A PAS Blue Plaque?

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We learnt yesterday that London's Heritage Blue Plaque Programme supports efforts to propagate awareness of the destructiveness of indiscriminate artefact hunting and collecting by erecting a heritage plaque in Gordon Square in honour of a fellow archaeoblogger. I wonder whether they would be placing one on a wall in Bloomsbury Square just a coin's toss away, celebrating the achievements of the considerably more expensive Portable Antiquities Scheme in this area? No, I guess not, when it seems at times that the pigeons make more of a noise about Looting Matters and instilling (real) best practice in "portable antiquity" (sic) collecting than the PAS does.

Responsibility

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And how does Gainsborough, Florida, Pastor Terry Jones fund his hate-ridden cult church? How else? Through trading to American buyers old things taken from other countries:

Dove World Outreach is funded by the pastor's furniture firm, TS & Company, which buys vintage items from Europe and sells them in the US.

Jones claims he is "not responsible" for the consequences of his actions, like most people involved in the trade of artefacts taken from other countries. Would you buy used furniture from this guy if you knew where the money was going?

Eisenhower on American Greatness and Art Acquisition

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Dwight D. Eisenhower, 2nd April 1946, speaking in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York when he was awarded a life fellowship of the museum:

"The freedom enjoyed by this country from the desolation that has swept over so many others during the past years gives to America greater opportunity than ever before to become the greatest of the world's repositories of art".

An opportunity dealers and collectors over there in subsequent decades took advantage of - thus creating huge desolation of archaeological sites and monuments, not stopping at items stolen from museum stores. This serves as a shameful monument to the undiscriminating greed of contemporary collectors of decontextualised artefacts and those involved in their commerce. Meanwhile their lawyers argue that what few laws the US has instituted to regulate their satisfying of greed were intended as a "compromise" to benefit and uphold that market. They argue that they should not be being applied in the way they are, arguing a free-for-all where American collectors get what they want is somehow the best way to "preserve" decontexualised artefacts. It does not however do anything to help preserve the places from where those artefacts are plundered to fuel that exploitive free-for-all no-questions-asked market.

And other countries have to just get used to the idea that Chicago Ron and others of his ilk can commercially loot the archaeological sites away to their heart's content and scurry off with the loot for "passionate" US collectors to shut away in ever-growing private artefact collections the other side of the Ocean without raising a peep of protest. How dare they oppose the US collector's "rights", eh?

Photo: Eisenhower looking at evacuated art in Europe.

Another Antiquities Store Looted by Armed Gang in Egypt

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Nevine El-Aref, writing in Al-Ahram on Friday 1 Apr 2011:

Armed looters broke in to the Tel El-Dabaa antiquities warehouse on Thursday, stealing artefacts and breaking several pieces of the stored collection. Mohamed Abdel Maqsoud, head of the Central Administration of Antiquities of Alexandria and Lower Egypt, said the warehouse was used to store artifacts found at Tel El-Dabaa's archaelogical sites by Dutch and German excavation missions over the last 30 years. They include a collection of ancient Egyptian clay pots and amulets.

I find the use of the term "warehouse" highly annoying here. What are being robbed in Egypt today are not "antiquities warehouses". A warehouse is where items destined for sale are temporarily held by merchants. What was broken into here is a storeroom of material from an ongoing archaeological project being archived for future work and research, not selling off to collectors eager to get their hands on their own private little "pieces of the past". In stealing this material, robbers are hindering - or removing any possibility - of using that material to write a public past. The results of decades' work by groups of dedicated people is being trashed overnight by these raids.

