Red Faces at the British Museum: "It's Chaos Down There".

How embarrassing. Difficult times again for the British Museum. After the situation concerning material missing from a storeroom in a Northern UK museum in Britain, where the police are still investigating and the process of documenting items accepted and stored by the Portable Antiquities Scheme is being beefed up, a major university collection of papyrii in the home counties (where police are taking even more time in their investigations), yet another British museum is involved in a scandal involvcving the sakle of artefacts to private collectors on a market that has no internal constraints. This time it is items offered for sale on eBay that includes "gold jewellery and gems of semi-precious stones and glass dating from the 15th century BC to the 19th century AD" reportedly stolen from Bloomsbury's British Museum ('Stolen artefacts from British Museum offered for sale on eBay' Sky News Thursday 17 August 2023)

The London museum has said a member of staff was sacked after jewellery and gems from its collection were found to be "missing, stolen or damaged".[...] The majority were "small pieces kept in a storeroom belonging to one of the museum's collections". They were mainly used for academic and research work and none had recently been on public display. The museum said it will be taking legal action against the unnamed staff member and the Metropolitan Police's economic and crime command is investigating [...] the museum is "working alongside outside experts to complete a definitive account of what is missing, damaged and stolen".

Good luck with that... so far there has been no arrest "and enquiries continue". The Independent name a person who lost their job as the result of the discovery of the thefts ( William Mata , Jane Dalton, Named: Curator sacked after British Museum treasures vanished', The Independent 17.08.2023) The Head of the department of Greece and Rome,

was dismissed last month after it was discovered that artefacts thought to be worth tens of millions of pounds had vanished from the vaults. It is believed to have been the largest breach of security in a decade at the central London institution and tourist attraction.[...] The museum, which houses items from around the world, has not confirmed which of its 8 million artefacts have gone missing, but the number could be in the thousands. Items had reportedly been disappearing for several years , although it is understood that they were stored items rather than those on display. According to The Telegraph[...] museum bosses [became concerned] three years ago after Roman jewellery went up for sale on eBay. The British Museum said it had dismissed a member of staff after items were found to be missing, stolen or damaged Museum director Hartwig Fischer apologised on Wednesday for the missing artefacts, saying that museum staff were “determined to put this right” and that they were ready to “throw our efforts into the recovery of objects”. Chair of the museum George Osborne said the trustees were extremely concerned, adding that they had “used all the disciplinary powers available to us to deal with the individual we believe to be responsible”. The former chancellor said: “Our priority is now threefold: first, to recover the stolen items; second, to find out what, if anything, could have been done to stop this; and third, to do whatever it takes, with investment in security and collection records, to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

The Times also has more details ( Billy Kenber, Constance Kampfner, ' The British Museum curator sacked after treasures vanished, Expert who dedicated his career to antiquity has been dismissed after three decades' The Times Thursday August 17 2023), including:

"Questions have previously been raised about security at the museum and its record-keeping. In 2002, The Sunday Times sent an undercover reporter into the museum’s Greek and Roman antiquities department, where Higgs worked, and revealed how artefacts had gone missing in storerooms. Security was so lax that the reporter was able to carry out part of an ancient Greek statue without being noticed. After returning it, the reporter raised his frustration with Higgs, who was then a curator in the department, that hundreds of pieces appeared to have been mislaid. Higgs told him he was confident they would be found but admitted: “It’s chaos down here”."

It is being alleged by several British media outlets that the thefts began as far back as 2016, and attention was drawn by an unnamed expert to a suspect pseudonymous eBay account back in 2020. It was selling items that were suspicious, and the BM was notified. Reportedly, not action was (or maybe could be) taken until this year, when a piece of Roman jewellry offered on the online auction site was traced back to one of its departments. Then it was a matter of tracing the eBay account by connecting it to to a PayPal account that in turn linked to a social media account that had been opened in the suspect's real name. In passing, it is rather odd that a Paypal account would be linked to a Twitter account rather than an actual email address. The identified person has not been charged with any crime, and has firmly proclaimed their innocence. Though a list of the missing objects has not been made public, many are said to be of diminutive size, made variously of gold and incorporating semiprecious stones (I suspect they mean intaglios PMB). The ‘or damaged’ makes one wonder if the items sold might not have been removed from larger artefacts.

I strongly doubt that the BM actually has any chance of getting - or indeed real inclination to get- the sold items back. As far as one can see they've not even given the name of the eBay seller so that its customers can come forward. As we know, if you do not do screenshots of offers, withing a few weeks they disappear totally from the internet. As far as I am aware, there is not going to be any way they can trace sales from even two or three years ago. And of course if the BM actually WAS monitoring online sales, they'd know that. Perhaps this event will be the impetus for a change in the legislation in Britain about how the passage of items through the internet is actually regulated and documented.

Vignette: artefacts in storage