Syria: Lest we forget

Look past the stones, think of the real people of Tadmur-Palmyra. Powerful words by Michael D. Press:

What might not have been clear if you followed the news stories and photographs is that there is also a modern town of Palmyra (Arabic Tadmur) adjacent to the ancient site, with tens of thousands of inhabitants. And here in microcosm is an unsettling problem/trend of the entire war: media outlets and academic interest have obsessed over ISIS’s treatment of antiquities, often at the expense of dealing with their human victims. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have died in the war; millions are refugees, millions more internally displaced. But they are muted in our coverage. We can name the sites that have been looted and damaged: Palmyra and Apamea and Mari – the Temple of Bel, the Arch of Triumph, the Great Mosque of Aleppo. But the Syrian dead are nameless.

David Press 'Callousness among the Ruins' Textual Cultures, Material Cultures Thursday, March 31, 2016 [some good other stuff in this blog too].

PAS-Claquer Questioned about Those Numbers

A Saturday Feelgood warble by a PAS-claqueur. The PAS and their supporters produce bucket-loads of feelgood warbles to draw attention away from the real problems of "best practice' in artefact hunting in England and (for the moment) Wales:

Matthew Fittock ‏@MatthewFittock 5 godz.5 godzin temu

To date over 1 million objects have been recorded by PAS #rfg2016 @RomanFindsGrp

Matthew Fittock is a PhD student at Reading studying pipeclay figurines in Roman Britain and editor of the Roman Finds Group newsletter. I'd comment that (a), the number of objects is not the same as the number of records (which is currently still much less than a million - 733,432 records) (b) it really is irrelevant "how many we have" when artefact hunters are destroying archaeological evidence in selectively taking this stuff for their ephemeral personal collections, the question of relevance is to what extent this information loss is mitigated both in quantitative and qualitative terms by the PAS records (the writer of this blog is of the firm belief that the answer is "not a lot" in both areas), and (c) the PAS was set up for a particular purpose and that is to work alongside the Treasure system which operates according to the 1996 Treasure Act. One part of the Treasure ACT is the compulsory reporting bit (art. 12). So it seems a pretty valid question to ask the archaeological warbler:

Paul Barford ‏@PortantIssues 11 min11 minut temu

@MatthewFittock @BenPaites @RomanFindsGrp and how many have been fully reported by the Treasure Unit as per Treasure Act? Can you say?

Mr Fittock? How many "objects" have been recorded under the Treasure Act, and how does that relate to the numbers of objects in the Portable Antiquities Scheme database? Why do I think you'll not have an answer?*

Another feelgood picture, what does it really show? One thing
it quite clearly shows is the scale of the backlog in
getting these all properly reported and published

Oh, and Mr Fittock, why do you think the Beau Street Hoard is in the PAS database at all, and does that not duplicate the data in the Treasure Reports? How much overlap is there, Mr Fittock?

And if you want to know about that "millionth find" (so we are talking about September 2014 here), it is not the PAS you need to turn to for the details on that, it's only in this blog you will find the true state of affairs discussed about that shameless bit of spin which you are applauding. The question is whether you do so knowingly, or in ignorance of the issues with that "number"?


* There are 10,167 records for "Treasure find" in the PAS database - total (it says) 196,648 [Mean quantity: 19.342, Maximum: 52,504]. But if you compare the PAS database figures for (say) 2003 with the figures in a recent Roger Bland publication, we see that only two thirds of the treasure cases shown by the graph seem to be in the database. There are other discrepancies.

Archaeological Material as Interior Decoration

Waiting to be taken away

The trophy use of archaeological material as interior decoration is illustrated by this Art Newspaper photo in the article 'Sekhemka to leave the UK as export license deadline passes'. Just one slimy step down from the peak of dubious taste from ADCAEA's Mr Swope making dugups into wearable jewellery. Stop them, stop the interior decorators.

Sekhemka sold off by UK Public Collection to US Private Collector

Britain is totally useless at preserving any cultural heritage at all, they promote metal detecting and flog off museum objects to American collectors. Sekhemka gets an export licence and will soon be taken out of the country:

"A buyer could not be found" - it was owned by the public: a buyer shouldn't have been necessary

Bravo to Northampton. 

Looking at Palmyra

British TV reporter Lindsey Hilsum spent a day touring Palmyra and is the first British TV reporter to have filmed inside both the ruins and the modern town (Channel 4 News, 'Palmyra: theatre of ISIS brutality re-captured'). The pictures from the modern city (1:47-2:14) show extensive damage and deserted streets, giving the feeling that it will be a long time before the place returns to normal life.

.

posted on You Tube by Channel 4 News 01.04.2016

There is a discussion of the pros and cons of rebuilding the blown-up buildings, with archaeologist Joanne Farchackh making a good point about the relationship between the ruins and the modern inhabitants of the place:

"The identity of Palmyra can't be the same any more. It is true, Palmyra is a World Heritage Site, but by now Palmyra is a site that has witnessed massacres, four hundred people have been killed inside the Roman theatre. People will not look at this site again, as it was before. Now it is a place where there is blood, the ruins have blood on them, and it is modern blood, not old blood. Can we treat it the same way as if this never happened before?"