Now I really do not accept what one British artefact collector and propagandist for the artefact trade recently suggested, that this looting is a "a cry of frustration from the poor and dispossessed" desperate acts "of the forgotten underclass" against their government. Forgotten underclasses do not carry guns and anaesthetics to render guards unconscious. Forgotten underclasses in most parts of rural Egypt can barely afford a donkey. What we see in Egypt before our very eyes is the early stages of the development of networks of illegal activity involving antiquities, due entirely to their value (real, or perceived) on the antiquities market. The current political instability in Egypt is allowing them becoming bolder and will lead to them becoming better organized into criminal networks. Then foreign collectors and dealers will be happy as there will be lots more ancient Egyptian antiquities on the no-questions-asked external markets, and they can all make a heavy profit from helping to finance these new organized criminal groups in their free-enterprise emptying of the fragile and finite archaeological record onto the commercial market.

We have seen this before, most notably in eastern Europe in the political instability caused by the collapse of the Soviet bloc. We have seen how the international antiquities market has profited, and continues to profit from the illegal activities of artefact hunters in southeastern Europe (Bulgaria in particular) and now - as that source dries up - in other regions of the former eastern bloc (such as northwestern Russia and the Baltic states). We saw the same thing in Afghanistan then Iraq. Dealers and collectors deny this process took place and deny their responsibility for helping fund it, let us observe now the same thing happening in post-Mubarak Egypt. I'd like to draw attention to the fact that none of the pro-market collectors blogs or forums open to public view have expressed any real concern about this looting, why should they when they are obviously silently waiting for the artefacts to start flowing onto a market near them?

For those who cannot place Tel El-Dabaa, this is the site of some really very interesting and modern excavations on what is thought to be Avaris, a central place in the Hyksos realm and in the story of the rise and functioning of the New Kingdom but also - some would argue - having its place in Biblical history as well. The dealers and collectors who will be handling the artefacts stolen from this storeroom in their efforts to pursue a vision of a "people's archaeology" (sic) through the collection of random decontextualised artefacts of specific type are not dismembering history stolen just from the Egyptian people, but from us all.

Cultural Property and Antiquities Must be Protected from Irresponsible Dealings

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Two second year law students at Georgetown Law School in Washington DC belong to an otherwise unknown group - they say - called "Students Against Looting of Valuable Antiquities". They've just published an article called "Cultural property and antiquities must be protected". It begins:

Every time we turn on the news, members of Congress are railing about wasteful federal spending and the dire need to curb ineffective programs.

before revealing that what it is talking about is the US International Cultural Property Protection programme. It calls this "one of the most ineffective, and potentially illegal, federally-funded committees". According to these students, Deborah Newburg and Amanda Blunt as part of this programme:

the Department of State creates over[-]inclusive trade restrictions that deny acquisitions to U.S. collectors and museums.

Let us be clear about what they neglect to say. These restrictions are only applied to cultural property of specific types from a small number of specially designated countries and only apply to those that cannot be documented as having been exported legally from those countries. Basically, I would have thought that, with the overall aim of protecting cultural property and antiquities, responsible (ethical) museums and collectors would themselves be taking steps to deny illegally obtained items access to their collections.

Apparently the authors consider that the situation in the US compares unfavourably with "European markets with more precise but less restrictive import bans". Eh? What "import bans" exist on the European market for cultural property? European states which are parties of the same 1970 UNESCO Convention as the US apply the respecting of the obligations it places on states party less selectively than the US (as is the intention of the Convention), but what does "more precise but less restrictive" mean? In the US one can according to US law perfectly legally import bucketloads (indeed container-loads) of ancient coins and brooches metal detected on bulldozed sites in southern Europe without any paperwork at all and nobody bats an eyelid. Only in the case of items from a relatively small number of "source countries" has the US reached specific agreements with those countries (who first specifically requested it) that it will examine the paperwork accompanying the items to ensure it is in order. This by the way is what they really should be doing with ALL antiquities and cultural items coming across their borders, and not only because they are (nominally) a state party of the 1970 UNESCO Convention!

Newburg and Blunt apparently consider that keeping illegally exported antiquities out of the North American antiquities market is "turning away major investments during a recession", I'd like to ask them where they think this American money is being "invested", when it is coming into the hands of those committing culture-crime? Into what kind of ventures do they think the organised criminal groups that are behind much of this looting are "investing" the money of US collectors raised by the illegal trafficking of smuggled antiquities?

