Bangor Gives up on Discussion, Goes Pagan

.
Almost daily somebody from Bangor, probably one or more of his "Heritage studies" students, has been logging on to see if Prof Karl is going to comment on my January discussion of his ideas about why the PAS is superior to preservation. It seems that - though persistent - they've given up and instead now looking at some other stuff on here (good for you), including finding something I'd forgotten about mentioning. One of my other research interests is the Slavs and I've been toying with the idea of writing something commercially on Slavic neo-paganism, instead of getting on with what I am supposed to be researching about them. Here's a video I came across related to this and mentioned briefly earlier and the Bangor folk apparently looked up - so I thought I'd share the link ("...and Heritage Issues"). I think it's cheating though that she's not singing in Old Slavic... but maybe that'd not go with the electric guitars.

Probably more fun than discussing the PAS... I think she is putting a curse on foreign collectors who dig up and buy and sell the things buried with and by the ancestors... (There is a big thing about the unquiet spirits of the dead in Slavic mythology, definitely something to use against collectors.)

Are Gill and Barford Interested in Icon Sales?

.
Peter Tompa apparently has a problem with icon auctions. Discussing an upcoming one on Cyprus he audaciously asks:

Will cultural property watchdogs Gill and Barford get on the case? Or, will they let the matter go because the auctioneer apparently has good relations with Saving Antiquities for Everyone? See http://www.savingantiquities.org/feature_page.php?featureID=6

I consider that insulting. I am not a US congressman whose opinions can be bought so easily. I support SAFE wholeheartedly but if I think it is doing something wrong, I say so. I wonder if one could say the same about "Cultural property Observer" and the coin dealers he works for or the ACCG? Could he bring himself to criticise the cowboys?

Sixteenth to nineteenth century icon sales are a bit outside the scope of interest of both my and David Gill's blog. I am not quite sure either where Tompa sees a corrupt relationship between SAFE and Maria Paphiti. Odd.


UPDATE: Now I see that the persistent Mr Tompa has added:

Addendum: Mr. Barford has responded claiming his blog is not interested in icons: But see http://paul-barford.blogspot.com/search?q=icons

What I said was that icons are outside the scope of this blog which is of course about portable ANTIQUITIES collecting, not collecting paintings. Tompa suggested I would not be blogging about this icon sale, because of some imagined "good relations" between its organizer and SAFE. The reader will note that I queried his grounds for such an accusation and it is no surprise to anyone that he has failed to answer that challenge.

Anyhow, here's a Cyprus icon story for Mr Tompa. Let us see Cultural property Observer join me in hoping that the wish of the Church of Cyprus is fulfilled:

"We ask from those who have in their possession ancient, important religious artefacts from the occupied Cyprus, and probably misled by dealers to buy them, to respect our religious heritage and offer them back to their legitimate owner, the Church of Cyprus".

given that he represents dealers desirous of selling Cypriot antiquities without all that bothersome paperwork, will he do that sincerely?

Vignette: Rublev's Holy Trinity (the Hospitality of Abraham) one of my favourite icons.

No Export Licence from Source Country? "Legitimate business" - No Export Licence from USA? USA: Go to Jail

.
Despite the fact that US dealers in ancient dugup artefacts think other countries' export licences are irrelevant to their own business practices, US citizen of Latvian origin Anna Fermanova found out the hard way that the USA takes its own export licenses pretty seriously. She is now under house arrest for taking some sports equipment out of the USA without a licence (Samuel Goldsmith 'Nice Jewish girl' Anna Fermanova busted for trying to smuggle night-vision scopes to Russia, New York Daily News July 28th 2010).
Fermanova was arrested at her home near Dallas on July 15 after returning from a four-month trip to Moscow - where her husband lives. She had bought online on the open market three night-vision scopes in Texas for her husband's hunting buddies in Russia. Now she has been charged with "knowingly and intentionally" attempting to export "defense articles on the United States Munitions list". Her lawyer says "She bought them legally. They are available for purchase on the Internet, you just need a license to export them," Palmer said. Just like ancient coins from most of the source countries then. So why cant all US collectors and antiquity dealers respect that?

