The History Blog

They’re not going to patrol the sites, but they are going to help facilitate a multi-step protection program.

Major Holloway explained: “The British Army’s role in the cultural project will be to facilitate specialists coming out from the UK to south-east Iraq, to liaise with Iraqi civil contacts, and to assist where possible with contracts for work required, underwritten with a degree of funding.”

The most urgent need is to conduct condition assessments on the major archaeological sites and to determine the extent of damage caused by looters. These places include the ancient Sumerian cities of Warka and Eridu. Satellite images show evidence of considerable illicit digging after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the remains are now badly pockmarked. The project will not involve British troops patrolling archaeological sites.

Now when they say sites are badly pockmarked by digging, they don’t mean some holes have been dug. They mean this:

That’s not the result of shelling or bombing you see there, despite the Flanders ca 1917 look of it. Looters did it all.

Hopefully the British program will turn out to be a solid foundation for long-term protection of Iraqi antiquities. Soldiers patrolling wouldn’t be more than a very short term solution, so it’s probably a good thing they’re looking to use the military to set up a civilian operation instead of making a few soldiers play watchman for the time being.

Margaret Hodge, UK Culture Minister, has put an export block on the Dering Roll, a beautifully illuminated roll of arms from the 13th century. Sotheby’s is looking to sell it out of country, apparently, although I can’t find out the details of the sale other than it was part of a lot listed for sale on December 4.

The Minister’s ruling follows a recommendation by the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest, administered by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council. The Committee recommended that the export decision be deferred on the grounds that the roll is of outstanding significance for the study of early English heraldry and is so closely connected with our history and national life that its departure would be a misfortune. The Committee awarded a starred rating to the roll meaning that every possible effort should be made to raise enough money to keep it in the country.

The Dering Roll was produced in England in the last quarter of the 13th century. It is eight and a half feet long and contains the coats of arms of approximately one-quarter of the English baronage of the reign of King Edward I. As the earliest surviving English roll of arms it is a key document of medieval English knighthood. As a statement of the knights who owed feudal service to the constable of Dover Castle, it carries outstanding local as well as national significance.

The cost is $400,000 or so and all offers need to be submitted by April 19 (although there might be an extension until July). For an illuminated roll of such historical importance and such lush design, that seems eminently doable. I’m surprised it hasn’t been snapped up already, possibly by one of the families whose coat of arms are represented.

~ Thanks to John Harrison of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, for the picture. ~

The Burmese Ministry of Culture prohibits mining and excavation near archaeological sites. Unfortunately, that prohibition doesn’t extend to government-owned mining concerns. Cement Factory Accused of Destroying Antiquities.

The Kawgun cave—a natural lime stone cavern, 200ft high and 300ft long—is located near a village of the same name, two miles from Hpa-an. It contains many images and artifacts that historians say date from the Pyu era, spanning the period from the first century to the ninth century AD. [...]

Residents say the blasting dislodges the Kawgun cave’s Buddha statuettes and other historical objects. “Buddha statues are broken day after day, and we feel very frustrated,” a monk told The Irrawaddy. “We want to repair the damage, but it should be the responsibility of the department of archeology.”

Beautiful cave. Here’s hoping the publicity shames them into stopping the destruction.

Today is a bad day for art thieves and looters. The Swiss police have found 2 of the 4 paintings stolen from a Zurich museum earlier this month, and the Italian police have recovered more than 400 looted artifacts including a Pompeiian fresco, Etruscan goblets and Greek vases.

From Swiss, Italian Police Recover Stolen Art, Artifacts:

The two paintings, by van Gogh and Monet, were found on Monday in a car parked outside a Zurich psychiatric hospital, police said and have an estimated value of 70 million Swiss francs ($64 million).

Police were notified about the paintings by an employee of the hospital on Monday afternoon who told them there was a suspicious white vehicle in the car park in front of the clinic and there were two pictures sitting on the back seat, the police said in a statement.

That’s right. They left the $64 million dollar paintings in the car. That gets the WTF prize of the year. Here’s hoping the thieves do something equally stupid with the remaining two paintings, Cezanne’s “The Boy in the Red Vest” and Degas’ “Viscount Lepic and His Daughters“.

The Italian artifacts were at least squirreled away in an anonymous Frenchman’s villa.

