The History Blog

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.

Yesterday I mused in re David Cahn, the antiquities dealer who had to cough up the lekythos:

Here’s the dealer in question’s website, btw. I wonder how much of that treasure is loot.

Thanks to the prodigious memory of Looting Matters’ David Gill, my question is no longer idle.

From an article last June:

The marble statue of god Apollo, discovered in the late 19th century in the town of Gortyna in Crete, was sought by Greece ever since it was reported stolen in 1991 together with nine other items.

It was not until March this year that Interpol informed Athens it had tracked it down in Berne.

Voulgarakis said Swiss arts dealer David Cahn, who had the statue in his possession, returned it unconditionally after a brief legal dispute.

I’ll just bet he did. In case his record over the past year or so didn’t speak loud and clear, I found another interesting tidbit amongst the braggadocio on his website.

He also contributed to the catalogue of the exhibition “Glories of the Past: Ancient Art from the Shelby White and Leon Levy Collection” held at the Metropolitan Museum of New York in 1990.

Shelby White has recently had to return ten of those Glories of the Past to Italy because, wouldn’t ya know, they were looted and illegally exported. That was just the comprise, too. Italy’s original request has twenty items on it, and I seriously doubt the ten artifacts that White refused to return had legitimate provenances either.

David Cahn has a degree in Classical Archaeology. There isn’t a chance in hell he didn’t realize the muck he was wallowing in. He, much like the rest of his colleagues and clients, simply chose to look the other way until the law forced them to do otherwise.

A marble lekythos (a tall vase used to hold oil) dating to the 4th century B.C. and inscribed with a funerary scene was returned to Greece April 17th. It had been in the (indubitably grubby) hands of a Swiss antiquities dealer, surprise, surprise.

It is a funerary lekythos depicting a farewell banquet for the deceased, in a classic farewell scene. It was presented at an international antiquities dealers exhibition in 2007 in Maastricht, where it was put up for auction by a Swiss antiquities dealer.

After a series of negotiations, the Swiss dealer decided to hand over the lekythos to the Greek government in an out-of-court settlement, without reservations or conditions. It was delivered to a representative of the Greek embassy in Berne and then crated in the customs free zone in Basel before being transported to Greece.

That’s actually a rather notable feat. Switzerland has been a central staging ground for antiquities dealers to hold looted and stolen artifacts before sale because it has no laws against importing illegally exported goods.

Last May, however, the Swiss and Greek governments signed an agreement requiring both countries to actively seek out illegally exported antiquities and repatriate them.

Here’s the dealer in question’s website, btw. I wonder how much of that treasure is loot.

Of stolen and looted antiquities, that is. I don’t know what y’all were thinking, but this is a family blog. Sickos.

In Italy, police found a dozen ancient artifacts destined for the antiquities market, including an extremely rare marble head of Emperor Lucius Verus. He was chisel-shy, so there are only four other known portraits of Marcus Aurelius’ co-emperor.

In Spain, police have seized tens of thousands of precious antiquities, including Roman swords, 12,000 coins, and 10,000 paleological artifacts. Twenty low-down dirty bastards have been arrested for systematically looting archaeological sites and then selling their finds on the internet.

The scale of this operation boggles the mind, doesn’t it? And it’s not even terribly professional. I mean, these were eBay jockeys, after all, not people with a high-end network on the antiquities market.

Today marks the fifth anniversary of the looting of the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad. I remember being horrified, aghast, on the verge of tears whenever the realization of what we had lost sunk in.

What I didn’t know is how much worse it could get. How the entire country would be stripped of its (and our) precious history. How archaeological sites that testify to our earliest civilizations, where people first invented writing, cities, the wheel and so much more, would become pockmarked no man’s lands of chaotic rubble.

The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago is hosting an exhibit on the looting of Iraq. Catastrophe! The Looting and Destruction of Iraq’s Past opens this evening in Chicago and will remain until December 31.

