UK Internet Auction Site Fails to Receive an Unsolicited Package with Looted Relief worth "£20m to £30m-plus" [Updated]

In a really chaotically-written article, Dr St John Simpson of the British Museum gets in the Guardian again, this time in a dubious tie (Dalya Alberge, 'Smuggled Iranian carving worth £30m seized at airport by UK border patrol' Sat 1 Apr 2023).

It was carved almost 2,000 years ago and is such an important sculpture that if it appeared on the art market today it could fetch more than £30m. But this is a previously unrecorded antiquity that can never be sold. For the large fragment of a Sasanian rock relief – which depicts an imposing male figure carved in the 3rd century AD – has been freshly gouged from a cliff in Iran with an angle grinder. It was heading for the black market in Britain when it was seized at Stansted airport. Border Force officers became suspicious when they saw its haphazard packaging, perhaps intended to suggest that it was a worthless item. The antiquity, which is over one metre in height, was hacked out of living rock or rock that has been carved in situ. Dr St John Simpson, a senior curator and archaeologist in the British Museum’s department of the Middle East, said: “We almost never come across a case of something being cut out of the “living rock”. That’s a level of brutalism that surpasses anything. [...] He has identified it as a unique rock relief sculpture dating to the period of the Sasanian empire, AD224-651 [...] “It looks amazing”, Simpson said. “It is stunningly attractive. The valuation could be anything, really. We’re talking £20m to £30m-plus. There’s never been anything like it on the market”.

The object was shipped packed "in an incredibly bad manner, in a small, almost unpadded crate held together with nails" apparently in order to not attract attention - but endangering it. The relief arrived at the airport already broken into two.

The case has been investigated by Interpol and the National Crime Agency, but no arrests have been made so far, although the packaging stipulated the sender, recipient and destination – a UK internet auction site, which said that it was not expecting it.

Umm, "not expecting it"? Is this particular wannabe vendor in the habit of sending things like this to certain sales venues unsolicited? A "UK internet auction site"? Who could that be? If this really was an unsolicited package, then why not name the intended recipient?

Looking at the photo, I think we may question Dr Simpson's aesthetic judgement  of "amazing”, "stunningly attractive". Looks like a piece of crap to me, ill-proportioned, crudely finished. And is it real anyway? If it is, why is it unrecorded, given the population of Farsd province and the interest in the antiquities of the area. I really do not know where that value comes from (esp. as he says there have not been any others on the market) but my feeling is popped onto the internet with all the other antiquities and "antiquities", it is unlikely to have ever reached that, even with St John Simpson's fulsome praise of the "goods".

Hat tip Andy Brockman

UPDATE 2.04.2023

Yesterday I supressed a couple of "eh?-moments" about this text, but today... bearing in mind the date of publication... I wonder if I should have. This story fits into a repetitive genre: something seized at UK borders (unusual in itself- most antiquities breeze through), taken de rigeur to the British Museum where (usually) Dr St John Simpson speaks about it, revealing some "little-known-facts" and there is a museum-promoting Guardian article written on the basis of cut-and-pasting a BM feelgood Press Release, nobody is charged with anything (and the trade people involved are rarely named). That's how it has gone time after time. This article is notable for that horrible curator's tie in the photo that quite obviously is not meant to be taken seriously (I cut it out), but above all the chaotic and repetitive nature of the text. 

The "antiquity" looks uh, "rough", it is supposed to be "calcareous limestone" but is brown in the photo (not impossible, but the photo suggests it's sandstone). The proportions are totally wrong, the head is much too big for the baggy-trousered legs, one hopes that the BM conservators have not created this monstrosity by uniting bits of two different reliefs by mistake (why can't we see clearly where the relief ends and BM restoration begins?). The right arm of the figure, straightened would reach mid-calf in the format of the BM restoration of this piece. I am not an expert, but from the images I have seen, the headwear does not look very royal-Sasanian to me. It's more suggestive of what we see on Parthian coin images from the centuries preceding the Sasanians (247BC to 224AD) which in turn derive from Achaemenid forms. .  

I am more than puzzled by the described manner of extraction ("portableisation") - cut with "angle grinders" from a rock face. There is also puzzling mention of: "You’ve even got felt-tip marks on the back before they’ve used an angle grinder to slice diagonally behind it and across the top". So some bloke is (say) halfway up a cliff, with a socking great "angle grinder" (rotary masonry saw in fact) - and first drawing with a felt pen (sic) on the back before cutting it outalong those lines... ummmm... Think about that. What is the BM talking about? This is as confused as a PAS "object description" (also sponsored by the BM). We do not have any details or real dimensions, and the back of the piece is obscured by the way it is mounted (by the BM), but several things just do not make sense. That saw ("angle grinder") is used to cut a slab from a rock face by cutting behind it "diagonally" (ie at an angle to the rock face). Let's say the extracted slab has to be 20cm thick in the middle so it won't break so easily (for safety it should be thicker and the edges need to be more robust than a sharp wedge edge) and its about 50 cm across (estimate from the proportions in the photo). So square-on-the-hypotenuse and all that, the diagonal cut - that has to meet the opposing one in the middle of the slab 20cm behind its front - is some 32cm long. That means the blade of the saw (the BM's "angle grinder") some guy is manipulating out there is greater than 64 cm. In fact it will be much greater because there has to be additional room in the centre of the blade to allow the mechanism of the saw to be next to the rock face while cutting into it at an angle. The whole saw will be very heavy. How was it manipulated while cutting diagonally into a vertical rock face, and more to the point, how was it powered? This conjures up an improbable vision.

Let us add that "bigged up" price estimate, I really do not think the cruddy relief shown in the photo can be assessed as being so "priceless".

I think, given its present form and lack of proper information, this story is either seriously misreported or simply fake and there is no such "UK online auction site" or anonymous speculative Iranian dealer. Prove me wrong by publishing better details - don't the BM have a special research report series? Whatever happened to that?