Newburg and Blunt say they consider that "protecting art and cultural property is an important goal", and roundly criticise the CPAC as a means the US has chosen to do this. But one gets the impression that their reasons for this are because it leads to measures that they consider are too "restrictive" for US museums and collectors. Surely the opposite is true, the current US measures, embodied in the CPIA and other legislation allow (encourage almost) the completely unrestricted no-questions-asked and indiscriminate commerce in artefacts from most of the world's countries that are sources of illegally obtained artefacts for the US market. That is why it needs reform in order to help protect the international cultural heritage, to make it more transparent and restrictive of illegally obtained articles coming freshly onto the market, not less. I am sure Newburg and Blunt would agree that the US, one of the largest global markets for this type of material, should be leading the way, not dragging along behind the rest of the world in this.

Another Antiquities Storeroom Looted by Armed Gang in Egypt

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Nevine El-Aref, writing in Al-Ahram on Friday 1 Apr 2011:

Armed looters broke in to the Tel El-Dabaa antiquities warehouse on Thursday, stealing artefacts and breaking several pieces of the stored collection. Mohamed Abdel Maqsoud, head of the Central Administration of Antiquities of Alexandria and Lower Egypt, said the warehouse was used to store artifacts found at Tel El-Dabaa's archaelogical sites by Dutch and German excavation missions over the last 30 years. They include a collection of ancient Egyptian clay pots and amulets.

I find the use of the term "warehouse" highly annoying here. What are being robbed in Egypt today are not "antiquities warehouses". A warehouse is where items destined for sale are temporarily held by merchants. What was broken into here is a storeroom of material from an ongoing archaeological project being archived for future work and research, not selling off to collectors eager to get their hands on their own private little "pieces of the past". In stealing this material, robbers are hindering - or removing any possibility - of using that material to write a public past. The results of decades' work by groups of dedicated people is being trashed overnight by these raids.

Now I really do not accept what one British artefact collector and propagandist for the artefact trade recently suggested, that this looting is a "a cry of frustration from the poor and dispossessed" desperate acts "of the forgotten underclass" against their government. Forgotten underclasses do not carry guns and anaesthetics to render guards unconscious. Forgotten underclasses in most parts of rural Egypt can barely afford a donkey. What we see in Egypt before our very eyes is the early stages of the development of networks of illegal activity involving antiquities, due entirely to their value (real, or perceived) on the antiquities market. The current political instability in Egypt is allowing them becoming bolder and will lead to them becoming better organized into criminal networks. Then foreign collectors and dealers will be happy as there will be lots more ancient Egyptian antiquities on the no-questions-asked external markets, and they can all make a heavy profit from helping to finance these new organized criminal groups in their free-enterprise emptying of the fragile and finite archaeological record onto the commercial market.

We have seen this before, most notably in eastern Europe in the political instability caused by the collapse of the Soviet bloc. We have seen how the international antiquities market has profited, and continues to profit from the illegal activities of artefact hunters in southeastern Europe (Bulgaria in particular) and now - as that source dries up - in other regions of the former eastern bloc (such as northwestern Russia and the Baltic states). We saw the same thing in Afghanistan then Iraq. Dealers and collectors deny this process took place and deny their responsibility for helping fund it, let us observe now the same thing happening in post-Mubarak Egypt. I'd like to draw attention to the fact that none of the pro-market collectors blogs or forums open to public view have expressed any real concern about this looting, why should they when they are obviously silently waiting for the artefacts to start flowing onto a market near them?

For those who cannot place Tel El-Dabaa, this is the site of some really very interesting and modern excavations on what is thought to be Avaris, a central place in the Hyksos realm and in the story of the rise and functioning of the New Kingdom but also - some would argue - having its place in Biblical history as well. The dealers and collectors who will be handling the artefacts stolen from this storeroom in their efforts to pursue a vision of a "people's archaeology" (sic) through the collection of random decontextualised artefacts of specific type are not dismembering history stolen just from the Egyptian people, but from us all.

