by Nancy Moses
But then I thought about post-9/11 America and the vast political consequences—the invasion of Iraq, the increased surveillance, the long security lines at every airport in the world, the massive barricades and stern guards surrounding Independence Hall, a block from my home—and I realized that the golden Sumerian vessel raised precisely these troubling concerns.
Looking for a broader perspective on these issues, I traveled across town to the Penn Museum, which displays the antiquities it received from Woolley’s expedition in Ur. Within the museum, the quickest way to reach Ur is to take an elevator to the third floor and walk through Rome, Canaan, and Israel, all of them the subjects of study by Penn archaeologists and anthropologists. At the entrance to the exhibit entitled Iraq’s Ancient Past is a wall-sized photograph of Woolley and his large crew of Iraqis standing on top of Ur’s partially excavated ziggurat. Apparently, a number of celebrated British were involved in the story. Woolley’s expedition was given the green light by the British Colonial Office, headed by a young Winston Churchill, on the advice of his assistant secretary, T. E. Lawrence, the famed “Lawrence of Arabia,” who was himself an archaeologist. An Englishwoman, Gertrude Bell, was so revered by the Iraqis that she became their honorary director of antiquities. She helped to set in place the 1924 Iraqi Antiquities Law, then lorded over the division of the finds from the excavations at Ur and helped to establish the National Museum of Iraq—where Michael Müller-Karpe later worked—to hold the Iraqi share of the objects. While the Penn Museum exhibition text does not mention Woolley’s theory of the Great Flood, it does concede that Ur was likely the “land of the Chaldeans” noted in the Bible as the birthplace of Abraham.
The Penn exhibit is a Sumerologist’s dream, with cuneiforms, pottery, jewels, and precious metal. I admired a set of game boards and a miniature golden bull wearing a false beard—the Sumerians loved false beards. Nearby were two lovely oval golden bowls, each, I noted, with the signature scrolled handle attachments on their sides.
The centerpiece of the exhibit is devoted to Queen Shubad, now called Pu-abi, whose twenty-first century avatar, a regal red velvet mannequin, is set in a glass box surrounded with items excavated from her tomb. Pu-abi sports an elaborate, puffy hairdo encircled by a wreath of golden leaves, and crowned by a golden Spanish comb topped by a spray of glistening stemmed flowers. Twin gold rings loop through the hair on either side of her head, and hammered golden earrings the size of bracelets hang from the place where her ears would have been. Draping her bodice is a sort of poncho comprised of strands of beads—blue lapis lazuli, red carnelian, and gold—that fall to a wide beaded belt. She is gorgeous and glittering.
Although the Ur dig was finished in 1934, research on it continues. Recently, three scholars decided to test Leonard Woolley’s theory—that the bodies found in Queen Pu-abi’s tomb died peacefully from poison—by taking a male skull and female skull from the royal cemetery at Ur to the University of Pennsylvania Hospital and sending them through a computed tomography scan. Both skulls showed circular holes in the backs of their heads, likely made by a heavy mallet with a point at the end. In other words, there was nothing peaceful about these burials. But that’s the way archaeology is: new knowledge emerging from old objects examined in new ways.
Sitting with the ancient Sumerians, I thought again about the price society pays for criminal archaeology.
Everyone agrees that trafficking in stolen antiquities is harmful. But how do you stop it? Not at the source—since there are tens of thousands of archaeological sites, and few nations that can afford to pay guards as much to remain honest as organized crime can pay them to turn a blind eye. Not at the national borders—since borders are long and, with forged documents and a bit of cash, easily crossed. Not in Beirut or Geneva, huge international ports and free trade zones where tiny treasures made of alabaster or clay or gold are easily smuggled in and out. Not in Munich, with its relatively lenient import laws and aggressive lawyers.
Trafficking has to be stopped at the end—with the buyer. If there’s no market for pilfered antiquities, then there will be no more pilfered antiquities on the market. As Michael Müller-Karpe says, “Everyone who buys antiquities of unknown origin should know he is committing current and future looting. He is committing a crime.”
But even if all looting ceased and no new finds came on the market, the problem would not be resolved, for we still must deal with the antiquities that are currently on the market, these so-called orphan objects. What should happen to these? What is the value to society of leaving them floating out there? If we condone their purchase, are we encouraging looting, fueling illicit business, funding organized crime, and destroying the past? Should we agree with the archaeologists, who are against any acquisition of unprovenanced antiquities, or concur with those art museum directors who argue that orphan antiquities need the special care and attention only available from public institutions? These art museum directors and archaeologists continue to talk, but the debates seem irresolvable. The two sides can’t even agree on what orphan objects really are. Archaeologists define them as objects that are missing contextual information about their “find spots.” Art museum directors say they are antiquities that have yet to find homes in public museums.
Regardless of which camp you join, orphan objects also raise an ethical issue. Many of these antiquities come from countries that are, like Iraq, at their moments of greatest weakness. Should institutions in the United States, one of the wealthiest of nations, be allowed to take advantage of their straits?
