Stolen Fragments

       policing is one part of           
           the problem that involves          
 wider public attitudes   
      

New book soon to be out:  Stolen Fragments Black Markets, Bad Faith, and the Illicit Trade in Ancient Artefacts by Roberta Mazza (Redwood Press), 17th September 2024 272 pages. $30.00 Hardcover ISBN: 9781503632509.

In 2012, Steve Green, billionaire and president of the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores, announced a recent purchase of a Biblical artefact—a fragment of papyrus, just discovered, carrying lines from Paul's letter to the Romans, and dated to the second century CE. Noted scholar Roberta Mazza was stunned. When was this piece discovered, and how could Green acquire such a rare item? The answers, which Mazza spent the next ten years uncovering, came as a shock: the fragment had come from a famous collection held at Oxford University, and its rightful owners had no idea it had been sold.

The letter to the Romans was not the only extraordinary piece in the Green collection. They soon announced newly recovered fragments from the Gospels and writings of Sappho. Mazza's quest to confirm the provenance of these priceless fragments revealed shadowy global networks that make big business of ancient manuscripts, from the Greens' Museum of the Bible and world-famous auction houses like Sotheby's and Christie's, to antique shops in Jerusalem and Istanbul, dealers on eBay, and into the collections of renowned museums and universities.

Mazza's investigation forces us to ask what happens when the supposed custodians of our ancient heritage act in ways that threaten to destroy it. Stolen Fragments illuminates how these recent dealings are not isolated events, but the inevitable result of longstanding colonial practices and the outcome of generations of scholars who have profited from extracting the cultural heritage of places they claim they wish to preserve. Where is the boundary between protection and exploitation, between scholarship and larceny?

I'll be interested to see if, and to what extent, she covers the "investigation" (I am using that term rather loosely) of the British police, bless 'em, into the connections between a former Oxford University scholar and a number of other items of papyri that are reported to have disappeared from the same famous collection held at Oxford University and that have never been seen since. This story is not over.

The book will hopefully provoke some discussion into wider public attitudes, The Museum of the Bible, accumulating THINGS in order to tell a specific watered-down story in the interests of a certain group, but apparently nobody was asking the question (or rather the question was being widely ignored) where those "things" were coming from and whether other stories were being obliterated by this stuff being acquired, that infringes on the interests of not just one group, but multiple groups - and ultimately us all. These are questions we should be asking. Get the book.