Parthenon marbles in European context

I have earlier commented on the way that the New Acropolis Museum will display the architectural marbles from the Parthenon within sight of the fifth century BCE temple on the Athenian acropolis. You will be able to wander down the south slope, past the theatre of Dionysos and straight into the museum.

At least to see part of the surviving sculptures. The rest are on the display a little further away.

At least for the moment.

Image derived from Google Earth.

Euphronios: The Lost Chalice by Vernon Silver

Vernon Silver has produced a remarkable book from his Oxford University doctoral research: it is a page turner. (I noted the acknowledgment to lunches with Colin Dexter author of the Inspector Morse novels.) It concentrates on the Euphronios cup that passed into the Bunker Hunt collection. However, the Sarpedon krater also features prominently.

I do not intend to write a full review here, but it would be appropriate to share some of the points. If anybody is in any doubt about the level of destruction caused by the looting process in order to supply the market they need to read The Lost Chalice. The account of the search for antiquities at Greppe Sant'Angelo at Cerveteri in Tuscany is sickening. This does not represent the casual finding of artefacts during agricultural work; it is the deliberate ransacking of ancient tombs in the search for saleable material.

Silver helped me to understand Giacomo Medici and The Lost Chalice provides a different position to that found in The Medici Conspiracy by Peter Watson and Celia Todeschini. It also allowed me to make sense of snippets of information about the market in Rome during the 1960s where "minor" antiquities were fed (relatively) openly onto the market while the major objects were taken for sale outside Europe.

The background to the fragmentary krater showing Herakles and Kyknos that was returned to Italy by Shelby White is reviewed. (I was interested to note who was advising Leon Levy about his purchases of Greek pottery.)

There is also information about the Sabina statue that was returned from Boston. It makes sense of the statement that it had once formed part of "an aristocratic family collection in Bavaria".

One of the strengths of this study is Silver's meticulous interviewing of key figures involved in the saga.

• Harper Collins

Keeping the marbles will now be terrible PR for Britain

Rowan Moore, the architecture critic for London's Evening Standard, has written a piece on his visit to the New Acropolis Museum in Athens ("Now let's return the Elgin Marbles", June 24, 2009). He is not totally enthusiastic about the new building:

You enter, under a vast, clumsy portico, an elephantine proboscis propped on three thumping columns. Throughout the building, architecture gets in the way of the exhibits. There are too many fat columns, and thick joints between panels, and holes cut in walls and ceiling for purposes of acoustics or lighting. The serene sculptures are interrupted with too much visual noise.

He also objects to the "pointless vandalism" of demolishing the Art Deco buildings that stand between the museum and the archaeological zone.

But the building has persuaded him of one thing:

Standing there on Sunday, as the first members of the public flooded in, and armed with all the arguments of a London patriot, I felt my objections melting away. It is partly that the Parthenon sculptures form a single work of art, which has been arbitrarily dismembered. This work can never be completely restored but there is still much to be gained from having as much as possible in one place. Like a shattered figure, it is good to reconnect the head to the neck to the torso, even if the feet and hands are permanently lost. To be more mundane, keeping the marbles will now be terrible PR for Britain. Each person who visits the new museum will see the same story: here is a great family of sculptures kept apart by the grouchy Brits, still exercising their imperial rights of loot and pillage. Most of all, the Greeks have shown, by building the museum, how much the marbles mean to them.

"Pot hunting" and absentee archaeologists?

I was interested to read the Las Vegas Review-Journal editorial on the "pot hunting" episode in the Four Corners region (June 21, 2009).

No one is endorsing wanton vandalism of such sites or artifacts. But it would be useful and realistic if a cooperative, rather than an adversarial, approach allowed quick surveys of such sites, with the most archaeologically promising being set aside for near-future professional digs, with residents told "Harvest the rest if you can."

How do all such artifacts -- even those unknown and undiscovered -- automatically become the property of absentee archaeologists who may never even show up?

The piece then points to two voices for the collecting lobby: Kate Fitz Gibbon and Peter Tompa (see my comments here).

Praise to "Doug" for leaving his thoughts on the Editorial:

The first false assumption is that the looted items "belong" to long dead peoples. Archaeological objects on federal lands belong to all Americans.

Second, an archaeologist who excavates such things never "owns" what he or she excavates. These items are strictly controlled, and the object's ownership goes to the federal government which often stores such objects in state museums. Implying that this is not the case belies a deep ignorance of the laws regarding public lands.

Ownership is the non-issue. Archaeology promotes good stewardship of our cosmopolitan cultural resources.

Survey on antiquities

Cherkea Howery, a graduate student at NYU, is conducting a survey on "Informing Audiences: Public Perceptions of Illicit Antiquities".

Click here to take part.