Questions like these are as ancient as the Sumerians, as old as the Bible, and as current as the evening news.
Notes
1. Samuel Noah Kramer, The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 3.
2. Ibid., 84.
3. Samuel Noah Kramer, From the Tablets of Sumer: Twenty-Five Firsts in Man’s Recorded History (Colorado: The Falcon’s Wing Press, 1956).
4. Sir Leonard Woolley, Excavations at Ur: A Record of Twelve Years’ Work (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1954), 12.
5. Ibid., 96.
6. Agatha Christie, An Autobiography (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1977), 364.
7. Ibid., 97.
8. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, Authorized Edition (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004).
9. Ibid., 157.
10. Ibid., 227.
11. Ibid., 234.
12. Ibid., 4–7.
13. Ibid., 172.
14. Interview with Michael Müller-Karpe, September 3, 2013.
15. Lucian Harris, “German Court Orders Return of Ancient Vessel to Iraq but the Gold Vase is Still Believed to be Held in Germany Pending an Appeal,” The Art Newspaper, November 18, 2009.
16. Ibid.
17. “The 9/11 Commission Report.”
18. “Kunst als Terrorfinanzierung,” Der Speigel, July 18, 2005, www.speigel.de/spiegel/print/d-41106138 html.
19. Noah Charney, Paul Denton, and John Kleberg, “Protecting Cultural Heritage from Art Theft: International Challenge, Local Opportunity,” FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, March 2012, http://leb.fbi.gov/2012/march/protecting-cultural-heritage-from-art-theft-international-challenge-local-opportunity.
20. Cristina Ruiz, “9/11 hijacker Attempted to Sell Afghan Loot,” The Art Newspaper, April 17, 2013.
21. Laura De La Torre, “Terrorists Raise Cash by Selling Antiquities,” BGSN: Government Security News 4, no. 3, February 20, 2006.
22. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property (Geneva: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 1970).
Chapter 8
Heroes
A glittering portrait of an Austrian socialite. A garment removed from a murdered Indian. The original typesc
ript of a wildly popular and influential book. An audio disc of a vintage radio show. A black Egyptian mummy with crossed arms and orange fingernails. An original copy of the Bill of Rights. An ancient golden vessel about the size of the tip of your thumb. These items are very different from one another. What could they have in common?
Though fashioned by different hands from different types of materials at vastly different times, all of these are cultural objects. Cultural objects tell us who we are and what we value. They ground us in the past, wrap us into a community, and connect us to the spiritual world. They reassure and comfort, charm and celebrate. Cultural objects are the mirrors of humankind.
UNESCO calls these objects “cultural property,” defined as “property which, on religious or secular grounds, is specifically designated by each State as being of importance for archaeological, prehistory, history, literature, art or science.”[1] UNESCO goes on to list categories of cultural property: property related to history, products of archaeological excavations, antiquities more than one hundred years old, objects of ethnological interest, property of artistic interest, rare manuscripts, and archives, including sound archives.[2] These include all of the objects profiled in this book.
The passion for cultural objects is deep and abiding. Humans create museums, archives, and libraries to care for those objects and assure their survival. But in the twenty-first century, these institutions face issues that their founders never contemplated. One of the most compelling is this: Who owns and who should own a culture’s treasured objects? When I was a graduate student in the early 1970s, this issue of ownership never came up. Things in museums belonged in museums. Now, it’s front and center, not only among museum professionals but also in the larger world.
Take, for example, the Parthenon marbles that Lord Elgin took from Athens in the early 1800s, quite legally, and sold to the British Museum. Many people, including those who have never been to either the British Museum or the Parthenon have strong opinions about whether the museum should return the marbles to the Greeks. The arguments against their repatriation make a lot of sense. For one thing, Elgin secured permission from the rulers of Greece to remove the marbles; for another, more people visit London than Athens, so more people can now enjoy them. Moreover, the British Museum has protected the marbles from air pollution, looters, and all similar threats; and finally, if the British Museum were to return the Elgin marbles, it would be overwhelmed with claims from every other culture whose treasures it holds. This last “slippery slope” argument darkly predicts such repatriations as, collectively, a death knell to “encyclopedic” museums of world culture like the British Museum.
The argument for returning the Elgin marbles to Greece is much simpler. It is embodied in the breathtakingly beautiful museum at the foot of the Acropolis in Athens. On the third level of this museum stands a full-scale display of all four sides of the Parthenon frieze. Museum visitors can walk around it and see the actual Parthenon sculptures that remain in Athens, placed in their appropriate places next to plaster casts of the Parthenon sculptures held by the British Museum. This is a powerful message of loss, as poignant as the sad smile of a beautiful woman missing half her teeth. The Greeks know the Elgin marbles are safe in the British Museum. But their longing for them is so profound that they created an entire museum to memorialize their grief. And to show that the Greeks are equipped and ready to reclaim these Greek treasures.
The case for returning the Elgin marbles, then, comes down to ethics. It’s the right thing to do.
