Syrian Conflict Antiquities Coming onto the European Market

Samarkeolog has a post today about the financing of the civil war in Syria by smuggling antiquities through Turkey. The sale of conflict antiquities is apparently is 'the route to easy money' which helps finance the conflict (based on: Boris Mabillard, 'Snapshot of a Syrian Smuggler: Arms, Antiquities and Jihad along Turkey’s Border,  Le temps, 2013-08-31). In the chaos, it is reported, "it has become impossible to do legal business in Syria if you are not part of an armed group", and in Turkey, there’s plenty of profit for traffickers large and small. 

It has even become impossible to do some illegal business in Syria if you are not part of an armed group. Beyond the local level, crime has been paramilitarised. In the beginning, ‘[m]ost of the weapons were sold by corrupt army officers’ but, ‘for the past six months, the jihadists [have taken] control of the traffic and imposed their laws’. ‘Small traffickers’ – independent traders who do not take sides in the conflict – ‘aren’t safe anymore.’

The article follows multi-commodity smuggler Ayham and his efforts to make a living - which includdes peddling antiquities ("[e]verybody does it [antiquities looting]‘, including ‘every katiba (military camp)").

Ayham sells looted antiquities from ancient Greek/Christian sites (or, according to an antiquities trader from Istanbul, ‘pale copies’ of Greek/Christian material). Whether or not his material is genuine, there is evidently a market for Syrian antiquities in Turkey (or, probably more precisely, a market for Syrian antiquities that reach the market through Turkey). And there is apparently little barrier to that trade: ‘Turkish customs officials… turn a blind eye on Syrian objects smuggled into their country’; hence, people now know that ‘smuggling antiquities [through Turkey] is the route to easy money’.

So, if this is so, it would seem that relatively large numbers of freshly-looted artefacts and coins from looted sites in Syria are coming onto the international market through Turkish middlemen and in this are involved major organized gangs which have links with those engaged in the senseless fighting and slaughter. These are blood antiquities of the first order. Next time you look at a dealer's site, V-coins for example and see dealers selling loads of objects which had, or could have had an origin in illicit digging in Syria, ask yourself why - if the objects are indeed as legitimate as they'd like you to believe - virtually none of them are sold with any kind of up-front indication that this can be shown to not be so. Why are the dealers not falling over themselves to demonstrate that they are NOT blood antiquities?

Of course a dealer might answer as one of the ACCG board of directors did to me two days ago in another matter "I will not consider complying [...]  until you have provided evidence that [this] contravenes the laws prevailing in the State of California and the United States of America". 'Falsus in unum, Falsus in omnibus'. Illegally obtained in one country, by that token illicitly transferred to another, but "OK to sell in California"? That seems to be the fundamental problem with the antiquities trade in general. A total lack of responsibility.  It is up to collectors to challenge this way of thinking and reject objects from dealers who cannot demonstrate that what they are offering is not only "they-cannot-touch-you-for-it-in-California"-legal, but wholly clean from the point of view of responsible and ethical dealings from start to finish.

In order to maintain the integrity of the market, surely any antiquity dealer who (because they've bought things without checking thoroughly where they came from and whether there is any documentation of licit origins and transfer of ownership), repeatedly cannot do that in the case of items in their stock, should be considered a cowboy and kicked out of the profession.  

Vignette: or don't collectors care at all?