.

Knee-jerk in slow motion: The ACCG and Christopher Metsos

.

I wondered how long this would take coming, the coineys are so predictable, but this one took a few days to get through the fog in the synapses caused by too much contact with dug-ups, from the former president of the ACCG Washington lawyer Peter Tompa: 'So Much for Cooperation: Greek Cypriots Let Suspected Russian Spy Escape'.

1) Of course reading the somewhat unbalanced treatment given in the Washington Post article cited there, it apparently never occurs to somebody whether the illegal export of antiquities from the island might not all be in the hands of local organized criminal gangs... Who are these "Russians" who have the Mediterranean villas and offshore banking accounts on the island? Does not the extremely lucrative no-questions-asked international antiquities market hold any temptations for any of them?

One wonders why a US group would be wanting to fight the regulation of the illegal market, with whom would that be collaborating? What business links do ACCG members have in Cyprus? In Communist China, in Bulgaria and Italy? Indeed, what are the business and political links of the many eastern Europeans currently involved both as dealers and middlemen (suppliers) in the US and UK and other countries in Europe selling dugups and fakes indiscriminately? Into whose pockets is the money from the n0-questions-asked antiquities trade going (and if no questions are asked, how can anyone tell)?

2) odd, isn't it ? The US "collectors' rights" lobby loudly protests its "innocence" (of complicity in crimes against cultural property) because it is not actually illegal to buy in the US coins that have been illegally exported from another country since no US laws have been broken". This is their constitutional right they say. This is not even against their so-called "code of ethics". But one of their member thinks an accused man should be locked up in a foreign country on some vague allegations that he might somehow have been involved with people who it is alleged may have broken the law in the US. Surely by the ACCG line of reasoning, there should first be a demonstration that a Cypriot law was broken by this man. I think it has long been clear that there is a signal lack of logic and coherence in the arguments of the no-questions-asked collecting lobby, this is a case in point.

3) How astounding, the US government attempts to STOP American dealers buying illegally exported coins (coins that no ethical or moral businessmen would want to sell anyway) and then its citizens like Mr Tompa apparently expect the foreign country they come from to fall at its feet in gratitude and do anything the US demand of it. ["Jail this man!!" "yes, Uncle Sam, Sir! Can I lick your boots too?"]. Cyprus is a sovereign state, not a US satellite, and has its own laws which are not written in Washington. Its judicial procedure and exercise of human rights cannot be bought with the promise to stop US businesses trading in illegally exported dugup ancient coins which the rest of the civilised world thinks they should not be selling anyway. Especially when a whole group of them say they are not going to stop anyway and are even publicising the fact that they have already illegally imported a batch of them to "challenge" the US government because they want the law overturned. That is hardly likely to make Cyprus think that the "gift" offered by the US was offered with any sincerity or hope of success.

Really, the narrow-minded arrogance of these people !!

.

Jackie and Wayne Comment on the Christies' Sale

The comments of simple art-loving Jackie (that's "Jackie@plus size lingerie") on the piece in the New York Observer about today's Christie's auction probably make about as much sense to the average reader in the context of the article as antiquity dealer Wayne Sayles'. Both miss the mark and both concentrate on their author's own commercial interests.

Under the guise of "protection", state politics and special interests have taken culture and its heritage away from the very people who create it and rightly cherish it. The laws and administrative processes designed to prevent genuine travesties are indiscriminately and capriciously being applied by bureaucrats, in nationalist countries and in the U.S., to some of the most innocuous and incidental types of objects from the past. This returns us to the cloistered elitism of the Middle Ages, where the common man is fed only institutional propaganda.

duh? What has that to do with Christie's or Medici? I see that Jackie has not got her act together and her website is not finished yet, and we've already seen that Sayle's "Internationalist" ideas are only half-baked, so they make a matched couple of commentators for this issue.

