This review compares four different books all covering the field of looted cultural property, from different perspectives. The fact that there are so many current books on the subject proves that it is an issue that is definitely on the radar – museums should think twice before dismissing it as an irrelevancy that the public aren’t bothered about.

From:
The Nation

Tales from the Vitrine: Battles Over Stolen Antiquities
By Britt Peterson

This article appeared in the January 26, 2009 edition of The Nation.
January 7, 2009

On a 1984 visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a Turkish journalist named Ozgen Acar noticed a group of fifty artifacts labeled “East Greek treasure” that resembled a collection that had gone missing some twenty years before. The treasure, Acar suspected, had been snatched by grave robbers from Sardis, an ancient city in western Turkey, which served as the capital of the Lydian empire at its peak in the sixth and seventh centuries BC. (Herodotus tells us that its last king, the affluent Croesus, was the first person to mint coins of pure silver and gold, hence the saying “as rich as Croesus.”) Acar, who had spent the previous decade tracking antiquities looters in the small towns surrounding Sardis, took his suspicions to the Turkish Ministry of Education. It turned out that the Lydian Hoard had passed through a number of smugglers and semireputable dealers before reaching the Met in the 1960s, and there was plenty of evidence that the Met had known something of the provenance of the objects at the time and willfully ignored it. The Turkish government sued the Met for the unconditional return of the cache and, after a six-year legal battle, finally won. In 1995 the Lydian Hoard was returned to the small town of Usak, in Sardis, sparking an outpouring of national pride and a flurry of copycat lawsuits.
Read the rest of this entry »

The looting in Baghdad following the fall of Iraq has been a recurring topic in the news for the last few years. It is interesting, not least because it brings home to people the reality of many acquisitions from archaeological sites, which is probably far closer to the truth than the image of an English gentleman picking up a few select items for their country residence. Certainly, the latter happened – but in many cases it was preceded by the former more brutal style of acquisition.

Peter Stone and Joanne Farchakh have written a new book on the subject which is reviewed in The Times.

Also, I thought it worthwhile at this point though to mention a book by one of the key people involved in trying to unravel the current situation – Matthew Bogdanos who I met in Athens in March has been largely responsible for leading recovery efforts, first on the ground in Iraq & now from within the US as he tackles the international art trafficking networks head on. His book is available in paperback soon.

From:
The Times

From The Times
May 9, 2008
The Destruction of Cultural Heritage in Iraq by Peter Stone and Joanne Farchakh
Reviewed by Mary Beard
Bajjaly Boydell, £50; 352pp

THE TWO MOST FAMOUS words ever spoken by Donald Rumsfeld – “Stuff happens” – were given in response to persistent questioning in April, 2003 about the looting of Baghdad, including the National Museum. Rumsfeld did not have a clue what had happened to the 5,000-year-old Wark Vase, or the thousands of other antiquities that had been systematically lifted; nor did he much care.
Read the rest of this entry »