The exhibition will consist of photographs as well as objects from the museum’s collection. “It summarizes results of investigations into the looting of the Baghdad Museum and updates efforts to recover the artifacts that were stolen,” said Geoff Emberling, Director of the Oriental Institute Museum.

The exhibition also will document the looting of archaeological sites with a series of aerial photographs that show the increase in damage through the past few years and other ground-level pictures of the looters at work. “A central section illustrates the importance of archaeological context through several case studies that show what is lost when a piece is looted. The exhibit presents an overview of the international trade in antiquities and the ways in which it directly promotes the looting of the sites,” Emberling said.

If anyone has a chance to see this exhibit, please let me know. I would dearly love to hear all about it. Meanwhile, a companion publication is available for sale or freely downloadable as a pdf.

I’ve read it and I cannot recommend it enough. It’s 82 pages long so eminently readable, although painful in the horror it describes. Here’s one example to give you an idea of what you’ll find.

A bull-headed lyre excavated from the Royal Cemetery of Ur and dated ca 2800, B.C.:

That same lyre after looters pillaged the museum on April 10, 2003:

Tonight, SAFE is holding a candlelit vigil in memory of the tragic loss of our cultural heritage. Click here to see if there is a vigil in your area.

Working at night and in secret so as not to alert looters, federal archaeologists have exhumed 67 men, women and children buried around Fort Craig. They were acting on a tip that a respected (and long-deceased) amateur historian had looted the graves and actually kept a mummy of a black Civil War-era soldier in his living room.

Most of the men are believed to have been soldiers — Fort Craig protected settlers in the West from American Indian raids and played a role in the Civil War. Union troops stationed there fought the Confederacy as it moved into New Mexico from Texas in 1862.

The children buried there may have been local residents treated by doctors at the former frontier outpost, officials said.

Federal officials learned of the looting in November 2004, when Don Alberts, a retired historian for Kirtland Air Force Base, tipped them off about a macabre possession he’d seen at Brecheisen’s home about 30 years earlier.

Alberts described seeing the mummified remains of a black soldier with patches of brown flesh clinging to facial bones and curly hair on top of its skull. Alberts said the body had come from Fort Craig.

Why this crazy sumbitch Brecheisen might have done this we don’t know, although there is some vague notion floating about that he had a bone to pick (sorreh) with the Bureau of Land Management. Fort Craig was only one of his targets. He grave-robbed other forts and Indian burial grounds as well.

Whatever his reasons, the remains of that soldier along with the rest of Brecheisen’s collection scattered after his death. His family sold the stuff. I hope either the family or the people who ran the estate sale had the decency not to include the mummy.

The bodies exhumed by the feds are being studied now to see if their identities can be determined. They will eventually be reburied.

The James Ossuary, the bone box inscribed “James son of Joseph, Brother of Jesus” that made the news 5 or so years ago when it was “found” by antiquities dealer Oded Golan, and then found by the Israel Antiquities Authority to be a forgery, is back in the news again.

60 Minutes did a story on the ossuary. They even track down an Egyptian craftsman who has forged tablets for Golan in the past.

An interesting side-note:

The question [of whether the inscription was forged] comes up because the ossuary was not dug up at an authorized excavation, where every shard is scrutinized by scholars. Like most so-called antiquities, it just turned up in the shop of an antiques dealer, which is another way of saying it was looted.

The Israel Antiquities Authority has a special unit of archaeological detectives trying to stop this trade. They spend their nights burrowing underground on the trail of tomb-raiders, like those who may have stolen the ossuary from the tomb of James. The trouble is, no one has any idea when that happened, or where.

But we do know where it turned up: in the Tel Aviv apartment of Oded Golan, an Israeli entrepreneur, amateur pianist, and one of the world’s biggest collectors of biblical antiquities.

Here’s a good example of another aspect of the looting trade. The traffic of illicitly excavated antiquities is peppered with forgeries — a little fakeration can add value to a sale, and it’s a lot easier to sell fakes when you don’t have to trouble yourself to prove provenance — and there’s a very fine line between “collector” and launderer/fence.

The 60 Minutes segment: