Stolen, Smuggled, Sold

by Nancy Moses

  Müller-Karpe thought they might have come from Ur, because it is Iraq’s best-known archaeological site and the place where the Royal Tombs were first discovered. If the vessel actually came from a previously untouched royal tomb, it would be especially rare, because there have been no legal excavations there since Woolley left in 1934. Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, may have been a monster, but he was committed to preserving Iraq’s heritage, and under his reign grave robbing was a capital offense. Since his overthrow in 2003, grave robbing has become much easier; Iraq’s ancient antiquities have flooded the market.

  The tiny vessel was lovely. “If I wanted to purchase this replica, what would it cost?” I asked, imagining it glittering in my own display cabinet, perhaps magnified by the same kind of magnifying glass used by the restoration students upstairs.

  “We are not selling,” Müller-Karpe replied. “To replace it someone would have to go to the Iraq National Museum in Bagdad to make the mold. We only made this one. You see, the replica itself is somehow dangerous. Do you know the detective story by Agatha Christie, Murder in Mesopotamia?” he asked. “It is set in the excavations at Ur. The French archaeologist turns out to be an antiquities dealer who takes gold objects from the excavation and leaves replicas in their place. The idea that a replica can replace the original means replicas are quite valuable. They must be kept. They must not disappear.”

  I asked Müller-Karpe whether it was possible to trace the vessel’s route from Ur to its sale in Munich. For example, who was the looter?

  “The looter who came across the royal grave?” he replied. “I can imagine he was a poor farmer who worried about feeding his family. He couldn’t sell his date crop because the chaos of war destroyed the economy. The reason I think he was in a desperate situation is that most Iraqis know the importance of antiquities. They are aware of their heritage and very are proud of it.” When Müller-Karpe worked at the Iraq National Museum, he was especially impressed by how many people visited and how knowledgeable they were about their heritage.

  “I don’t know what I would do if my family was starving,” he continued. “You will have bad feelings, your conscience, you might not sleep at night.”

  The hypothetical Iraqi farmer knew he would find something in the mound, though he had no idea what it would be. Typically, grave robbers dig a shaft as deep as ten meters down into the ground, and then dig horizontally into the layers that hold the ancient settlement. The tunnels can easily collapse if not dug correctly, smothering the robbers. But luck was with our farmer; he discovered a cache of valuable objects and was able to sneak them out without the other looters knowing, and perhaps killing him for the treasures. No one knows how many are murdered in the course of criminal archaeology.

  Our farmer would have sold the vessel and other miniatures for a pittance of their value to a middleman working for organized crime. Eventually they would sell for millions. Müller-Karpe told me about a miniature lion figurine that sold at auction in New York for fifty-seven million dollars. The catalog listed it as “excavated in the vicinity of Baghdad.”

  German customs investigators were able to trace the tiny Sumerian golden vessel to Beirut because they found the middleman who brought it there. The middleman transported it to the Geneva Freeport, a secured warehouse complex that has become a major storage center for stolen art and artifacts because owners pay no import tax or duties on goods stored there. From the Freeport, the vessel traveled to Munich in the German district of Bavaria. Munich had become an international hub of criminal archaeology because Bavaria did not require the source country to document legal export.

  The golden miniature next appeared in late 2004 in the catalog of the Munich auction house of Gerhard Hirsch Nachfolger. It was listed as Mediterranean, possibly from Troy, and dated to the Roman Iron Age (first century CE).[15] The estimated auction price was 1,200 euros.

  “No one would buy it in good faith,” said Müller-Karpe, shaking his head. “People knew it was stolen. All archaeology students in their first year learn that double tube handle attachments are typical for Sumerian Mesopotamia of the third millennium. The owner of Gerhard Hirsch Nachfolger was trained as an archaeologist, so I would be surprised if she really thought this vessel was Roman.”

  “The auction estimate for the vessel was 1,200 euros,” I said. “What do you think is the actual value?”

  Müller-Karpe thought for a moment. “The true value of an archaeological object,” he said, “is the information it carries, and that is far beyond any monetary value. But on the illegal art market, I would not be surprised if such a unique item would fetch thirty million euros.”

  I did a quick calculation: That would be about forty-five million dollars. If the 9/11 attacks cost five hundred thousand dollars, this little vessel could pay for ninety similar terrorists attacks. No wonder people were so interested in it.

  Unscrupulous dealers are expert in transforming the looted into the legitimate. A dealer imports an antiquity and assigns it a false, later date and vague attribution, like, “from the vicinity of . . .” or “southern Mediterranean,” which deflates its value. The dealer then pays import taxes on the deflated value, thus attaining legal documentation that supports the false attribution, and lists it in an auction catalog. Then, a co-conspirator buys the antiquity, puts it away, and a number of years later brings it back onto the market and sells it for millions.

  In 2006, a year after first appearing in the Gerhard Hirsch Nachfolger auction catalogue, the tiny golden vessel appeared again, this time with an auction estimate of two thousand euros, and was purchased by a German lawyer.

  Müller-Karpe had been monitoring these transactions. Realizing that this might be the oldest intact Sumerian vessel ever to come on the market, he decided to try to rescue it. But first he had to verify its origins. Unfortunately, the photograph in the auction catalog had carefully positioned the vessel so that the distinctive Sumerian handle attachments were hidden from view. So, Müller-Karpe contacted a Munich policeman he knew and asked him to confiscate the vessel and send him a photograph of it showing the vessel’s other side. The policeman, beaten down by years of fruitless fights against the clever attorneys of corrupt auction houses, wouldn’t do it.

  In Germany, property crimes fall under the jurisdiction of the district court—except for trafficking in Iraqi antiquities, which is a federal crime. When the Munich police officer refused to confiscate the Sumerian vessel, Müller-Karpe called an officer in the federal customs office, who went to Munich and confiscated the vessel. A few days later, Müller-Karpe received an envelope from customs. Inside was the tiny golden antiquity worth thirty million euros, sent by ordinary mail.

  Now that the vessel was at the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum, its safety had to be ensured. Müller-Karpe notified the Iraqi ambassador to Germany and then invited a team of experts to examine the object thoroughly and report the findings to customs. Two years, later a letter arrived directing the museum to turn over the golden antiquity to the customs authorities. Müller-Karpe wrote back, suggesting that because of the vessel’s small size, value, and rarity, it was safest to keep it in the museum’s vault until the legal dispute over its ownership was resolved.

  He didn’t hear from customs until a letter arrived the following year informing the museum that an armored car would soon arrive to pick up the Sumerian vessel. Müller-Kamp called the officer who had initially confiscated the vessel and learned that, upon request by the auction house, the Bavarian district courts had decided to secure the object for court inspection. If the court ruled that the vessel was from any place other than Iraq, customs should not have confiscated it in the first place; it would be returned to the auction house.

  “What does this mean, ‘inspection by the court’?” Müller-Karpe frowned. “I suggested to the officer that if the court wanted to inspect the vessel, it could inspect it here. The Iraqi Embassy was very concerned that an antiquity this tiny and this valuable could easily disappear. T
he officer then asked if I was 100 percent certain the vessel was Sumerian. Of course, I was certain, but only to the degree of certainty archaeology allows. There’s no 100 percent in archaeology.” As Müller-Karpe tried to convince the officer to allow the vessel to remain at the Zentralmuseum, the conversation heated up. Before he knew it, the customs official had threatened to take the vessel by force, by blasting open the safe with a welding torch if necessary.

  When you are fighting the good fight, sometimes you get lucky. About thirty minutes after hanging up the telephone with customs, Müller-Karpe received a phone call from a reporter for Der Spiegel. Müller-Karpe told him about the officer’s threat. That evening, Der Spiegel’s website carried the story, and the next morning it was picked up by major international papers. Soon, people throughout Europe knew that come Monday, customs personnel would appear at the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum in Mainz, Germany, to break open its safe and confiscate a miniature Sumerian antiquity. To avoid negative publicity, customs postponed the visit for three more days—then postponed it twice more.

  Eventually, a large truck pulled up to the Mainz museum, picked up the little gold object, and drove to the world-famous museum of archaeology, the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. After a day of careful examination, its archaeologists verified Müller-Karpe’s attribution.

  The Sumerian vessel next appeared in Munich’s financial court as the subject of a suit brought by the Gerhard Hirsch Nachfolger gallery claiming it was not of Iraqi origin. In October 2009, on the basis of a second expert opinion prepared by the Pergamon, the financial court ruled the vessel was of Iraqi origin. But, despite the court decision, the Sumerian miniature remained in the hands of German customs.[16]

  As all this was unfolding, it became clear that the controversies surrounding the golden vessel presented the perfect opportunity to bring the story of illicit antiquities to a wider audience. “The public knows that the drug trade or weapons trade is evil and dangerous,” Müller-Karpe told me, “but doesn’t know that the trade in illegal antiquities is just as dangerous.” The result of Müller-Karpe’s effort to publicize this danger was an exhibit about stolen antiquities—and the “Kriminalarchäologie” catalog that accompanied it. To reach the largest possible audience, the exhibit was designed not for a museum but rather for high-traffic areas: the Mainz train station and the Munich airport. It opened in 2011 and was eventually viewed by more than six million people.

  Shortly before the opening, Müller-Karpe received a note from customs reporting that the case of the Sumerian vessel was going back to court for the third time. Apparently, customs had only temporarily seized the object instead of formally confiscating it, and Gerhard Hirsch Nachfolger had taken advantage of this procedural error to reinstitute its suit. This time the gallery came armed with its own archaeologist, who disputed the vessel’s Sumerian origin.

  The case of the Sumerian gold vessel was one of the top stories in the exhibition. It informed a wider public about the ongoing legal dispute and the embarrassing inability of the authorities to return this precious treasure to the country from which it was plundered. Within a few days of the exhibition’s opening, Müller-Karpe learned from the German Finance Ministry that the case of the Sumerian vessel was closed. On July 6, 2011, Germany’s secretary of state officially returned the vessel to the Iraqi ambassador to Berlin. For several months, it was stored in the vault of the Iraqi Embassy in Berlin until the director of the Iraq National Museum arrived to personally escort it back home.

  That was quite a story, but there was still something missing, so I asked Müller-Karpe the question that had been troubling me: “the “Kriminalarchäologie” exhibition catalogue included photos of Mohamed Atta and the other 9/11 terrorists. I read the official 9/11 Commission Report,[17] and it made no reference to criminal archaeology. Do you think illicit antiquities were used to finance the attacks?”

  The Commission “knew nothing about antiquities,” said Müller-Karpe, shaking his head. “Here is what I know.”

  In 2006, four years after publication of the 9/11 Report, Müller-Karpe gave a lecture to the German Oriental Society in Leipzig on the illegal excavations in Iraq. Afterwards, a former student, a woman who was an archaeology professor at Hamburg University, approached him and told him a remarkable story. In 1999, an architecture student came to her for advice. The student had just come back from “training” at some undisclosed location in Afghanistan, where he had seen caves filled with antiquities. Now, he wanted to know how to sell the antiquities in Germany, saying that he wanted the money to purchase flying lessons.

  “The professor became very upset by the student’s question,” Müller-Karpe recounted, “and she made some kind of remark, like, ‘Why do you ask me? You should ask your Allah’ or something like that. The student became very angry and said if she were not a woman he would kill her. Later the professor learned that this student was head of the team of terrorists—Mohamed Atta.”

  Müller-Karpe tried to convince the professor to report this incident to the authorities, but she was too frightened, so he secured her permission to tell the federal police himself. Later, he learned that the police had interviewed the professor but had discounted her report as unreliable.

  “Well, I don’t know the woman that well,” he said, “but I would not have thought she was nuts. Actually I believed her, and I don’t see any reason not to believe her.”

  “Why do you think the police considered her unreliable?” I asked.

  Müller-Karpe stopped and took a breath. “I have been involved in criminal archaeology for many years. I believe there are strong ties between the antiquities industry and the authorities, strong ties.”

  Did Mohamed Atta attempt to finance the 9/11 attacks by selling looted antiquities? If he did, then the antiquities would not have come from Iraq, but rather from Afghanistan, acquired when Atta was in the country for terrorist training.

  Müller-Karpe is not the only one who believes this is true. A story published in July 2005 in Der Spiegel reported that Atta tried to sell looted antiquities;[18] the story was later cited on the FBI website in a Law Enforcement Bulletin about art theft.[19] The Art News, a weekly British magazine covering the art and antiques trade, reported on repeated statements by the secretary general of Italy’s Ministry of Culture that the German Secret Service had testimony about Mohamed Atta’s attempted sale of looted Afghani artifacts.[20]

  We will never know whether Atta was as successful an antiquities dealer he was as a mass murderer. Ironically, what we do know concretely about the connection between illegal antiquities sales and violence involves not the causal link between looting and violence, but the link between violence and looting.

  In the days after the March 2003 overthrow of Saddam, the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad suffered heavy looting, despite the efforts of its staff to protect it. Among other things, five thousand cylinder seals were stolen: a cylinder the size of a human thumb can fetch upwards of five hundred thousand dollars.[21] As of 2013, 3,500 objects have been recovered, and experts estimate another 8,000 are missing. Many more antiquities were looted from unprotected archaeological sites.

  Thus, although there is no evidence that the Sumerian vessel helped to finance the 9/11 attacks, we do know that the attacks, and the consequent overthrow of Saddam, sparked the discovery of the vessel in the mound at Ur, led to its illegal removal, and sent it off on its long, circuitous journey.

  War can destroy more than individual lives. It can destroy a nation’s patrimony. “Sometimes I’m asked by journalists what is the volume of the damage,” Müller-Karpe told me. “Some colleagues give figures of two or three billion dollars’ damage. This is nonsense. What is damaged is the historic memory of mankind. That loss can never be measured—not even in billions. These archaeological sites are archives in the ground. Even if you confiscate the material, identify its source, and give it back to the state the objects came from, this cannot compensate for the destruction.”

&n
bsp; Richard M. Leventhal agrees. He is executive director of the Penn Cultural Heritage Center at the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the institution that financed Leonard Woolley’s excavations at Ur in the 1920s and 1930s. Leventhal’s center is dedicated to the often-frustrating quest of stopping wanton looting of archaeological sites. Most of these are in third world countries—what archaeologists refer to as “source countries. Museums in wealthy countries—called “market countries”—are especially at fault. UNESCO’s Convention was adopted in 1970.[22] But museums in wealthy countries continue to buy.

  “Museums must stop wanting to collect,” Müller-Karpe told me. “They are still purchasing cultural objects without thinking of the morality. Why would they want to purchase objects that might be illegal or immoral? I think it’s about showmanship.”

  In fact, as Leventhal pointed out, things are getting worse, not better. In 2008, the Association of Art Museum Directors agreed to direct its member institutions not to acquire objects excavated before 1970 without proper provenance. In 2013, the association re-evaluated these guidelines and added in some exceptions that allow museums to purchase “orphan objects” under some very few conditions. The association makes a good point: many antiquities without proper documentation were excavated decades before 1970 and acquired by private individuals.

  My search began with a chance encounter with a tiny, ancient vessel small enough to hide in a child’s hand, which led me to stolen antiquities and terrorism. I found myself wondering whether I was becoming one of those crazy conspiracy theorists, the kind of person who sees danger lurking behind every door, every rock.