Jackie can be found in many places on the web commenting vacuously on a number of topics, from fishing to Firefox, salads to art and supporting her business activities...

"Cosmopolitan" behaviour

The collectors of dugup antiquities claim that their activities promote "cultural understanding", that they have a cosmopolitan outlook on World Culture to which others (non-collectors like myself) can never aspire. This is the basis of Cunoesque "Universalism". I really would question whether collecting bits of archaeological sites like shabti figures or cleaning and hoarding bucketloads of dugup Constantinian camp gate and "Fel Temp Rep" coins really does promote international cultural understanding in any way. This is even more unsustainable in the context of some of the other arguments used by the same ranters (and also Mr Cuno), that most often the modern population of a land has no conceivable link with the ancient inhabiants of the region compared with the US or British dugup antiquities collector (an argument I do not accept anyway).


Personally, I think a far more effective way to understand a culture is to live among its bearers. Living here in Upper Egypt for the past couple of months, one learns very quickly what the cultural norms are and is careful not to act in a way which shows (and engenders) disrespect. One of the issues involves an unspoken dress code for males and females alike. Both sexes dress in a manner which hides not only bare flesh, but even the shape of the body. That is how it is, it is neither good nor bad, but a female student venturing outside the tourist zone in tight jeans and flowing red locks (Hi, Kamilla !) knows that she tends to attract more attention than is pleasant from the local "gentlemen". But we are guests in their country, I guess a Papuan New Guinean should not really expect to walk through Central Birmingham naked or wearing nothing but a very long penis sheath and attract no attention. In fact, even in liberal Great Britain, even today he probably would run the risk of being arrested for public nudity.

Members of our team are therefore careful about how they behave and dress when out and about. Sadly for those who know what the local norms are, there is much to criticise in the dress styles of the "cultural tourists" we see daily in our place of work doing their version of the Grand Tour, cameras in hand rushing overnight from their Red Sea coast resorts to do in one day "Karnak, Valley of Kings, Hatshepsut's Temple, alabaster factory and back to the hotel". Visitor numbers at the Temple reach 8000 a day. Many of the tourists clearly have no idea of (or perhaps simply do not care about) what impression they are creating among the local inhabitants by the way they behave while they are guests in a foreign country. Thankfully most of them are shielded from the real locals, they are herded in their tour groups from one sun-baked monument to another, cameras clicking away. They meet mainly the gaffirs (guards) and souvenir peddlars, both of whom one may suspect see them mainly as totally naïve walking wallets (though the more one has contact with both groups, the more one sympathises with the locals). There is also the conviction among the natives of the region that European women dress and behave immodestly and so therefore the normal rules of behaviour towards women need not apply - as many a female tourist walking around a place like Luxor can probably testify. Men in shorts or walking around shirtless also look very much out of place here, Luxor is not Hurghada.

Just a few days ago there was a spate of people visiting the Temple in dress that was extremely unsuitable for the local conditions. Its hot work being a gaffir, and after lunch last week Saïd the Temple Guard was sitting on the ground in the shade just by the entrance to the upper portico watching the people walk past into the centre of the monument just as the excavation team was returning to work. It is unclear who noticed her first, Saïd or my colleague Sarah, but they exchanged knowing glances and she snatched a few shots on my camera as the individual in question gazed into the darkness of the Sanctuary of Amun. After she had gone, a hastily convened unofficial commission of the expedition fashion police failed to reach agreement on what precisely the lady in question, a Russian, was or was not wearing. They were however of the opinion that she was not dressed in the most appropriate manner for visiting Upper Egypt, whoever she was and whatever she thought she was doing.

In the clash of civilisations, whose value system should be applied, that which is most aggressive or the more culturally inoffensive? The same of course applies to those collectors enforcing their "rights" to do whatever they please to get decontextualised pieces of somebody else's archaeological heritage in the name of spreading "cosmopolitan values". That is their own values at the expense of others.

Photos: "townswomen in upper Egypt" top (photo PMB); "tourist bottom", (photo Sarah Fortune).