Each of the cultural objects profiled in Stolen, Smuggled, Sold is similarly emotionally resonant. The Ghost Dance Shirt was so important to the Lakota Sioux that they spent years trying to retrieve it from the Kelvingrove Museum in Edinburgh, Scotland. Their cause was so potent that it commanded the attention of a good portion of the population of Edinburgh, who saw the cause of the defeated Sioux as akin to their own. The power of this rough muslin garment hung with frayed bald eagle feathers reaches beyond the decades and the glass case in which it now stands.
North Carolina’s copy of the Bill of Rights is beloved by North Carolinians, a feeling intensified by its theft at the moment when the state’s capital, Raleigh, was most helpless. North Carolinians held the Bill of Rights in such reverence that they refused to sign the Constitution without it, and they refused three times to buy their original copy of it back when it was offered for sale. They refused to commoditize this sacred parchment. They, after all, owned it.
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer 1 embodies the loss of the Jewish people who lived in Europe before World War II. The painting was wrenched from its family when they were forced to flee their Vienna palace, and their descendants spent decades knowing that the painting was in a museum owned by those who were culpable in the destruction of the Jewish people. For decades, as the painting hung on the walls of the Austrian National Museum, Adele’s beauty so seduced her visitors that all of Vienna mourned its loss when the painting finally returned to its rightful owners.
The royal mummy that might be Ramesses I went from dusty oddity to celebrated figure when archaeologists spotted it at the Niagara Falls Museum and Daredevil Hall of Fame. Practically overnight, the mummy came to command VIP treatment at a leading Atlanta medical center and starred in its own exhibit and television show. After Ramesses I finally made his flight back to Egypt, he received a mighty welcome—a truly king-sized celebration.
Not all cultural objects are as cherished as these. Some possess a sinister, even seductive, power. Obsession led Leslie Waffin, the former director of the National Archives Audio Section, to smuggle the audio disc of Babe Ruth at a Quail Hunt, plus 4,800 other recordings, out of the Archives. He stole them not for the money but to own the thing itself. Fear may have led Pearl Buck’s long-time secretary to hide original typescript of Buck’s masterpiece, The Good Earth, from its owner. The secretary may have believed that a false friend had seduced Pearl into selling her most cherished work to underwrite his lavish lifestyle.
Finally, there is that five-thousand-year-old Sumerian miniature vessel from a culture so creative that we continue to live with its inventions. This object raises a raft of complicated issues. If the world were truly just, we might never have known about it. The Sumerian vessel might still be resting in its grave if al Qaeda operatives had not attacked America on September 11, 2001, and if the American government had not invaded Iraq partly in response, bringing about the downfall of Saddam Hussein and, consequently, leaving archaeological sites vulnerable to grave robbers. That’s quite a cascade of causation captured in a single tiny object. In archaeology, every aspect of an object can be just as it was yet never be the same. When an antiquity is removed from its find site, much of its meaning is lost forever.
These cultural treasures spark passion; they take on a moral life. They reflect a universe of people’s legitimate claims and desires. They also stand for the millions of objects that have yet to be returned to their original owners, or will never be. Despite their social value, cultural objects are surprisingly vulnerable. There is no international clearinghouse of cultural objects. There is no way to count how many cultural objects that are missing provenance records are actually held by their legal owners. There is no way to tell how many may be tainted. Of those that are suspicious, there is no way to know how many are stored in collecting institutions, hidden in criminals’ safe houses, awaiting auction, decorating corporate offices, or enlivening the homes of collectors. This lack of information is what makes them vulnerable.
Experts are quick to say that there is no way to estimate either the number of illicit cultural objects or their financial value—but, of course, some do. Estimates for the global annual trade in illicit antiquities range from three billion to eight billion dollars.[3] Every time a war breaks out, the market is flooded with cultural property dug out of unprotected archaeological sites and national museums.
Holocaust artwork has been much in the news lately. What do we know about how much is
returning to the descendants of its Jewish owners? There’s good news and bad. The good news is that there is an international agreement that governs the restitution of Holocaust artworks: the 1998 Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, renewed in 2009. The bad news is the international agreements have had only modest effect. The statistics prove this out. In 1998, it was estimated that 650,000 artworks had been stolen from Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, and 200,000 remained at large.[4] Since that date, only 1,000 to 1,500 have made their way back to their Jewish families. This is according to Wesley Fisher, who is director of research of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany and World Jewish Restitution Organization.
In the United States, the restitution statistics are equally discouraging. Since 2003, museums in this country have been encouraged to list all artwork with gaps in their provenance during the years 1933 to 1945 on the Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal.[5] In 2014, the Portal listed 28,930 artworks. Leslie Fisher estimates that fewer than fifty of these have been returned to Jewish families. As he told me, “The legal system is stacked against claimants.”
The scale of the problem of cultural treasures that have been stolen, smuggled, and sold staggers the imagination. One cannot help but ask: Why isn’t anyone doing anything about the problem?
