Lydian stele: Fivefold Due Diligence Fail

Screenshot from dealer's website (Dorothy King)

Screenshot from dealer's website (Dorothy King)

On Dorothy King's PhDiva (Sunday, October 5, 2014) is a post about 'Inscriptions Returned to Turkey' from a US-based dealer which the FBI handed over to the Turkish Embassy in DC in August. The ten stele are 2st to 3rd century AD, and can be located to Lydia based on the dialect of Greek used. The gallery selling them was edgarlowen.com, and quite a few similar stele are still on his web site, being sold at 25k each. The provenance of the seized items was given as "purchased by the current owner in the late 1990's(sic) on the European market from the collection of a European business executive". They turn out to have been on the Interpol database of stolen artefacts, which the buyers might have suspected by looking at the lower edge (not shown in the catalogue photos) which shows them to have been freshly and crudely sawn off with rotary masonry-cutting discs:

Sawn off just below inscription, rest discarded  (Dorothy King)

We may schematically reconstruct the chain of ownership indicated by the current seller's collecting history, let us give the first recorded owner the credit of assuming he did not buy straight from the looter who'd approached an archaeological monument with the cutting disc to 'portableise' the saleable part of it - surely not? Let us also assume that the use of the phrase 'current owner' in the third person means that Owen is acting as his or her agent here ('v' denotes passage to new owner, '=' denotes where due diligence did/should/did not take place before purchase):

Recent looter
v
=
some middleman/middlemen?
v
=
European business executive
v
=
'The European market' 
v
=
'current owner'
v
=
Edgar J. Owen (agrees to act as agent for current owner?)

Then the prospective next buyer's own due diligence - no information about available documentation of collecting history or  licit provenance being offered up front on Mr Owen's website.

So these sawn-off steles have, by Mr Owen's account been through five episodes of due diligence. On what basis did they 'pass' each time if there appears to be no documentation of (a)  them having been obtained licitly, (b) leaving Turkey licitly, (c) being in an old licit collection, (d) changing ownership five times with the seller documenting title?

The draft ADCAEA 'due diligence guidelines' give as one of the criteria by which you can judge the licitness of a potential transaction the 'reputation' of the dealer offering them, blindly trusting that the previous 'reputable dealer' had done their due diligence. It seems, in the lack of verifiable documentation, and the fact that in fact the objects figure on a missing items register, that this was the main criterion by which these objects changed hands as many as five times. But it should be noted that the first of these transactions was between the first buyer and the man with the stone-cutting equipment - what kind of 'reputation' did he have? This shows well the fallacy of relying on word-of-mouth (nod-nod, wink-wink) assurances without knowing through whose hands the artefact being considered has passed - even in the case of an artefact the state of whose edge should (even in the least astute European businessman ever) raise suspicions about how and when it had been 'portableised'.

The nod-nod, wink-wink method of doing transactions with antiquities dealers is sometimes known as 'optical due diligence', translated that means, Gollum-like: 'I sees the object, I wants it, I'll buy it!'.

No wonder people get caught out in deals on such a market. Time for more transparency and accountability.