The History Blog

The Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles has created a new web-based tracking system for archaeological sites in Jordan. Financed in part by the World Monuments Fund and with extensive support from the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, the million dollar project has been in the works for 3 years and will be available for authorized users starting in September.

Awesomely named MEGA — Middle Eastern Geodatabase for Antiquities — the database uses Google Earth satellite images and archaeologist field reports to catalogue over 10,000 ancient sites in Jordan. Some of the information was available in a local Jordanian database, but it wasn’t web-based and was clunky to browse and update. Now anybody in the know can easily record any news about a site’s condition, from encroaching development, looters, environmental threats, whatever is relevant.

Obviously real-time updates are not going to stop someone from looting a site, but it will help authorities track problems almost as soon as they happen, and get a better idea of how to apportion protection and conservation resources.

It was the devastation of Iraq’s archaeological sites in the wake of the US invasion that actually inspired this project. The looting of the National Museum in Baghdad got much of the attention at the time, but the Getty thought they could devise a database to help authorities cope with the archaeological sites being destroyed by looters. Unfortunately, the chaos in the country over the next few years kept the Getty from being able to work with local Iraqi experts, so the project never got off the ground.

“The idea of shipping a couple of big computers to Iraq and hoping that they would get there and that it would all work just seemed too crazy,” said Alison Dalgity, a senior project manager at the Getty who helped develop MEGA.

And so the institute accepted an invitation from Jordan to develop the system there first, a plan that coincided with a sea change in Web-based mapping tools and the rise of open-source software, meaning that the system could exist on the Web and be built and updated cheaply.

It’s not even live yet, but already Jordanian authorities are so delighted with the database that they’re considering opening it to everyone, not just authorized experts but tourist schmoes like the rest of us. Jordan isn’t exactly comfortable with open information sharing when it comes to official government data, so it says a lot that they’re seriously considering upending their customary attitude towards transparency to share the wealth of their archaeological sites.

Jordan’s experience with MEGA might be something of a template for Iraq and other antiquities-rich countries. Change the Google settings and the names, and then it’s just a matter of data entry.

Here’s some more information on the discovery of King Hekatomnus’ tomb in Milas, Turkey. Police searched a home the looters were using and found 2 tunnels leading to the tomb. Inside the tomb they found not only a large and elaborately carved sarcophagus, but also frescoes and possibly more easily portable treasures that they promptly sold on the black market.

A court has arrested and charged five of 10 people detained in the raid, the state-run Anatolia news agency reported.

Anatolia, which was allowed to enter the tomb, said the suspects had dug two tunnels — 6 and 8 yards long — from the house and an adjacent barn, leading to the tomb that is buried about 10 yards deep.

They used sophisticated equipment to drill through the thick marble walls of the tomb and were working to remove the coffin from the underground chamber.

So I gather then that the tomb is a marble structure, not just a grave. Maybe it was an inspiration for his son Mausolos’ famous excess.

Culture Minister Ertugrul Gunay noted that these looters weren’t some fly-by-night amateurs with shovels. They had funding and access to specialized equipment. Turkey intends to follow the money, investigating any potential international links. Gunay has also ordered further digs on the site and in nearby areas.

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.

Ukrainian and German police forces collaborated to bust a ring of international art thieves who were attempting to sell a stolen Caravaggio painting to a German collector in Berlin.

Ukraine’s Interior Minister Anatoly Mogylyov said that investigations have linked this gang to 20 other major art thefts in the Ukraine, and 20 suspected members of the gang have been detained there. The ministry is filing for extradition of the alleged thieves arrested in Germany.

The German newspaper said police in Germany detained three Ukrainian nationals and a Russian when they attempted to hand over the painting to the buyer.

The painting was brought to Odessa at the beginning of the 20th century. It was long believed to be a copy of a Caravaggio, but the authenticity of the work was established in 2005 while the canvas was on exhibit in Spain.

Soviet experts had declared it authentic in the 1950’s, but the attribution was still questioned until it went on tour in 2005. It was restored in 2006, although from the looks of it it’s going to need a whole new round of tender loving care after how the thieves manhandled it.

The painting, known as “The Taking of Christ,” or “The Kiss of Judas,” was stolen 2 years ago from the Museum of Western and Eastern Art in Odessa, Ukraine. The thieves broke into the museum through a window at night, removed the glass pane shielding the canvas and cut it out of the frame, all without setting off a single alarm. It was major loss to the museum and to the Ukraine. It was their only Caravaggio and the single most valuable painting in the country, worth tens of millions of dollars.

There is another copy of the same painting in Dublin’s National Gallery of Ireland. It too is thought to be in Caravaggio’s hand, but it’s hard to say.

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.

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.

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.

The British produced only four top-secret Livens Large Gallery Flame Projectors to deploy at the Battle of the Somme. They were huge, complex flamethrowers that shot a 300-foot flame across the German lines. The aim wasn’t to kill so much as terrorize, to chase the enemy away from the front line and clear some space for the British troops to occupy German positions. It almost worked.

Two of the four were destroyed under German shelling before the battle began, but on July 1, 1916, the first day of the Somme, the two remaining flamethrowers were deployed and did what they were expected to do: scare the crap out of the German front line troops allowing the British to move in on the German trenches in the area with comparatively few losses.

Obviously that small initial advantage didn’t make much of a difference in the long term. The weapons were so absurdly oversized that they were hardly portable, and even if they could have been moved easily they could only be used for three 10-second blasts each.

To the men who operated them, the 56ft long, 2.5 tonne machines were called “Squirts”, and “Judgements”, by more senior officers. [...]

They were operated by a crew of eight men from the Royal Engines Special Brigade – “Z” company – but took 300 men to assemble them underground, each component part being taken into the shallow tunnels, known as “Russian Saps”, in sequence. The devices then had to be filled with oil, taken underground in hundreds of cans.

The strange-looking, tubular weapons were only 14 inches wide and worked like a large syringe. A piston was pushed by compressed gas into a long chamber containing the fuel. This was then forced out through the nozzle on the surface, from where the jet of flame was projected.

Despite their limited but notable success on the battlefield and the incredible drama of their deployment, these weapons remained very little known. Now a team of archaeologists and historians believe they’ve located the remains of the last Livens Large Gallery Flame Projector under the mud of Montagne de Cappy in northern France.

The device was noted in a war diary as “lost beyond recall” on June 28th after the tunnel it was in collapsed under German shelling. The team studied the war diaries, private diaries, trench maps, other primary sources to narrow down its possible location, plus ground penetrating radar found evidence of metallic objects which could be the Livens projector. Of course, it could also be any number of other World War I ordnance, so when they dig in the area next week, they’re going to have to be extra careful.

If it does turn out to be the flamethrower, this would be the only one left in the world. The British only deployed one more in 1917 in Belgium. They did give a few to the Russians, but those are long gone in the chaos of revolution.

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