This brings up the question of which past, whose past, we commemorate. In the case of Palmyra, is it "our, common" (Roman) past which is more important than the local past of the inhabitants of Tadmor, for whom the state of the ruins is today a place of memory connected with recent trauma. Is not a decision to rebuild an attempt to impose our own narrative (of 'victory') over the local experience? But whose heritage is Palmyra, ours or theirs? 

Would You Buy A Used car...?

The Art Gallery of NSW has reluctant­ly admitted it may not ­legally own a 1000-year-old Hindu sculpture it bought in 1999 with funds raised by the Art Gallery Society (Michaela Boland, 'AGNSW’s 1000-year-old Hindu goddess ‘may be illegal’...', The Australian April 2, 2016):

The Weekend Australian has discovered a 140cm-tall red sandstone carving of a mother goddess, Durga slaying the titan Mahisha, bought from New York antiquity dealer Nancy Wiener, is under scrutiny [...]  researchers had discovered Wiener sold them the durga without documentation. [...]  The AGNSW asked Wiener for more information about the statue but received no response. Nor did she return calls from The Weekend Australian. 

I cannot understand how anyone could possibly even contemplate buying a battered piece of old stone like this without demanding upfront the proper paperwork. Is there any reader out there who can come up with a decent explanation of why a decent public institution would be so reckless with public (or any other) money? What do their accession registers look like, an empty box -file with a
"Snickers" wrapper and a single loose paper clip in it maybe?

Why is it that huge sections of the business of buying and selling antiquities acts today as if it had been in a time-warp in which all the years between the UNESCO Convention of 1970  and the present day had never existed? That is an awfully long time for the "art" world to have its head buried in the sand, only to briefly raise it blinking in bewilderment if somebody starts asking about the documentation of a single artefact.

Perhaps the Trustees of the NSW institution will start doing their job and demand of the responsible curatorial staff  a detailed and factual report on the state of the documentation of all the gallery's acquisitions since 1970. Where did the objects come from, how did they reach the market? That goes for any public collection that gets caught out for similar misguided Due-Diligence-Deficient acquisition decisions.

Sekhemka to go to US Museum After All?

The new owner, whoever he or she is, can take
possession of one of the world’s most important
Egyptian antiquities and do with it what they will. 

The statue of Sekhemka is rumoured to have been bought by an American collector who has declared that he wants to put it on permanent public display in a privately-owned museum. As has been widely commented recently in the press, the buyer, Salt Lake City real estate broker Carl Smith IV has for the past four years been collecting manuscripts and artefacts relating to the Book of Mormon and devoted to the scholarship of Joseph Smith, a distant relative. The collection is believed to be the largest privately-owned assemblage of relics illustrating the Judeo-Christian history of the ancient American civilization described in the Mormon Scriptures. Highlights are believed to be the signet-ring of Nephti, early 1820s transcripts of the original text in 'reformed Egyptian', and, most astonishing of all, a few fragments of a manuscript believed to be the missing portion of the Book of Lehi.  There is also a rare copy of the first edition of the Book of Mormon published in Palmyra (the one in NY state, not Syria) in 1830 by local publisher E. B. Grandin.

As several articles in the New York Times have highlighted, the purpose of the new "Museum of the Divine Truth About America's Past" is primarily the mission of defending the Book of Mormon as a literal history, countering arguments critical of its historical authenticity, and using objects in the collection to illustrate how it is possible to reconcile historical and scientific evidence with the text. Billionaire Smith has recently begun to support important LDS-related initiatives such as the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS), and the Foundation for Apologetic Information and  Research (FAIR).

Mr Smith reveals that the purpose of his museum, due to open in New York (widely expected to take place at the end of this year) is to “bring to life the living word of God ... to inspire confidence in the absolute authority” of the words of the Mormon Scriptures. Smith is worried about the “danger of an America that gets too far from the God of Scripture", and he wants to remind Americans of the "Divine favours which have made our nation great and will make America great again".

Sekem is the name of one of the minor characters in the Book of Abraham, one of the lesser-known components of the LDS scriptures, and although the Egyptian statue is not believed to be the character mentioned in that Book, the inscription in unreformed Egyptian on the statue will be used as proof that this was a real name in the past.  As such the New York Times reports that in the project's design, the statue of Sekhemket will have a prominent place in the new museum, it will be sited at eye-level and lit with multicoloured strobe lighting to make it "seem more alive". Hidden speakers which will be mounted in the figure's chest will reportedly emit a recorded message by Mr Smith welcome visitors to the display of his collection.

Mr Smith released a statement today expressing his satisfaction that the British export restriction on the statue has been lifted and the sculpture will at last be coming to take its place in the new museum, "God has in this way made manifest His approval of our activities. I take this as a sign that the Lord has chosen me to help spread His word".

UPDATE 3rd April 2016:

For those who could not work it out for themselves, this, the only blog post I made on the 1st April (April Fool's Day) so as not to confuse it with the other content, was a spoof. It however is one which makes a perfectly valid point about the use of heritage. It seems some could not see it as such (see comments underneath and here).

Here's one for the sense of humour-deficient Sekhemket campaigners, David Gill: http://lootingmatters.blogspot.com/2016/04/rigorous-due-diligence-introduced-by.html. I expect they'll be calling him names next.