class protection.

Wang said the gang members were from several provinces, including Hunan, Shandong, Jiangxi, Shanxi and Gansu.

It’s the largest tomb robbing operation ever busted in Hunan Province, and obviously the Intermediate People’s Court in Changsha isn’t kid around when it comes to making examples of convicted criminals.

I sometimes wonder why I still watch The Simpsons, a full decade after it stopped being any good at all, but a couple of times this season there’s been a pale, blurry shadow of a reminder of its former glory. Tonight’s episode we saw Monty Burns getting busted for having commissioned the infamous 1990 art thefts at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Vermeer’s The Concert features prominently, one of only 36 known Vermeers in the world, as does Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, the only known seascape Rembrandt ever made. They were stolen from the Gardner along with 11 other Renaissance and Impressions masterpieces, plus two rare artifacts. The total value of the stolen pieces was estimated at $500 million. If they were put on the market now, even that staggering figure would likely be rapidly eclipsed.

On the night of March 18, 1990, men dressed like police officers argued their way in the door, handcuffed the night security guards and made off with 3 Rembrandts (and a Flinck that had been attributed to Rembrandt), the Vermeer, five Degas gouaches, a Manet, a 3200-year-old Chinese bronze vessel and a Napoleonic eagle finial.

It’s the largest art theft in history. Despite the $5 million reward for information leading to the retrieval of the pieces in good condition, the case remains unsolved. UNTIL NOW THAT IS.

There’s no clip online yet, but you can catch whole episodes on the Fox website. Keep your eye open for the episode called “American History X-Cellent” to see Homer’s thoughts on Vermeer’s beautiful symmetry and his shameful treatment of Rembrandt.