Investigators identified the colourful Pompeiian fresco as perhaps the most prized object. Probably a 1st century A.D. work, the fragments show gardens, fountains and parts of a villa that was once home to Poppea Sabina, the wife of Emperor Nero.

Other significant finds included a virtually intact mosaic showing a young boy with cropped black hair and large black eyes, and a rare Kalpis—a Greek vase used for holding oil or water—featuring delicate figures.

An assortment of jugs, saucers, chalices and vases bearing figures in red, beige and black completed the rich collection.

On the question of museums’ complicity in the looting of antiquities, here’s a brief but punchy op-ed by Robert Bagley, a Princeton University specialist in Asian archaeology, and Patty Gerstenblith, director of DePaul University’s program in art and cultural heritage law.

In an ever-smaller world, and an increasingly multicultural society, our museums have an educational mission whose importance would be hard to overstate. For many people the art museum is the most immediate, effective and appealing way to encounter the past and to engage with other cultures. But amassing collections of looted antiquities is not the way for our museums to fulfill their mission, though many museum directors would have us believe otherwise. With the money required to buy one major object that will be seen by a trickle of visitors over the years, a museum could organize a loan exhibition that would bring it a hundred major objects and that would be seen by thousands or tens of thousands of visitors in a matter of months. Which way of spending the money does more for education? When some museum directors choose to purchase one object rather than borrow a hundred, they claim to be acting in the interests of their visitors, but surely they are deceived as to their own motives. They are motivated by a curatorial culture that puts acquisition above all else–acquisition before education, before knowledge, before the public interest. It is through intercultural exchanges, not through trafficking in illicit antiquities, that American museums should fulfill their educational mission and discharge their responsibility to the American public.

That’s an excellent point I hadn’t thought of. The Met broke the million dollar barrier when it bought the Euphronious krater in 1972. An anonymous collector bought the 3 inch high Guennol Lioness in November of last year for $57 million, setting a whole other stratospheric record.

This is the kind of money museums have to spend to wallow in the filth of plundered history. For the price of a single statue the size of a kid’s hand, museums could fund huge exhibitions of loaned wonders.

They wouldn’t even have to fund the entire thing. Most loaned exhibits have corporate sponsors footing a hefty portion of the bill. The First Emperor exhibit at the British Museum, for instance, is sponsored by Morgan Stanley. That support will be bolstered by Delta and UPS when it moves to the High Museum in Atlanta.

You can’t even buy an advance ticket for that exhibition, btw. They’ve sold out completely through the end of the run. The only way to get tickets now is to stand in line with literally a thousand other people before the museum opens for a shot at one of 500 tickets available for that day’s show.

So, for a fraction of the cost of a single statuette, the British Museum gets hundreds of thousands of paying visitors at 24 bucks a pop, huge publicity, a chance to educate a voracious public with a high quality, detailed curatorial framework plus all kinds of ancillary lectures, debates, workshops, etc.

It’s not even a contest, frankly. By any possible standard — financial, educational, ethical, legal, PR — the loan system completely blows the antiquities trade out of the water.

The felicitously named Bulgarian Directorate for Combating Organized Crime has busted a gang of 19 looters with operations in 5 major cities.

The police found a completely preserved ancient chariot, over 2,800 ancient coins, over 790 various archeological monuments, seven matrixes for minting coins, as well as ancient ceramic, glass, and bronze vessels.

Imagine what it took for these low lives to score a complete ancient chariot. They didn’t just scratch up the topsoil. Odds are they had heavy machinery and tore into the site.

An update to this entry about the family of antiquities forgers who were finally busted after years of successfully pulling the wool over experts’ eyes: Curtain falls on antiques rogue show as last of family forgers convicted.

The 84 year-old pater familias amusingly monickered the “Artful Codger” by the British press was sentenced to 2 years in prison, suspended. His 83 year-old wife got a year, also suspended. Their son, the guy who actually made the fake artifacts in their garden shed, got a 4 and a half year sentence, not suspended.

Their motivations are still something of a mystery. It can’t have been filthy lucre since they lived pretty low on the proverbial hog. The speculation is frustrated artistic talent driving them to mock the establishment, but the Greenhalgh’s ain’t talkin’.