Photo: Tel El-Dabaa, the future site no doubt of criminal organizations' artefact mines to tap the ample resources offered no-questions-asked by the international antiquities market. History for all becomes a blank, a looted site and a handful of collectable geegaws in a Chicago suburban back room.

A Warning From Beyond the Grave for Looters

Attention has been focussed on the legal, rather than moral, aspects of the current retention by the St Louis Art Museum of the cartonnage mask which proper due diligence should have revealed clearly should be in the archives of the 1952 excavation by archaeologist Mohammed Zakaria Goneim in Sakkara. The excavation has been published (Goneim  1956), but there is a nice online resource detailing her burial by K.M. Johnston, a previous correspondent with this blog, on Egyptology Geek and Amduat Wiki.

Johnston notes that the contents of Ka Nefer Nefer’s burial are in several respects extraordinary for such a simple interment. The body has the cartonnage accompaniments of a mummy, but was not actually mummified. A recent re-examination in association with the upcoming court case of the field catalogue of finds still held in Egypt however reveals (pers. comm. A. Mustafa Laff, Feb 2011) that also now missing from the Sakkara storeroom (presumably removed at the same time as the mask and presumably scattered in the no-questions-asked antiquities trade), are several fragments of cartonnage bands found loose in the vicinity of the body. Although, unlike the mask, they do not bear the name of the deceased, they clearly belong to this burial. There is a hieratic inscription on the cartonnage, and the text (visible in  the low resolution photos in the field journal) is transcribed as below by Prof. Ivar Lupe, egyptologist in the Estonian Academy of Sciences, whose  recent research has focussed on Ramesside non-royal burial practices and who will be publishing this new discovery in due course:
Lupe observes that a feature of great interest in these lost fragments is that alongside the usual funerary formulae, the mummy bands contain a text of the type popularly known as a „mummy’s curse”.  Lupe translates this portion of the text as follows:

"Death will come on swift wings to those who disturb my peace and shall do evil or wickedness to this. The  City of the Gate  will fall, and to its land will come fire, water and pestilence [...]."

This seems to me a further argument for returning Ka Nefer Nefer's coffin mask to  Egypt to rejoin the rest of the material excavated from her burial. It is what she would have wanted. The formulae are well known from other inscriptions of this type, but Prof. Lupe was unable to decipher the meaning of the „City of the Gate” in an ancient Egyptian context, suggesting it either refers to a local town or more likely refers to a military outpost on Egypt’s western borders in the Delta, referring to a text on a Late Ramesside papyrus from Deir El-Medina in a time of crisis at the end of the 21st dynasty which makes reference to the „foreign-born princes” ruling in a „City of the Gate on the Western Horizon” indicating a collapse of central control of this strategically important region.


Readers cannot fail to note the coincidence that St Louis which refuses to allow Ka Nefer Nefer’s face to be reunited with the rest of her burial also calls itself the „Gateway to the West”. One may only speculate whether the priests and seers (re)burying Ka Nefer Nefer's remains foresaw the violation of the integrity of her burial and  were issuing a warning to the people of St Louis, that under the rule of a foreign-born prince „fire, water and pestilence” will visit their land. Just to be on the SAFE side, in their place, and given all the other factors, I would be urging the local museum to give it back right now.


Reference: (Goneim, M. Zakaria. The Lost Pyramid. Rinehardt & Co Inc. 1956. pp  64-66; Goneim, M. Zakaria, Service des Antiquites de L'Egypte. Horus  Sekhem-khet - The Unfinished Step Pyramid At Saqqara, Volume 1.  Excavations at Saqqara. Imprimerie de L'Institut Francais D'Archeologie  Orientale. Cairo. 1957.  pp 23-27, Plates LXVII-LXXI)