The results of the survey will appear on her blog.

Antiquities, ancient coins and changing attitudes in North America

Over the last few years over 100 antiquities have been returned to Italy from major North American museums. The piece that attracted the most publicity was the Sarpedon krater by Euphronios; it was returned by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Other items include a Roman portrait statue of Sabina, and quantities of pottery made in Apulia, southern Italy. These voluntary returns, offered without active legal action, have done much to restore the patinated reputations of museums.

The Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) that serves as an umbrella organisation for museums has now changed its policies on the acquisition of undocumented antiquities. The AAMD now advises constituent organisations not to buy objects that are unknown prior to 1970, the date of the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. A public object registry has been launched by the AAMD with the object of letting interested parties check what is passing into public collections. (The scheme has had limited use since its launch with a total of four items in the register by mid-June 2009.)

Some senior figures in the North American museum world --- for example, James Cuno --- have continued to voice their disquiet over the changing situation. But such views appear to be in a minority. Museum curators who handle archaeological material understand the issues and are aware of the level of destruction sustained by archaeological sites around the world to supply "museum quality" objects for the market.

The growing realisation that action needs to be taken about the antiquities market has been reflected in the work of the US Cultural Property Advisory Committee (CPAC). The most noticeable action was over antiquities from Iraq in the wake of the Second Gulf War and the looting of the Baghdad Museum. However there have also been memoranda of agreement with countries such as Italy, China and Cyprus.

The workings of CPAC are now under scrutiny. A Freedom of Information Act suit (FOIA) was filed against the US Department of State back in November 2007; this was in response to the restriction on the imports of ancient coins from Cyprus. This action was supported by three bodies: the Ancient Coin Collectors Guild (ACCG), the International Association of Professional Numismatists (IAPN), and the Professional Numismatists Guild (PNG).

The purpose of the FOIA suit is made clear on the ACCG website:

The State Department recently imposed unprecedented import restrictions on ancient coins from Cyprus—requiring importers of even a single common coin of “Cypriot type” to provide unfair, unworkable and unnecessary documentation.

Why have these bodies taken such action against the US Department of State?

The IAPN, based in Brussels, Belgium, states on its website:

The IAPN is a non-profit organisation of the leading international numismatic firms founded 1951. The objectives of the Association are the development of a healthy and prosperous numismatic trade conducted according to the highest standards of business ethics and commercial practice.

The PNG describes itself as follows:

The PNG is a nonprofit organization composed of the world's top rare coin and paper money experts. As numismatic professionals, our primary mission is to make the hobby safe for collectors and investors by maintaining rigid standards of excellence for our member dealers.

This is clarified as follows:

The Professional Numismatists Guild, Inc. is the only numismatic organization in the United States that restricts its membership to dealers who possess and demonstrate three essential qualifications: Knowledge, Integrity and Responsibility.

Is this alliance of three organisations in reality acting over freedom of information? Could there also be an implicit commercial interest in the liberalisation of the market in ancient coins?

The US State Department, as Defendant in the case, seems to suspect ulterior motives and made this statement in their formal reply (dated May 19, 2009):

Consequently, Plaintiffs’ claims that they are advocating the public interest are properly viewed with some skepticism given ACCG’s “two phase” “coordinated plan” to attempt to rescind the import restrictions, which would commercially benefit a number of its benefactors, who appear to be U.S.-based dealers and brokers of ancient coins.

This statement has been refuted by the Plaintiffs (the ACCG, the IAPN, and the PNG).

In April 2009 the ACCG tested the agreements with Cyprus and China by deliberately bringing a set of ancient coins in the USA by air ("Coin Collectors to Challenge State Department on Import Restrictions", PR Newswire May 13, 2009).

As mandated, U.S. Customs detained the coins upon arrival. The ACCG now plans to use this detention as a vehicle to strike down the unprecedented regulations banning importation of whole classes of ancient coins. The collectors' advocacy group claims that, among other abnormalities, the decision process for these agreements was orchestrated contrary to the spirit and intent of governing law.

The ACCG seems intent on criticising a policy that is intended to offer some protection to the archaeological heritage of Cyprus and China by placing restrictions on the movement of material that may have been derived as a result of illicit diggings on archaeological sites.

So will the legal action and test case merely serve to inflame the situation? Do such actions present to the world an image of North American collectors of archaeological material (and that includes ancient coins) who are more interested in owning objects than preserving archaeological contexts and integrity?

Papoulias: Now is the time ...

The President of Greece, Dr Karolos Papoulias, has been quoted in the New York Times ("Greece presses its case", June 22, 2009) in the wake of the opening of The Acropolis Museum. Speaking about the Parthenon he is quoted:

It's time to heal the wounds of the monument with the return of the marbles which belong to it.