Last week the Guardian knocked on the Greenhalgh front door to ask these questions. A lock rasped shut, a blind was drawn and from behind the frosted glass plane a woman shouted: “Go away or I’ll set the dog on you.”

I can’t help but like these guys. I’ll take a thousand skilled forgers over one looter, that’s for sure.

They are supposed to helping broker a conflict between Morocco and the Polisario independence movement in Western Sahara. Evidently that leaves them a lot of free time to take spray cans to prehistoric engravings at the rock art site at Lajuad.

The most dramatic example of this is at Lajuad in the Southern Sector of the Polisario-controlled zone, where MINURSO recently installed some communications hardware on the inaccessible (except by helicopter) summit of a smooth granite hill. It appears that the MINURSO personnel responsible for the installation amused themselves by spray-painting their names on the wall of a rockshelter that is also an important archaeological site (see photos). Although the paintings and engravings in this shelter are somewhat faint, it is difficult not to notice that the wall defaced by the MINURSO personnel houses ancient paintings and engravings, as does the floor of the shelter.

See those zig-zags like on Charlie Brown’s shirt with the lines dropping down? They’re faint already on account of they’re thousands of frikkin’ years old. Ahmed’s stupid frikkin’ tag sure doesn’t help matters.

It’s not the first time the rock face has been scribbled on — some of the graffiti goes back to the beginning of the 20th century — but these scrawls are huge and they were done by people who were supposed to be there to help. Now UNESCO has to clean up the mess their colleagues in the UN made.

Irbil, capital of the autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq, has a citadel. A citadel which has been continuously inhabited for 8,000 years. A citadel just 20 miles away from where Alexander the Great finally defeated King Darius in 331 B.C. A citadel on the verge of collapse.

The Kurdish government, in conjunction with a Czech restoration company and a variety of NGOs, has crafted a plan to restore this gem before it’s too late.

Little is known about the early inhabitants of Irbil but the citadel’s secret is water - an abundant supply has maintained civilization after civilization.

The site “is a rich historical repository holding evidence of many millennia of habitation, more than 8,000 years old, making it the longest continuously inhabited site in the world,” said UNESCO’s Djelid.

The citadel sits atop a roughly 30-metre-high mound formed by layers of successive settlements, including Assyrians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Persians and Greeks.

They need $35 million to get started, though, and right now the kitty is at zero. Here’s hoping the wondrous rare beauty and historical importance of this site inspires a flood of donations.

In the comments on yesterday’s entry about the museum raids, I noted that it was virtually impossible for a substantial collection in the United States to be built quickly out of provenanced antiquities because the demand far outstrips legitimate supply. Clutch asked:

So, are all the graduates of curating/gallery studies/museum studies doomed to careers of self-deception or outright fraud? Do you think anything can be done? If the legal/moral supply really is too small, and the demand is large, it strikes me that a “War on Drugs” approach of occasional prosecutions will work no better than… well, the War on Drugs. Do you see a practical course of action that could help?

Assuming the curator wants to work in the North America, there are two approaches I can think of which could help de-loot the system: 1) buy local, and 2) pursue long-term loans and travelling exhibits.

The lust for classical or exotic fureign antiquities seems to me a vestige of the Gilded Age parvenue attitude that prestige and class can be bought. Nowadays, there are all kinds of museums with a more narrow focus on local history.

There’s still a huge traffic in looted local antiquities, mind you, especially Native American and Civil War, but it would be easier to trace the provenance on such pieces and most importantly, to team up with legitimate archaeological excavations and arrange the display of their finds.

The money, though, is in long-term loans and travelling exhibits. This would work both with local antiquities under the control of government agencies (national parks, for instance) and tribal governments, and with other countries’ antiquities.

There are already established loan mechanisms between museums, and many countries with a surfeit of antiquities would doubtless be glad to negotiate long-term loans of stuff they have in storage or can ill-afford to preserve.

First there needs to be a serious culture shift, however. As things stand, curators and the collector class who populate museum boards have been more than content to rationalize their wallowing in the loot trade sty. The froo-froo talk about antiquities “belonging to the world” or worse, the patronizing “we can take care of it better than they can” excuses for trafficking in goods stolen at massive cost in site destruction and even human life, have to stop.