Month: November 2008

2,000-year-old gold earring found in Jerusalem

Ancient, Roma, Caput Mundi, Treasures

You’d think finding ancient jewelry would be a relatively common occurrence in a city as ancient as Jerusalem, but in fact, such finds, especially of Roman-era jewelry, are extremely rare because Titus razed the city in the late first century AD, and in the many invasions that followed these sorts of delicate artifacts were often destroyed, sold away or melted for the gold value.

That’s why this beautiful gold, pearl and emerald earring dating from the time of Christ is so remarkable a find. It’s in in astonishingly good shape, too. It looks like something you’d see in a Cartier window.

Gorgeous, neh?

The piece was found in a Byzantine structure built several centuries after the jeweled earring was made, showing it was likely passed down through generations, he said.

The find is luxurious: A large pearl inlaid in gold with two drop pieces, each with an emerald and pearl set in gold.

“It must have belonged to someone of the elite in Jerusalem,” Ben-Ami said. “Such a precious item, it couldn’t be one of just ordinary people.”

Britain’s most important archaeological discovery found in a drawer

Ancient, Treasures

In 1808, archeologists excavated the Bush Barrow burial mound near Stonehenge. They found a dagger and thousand tiny gold studs the size of pinheads.

In 1960, one Professor Richard Atkinson borrowed the gold to study it and promptly died. His successor popped the goods in his desk drawer, which is where they stayed until he died 3 years ago.

Finally, his successor, Niall Sharples, found the gold studs, actually recognized them for a change, and will now return them to the Wiltshire Heritage Museum.

The gold pins, thought to come from Ireland, were fashioned by craftsmen in Brittany, France, and inlaid in an intricate herringbone pattern into the handle of the ceremonial dagger, which had an eight inch bronze blade.

It is the richest and most important Bronze Age grave on the Salisbury Plain and in Britain, according to experts.

And its riches were lost in a desk drawer for 50 years. :facepalm:

I’m right again!

Ancient, Looting, Social policy

I know, not exactly shocking at this point, but always worth covering. When Amenhotep III got his eye back from the museum in Basel, Switzerland, I said this:

There are going to be lots more stories like these as Switzerland confronts its long history of warehousing looted goods.

Or one story covering 4,400 individual antiquities returned to Italy from a warehouse in Basel.

They were the holdings of a husband-and-wife team of Swiss art dealers and were all recently excavated and illegal exported to Switzerland (ie, loot). The goods were seized in 2001 and only now, after the couple spent 7 years in court trying to stop Italy from getting its stuff back, is this motherlode going home.

More than half the objects were from the eastern Italian region of Apulia, an area that was heavily influenced by ancient Greek culture, said Guido Lassau, a Swiss archaeologist who worked on the case.

They include richly decorated vases and so-called kraters, large vessels that were used for mixing wine with water. The objects were stolen from upper-class tombs dating from the fifth to third centuries B.C., according to Lassau.

One item that looks like a ceramic mask modeled on a woman’s face retains the original water-soluble painting from about 300 B.C. […]

Other items belong to the pre-Etruscan Villanova culture of northern Italy, and some of the bronze figures appear to have originated on the island of Sardinia.

The oldest are bronze daggers thought to be about 4,000 years old, said Lassau.

“This is a vast haul on a dramatic scale that would have saturated the market if they had been sold,” he said, adding that very few such items are available through legal channels.

That gives you an idea of the scale of these operations. Grave robbers (tombaroli) on the ground in Italy turn over an immense number of antiquities every year. These artifacts end up in huge warehouses in countries where they don’t ask too many questions, like Switzerland until recently or Germany.

Then they sit and wait while the dealers make a slow killing selling the pieces one at a time so as not to flood market, depress prices and raise suspicions. We don’t have any idea how many thousands of stolen antiquities are currently locked up in warehouses, but the mere two warehouses I know of in detail (this one and Giacomo Medici’s astonishing hoard in Freeport, Switzerland) contained just short of 15,000 looted artifacts worth a conservative $40 million. In two warehouses.

The sources of this raging river of loot — the in-country grave robbers and site plunderers — keep the flow constant. This is why repatriation efforts are so important: it’s not the sop to nationalist sentiment that museum directors like James Cuno think it is, but a way to discourage looting and archaeological site destruction by making it in the primary buyers for illicit antiquities’ interest to demand a clean record of ownership before purchasing any artifact.