The Source of Looting in Moslem Countries

The Cultural Property Observer today discusses Addressing Looting at the Source by Remote Viewing and adds that for the situation in Moslem

places like Egypt to improve, issues of poverty and encroachment by development must also be addressed not by more dictatorial measures, but by engaging local people and encouraging an appreciation of past cultures.  

The question remains however whether this is possible among the poorly-educated fellahin, blindly adhering to a rigidly monotheist religion which teaches monocultural fanaticism and holding that theirs is the only one and true way and that all others are apostasy and false, and that anything which predates the appearance of their culture is non-history which should not be revered. Furthermore the encroachment of modern villages onto ancient sites is, I think, due to the chronic overcrowding which is this small country's main problem, and the processes of development which Mr Tompa would like to see encouraged.  I am not sure what Mr Tompa means by "engaging local people", has he in mind something like the British Treasure Trove scheme which informs the local people about objects they have found?

Egypt, Italian Likely Killed by Police

Islamic barbarity in the name of the state

We regularly repatriate artifacts to the Egyptians to curry favor with their repressive military dictatorship. Egypt is coming under scrutiny after the death of the Italian researcher Giulio Regeni, 28, a graduate student at Britain's Cambridge University. Regeni had been researching independent trade unions in Egypt and had written articles critical of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's government. He was reportedly arrested by Egyptian security forces and then a few days later, he was found dead by the side of a road in Cairo. The autopsy revealed that Regenio had seven broken ribs, signs of electrocution on his penis, traumatic injuries all over his body, and a brain hemorrhage. Regeni had been hit on the back of the head with a sharp instrument. His body also bore signs of cuts from a sharp instrument suspected to be a razor, abrasions, and bruises. He was likely assaulted using a stick as well as being punched and kicked, the source added. A second autopsy in Italy "confronted us with something inhuman, something animal", Italian Interior Minister Angelino Alfano told Sky News 24 television last week. Rights groups say police often detain Egyptians on scant evidence and that they are beaten or coerced. Scores have disappeared since 2013, the groups say. Egypt denies allegations of police brutality. Now, even the State Department has been forced to temper its solidarity with the government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi with a few timid words of criticism (Charles Tiefer, US State Dep't Joins World Storm Over The Torture-Murder By El-Sisi's Egypt of Italian Student Forbes Feb 13, 2016). 

Regeni’s murder should be fitted into the broader currents of U.S. human rights oversight of Egypt. Egypt just completed a set of parliamentary elections.  The opposition – not just the Islamist groups, but, the youthful reformers who had brought down Hosni Mubarak five years ago – had been locked up or scared off from participating.  As Senator Leahy told Forbes: “The truth is, it is high time for all of Egypt’s allies, including the United States, to make it clear to Mr. Sisi that the abuses he has encouraged to flourish can no longer be tolerated.” Why has the U.S. not been even blunter? Besides the longer-term caution in confronting el-Sisi, right now we need Egypt to join us against ISIS in Libya.  Indeed, the Administration may loosen, not tighten, the human rights oversight of Egypt.  In previous years, fifteen percent of United States aid to Egypt was covered by human rights conditions.  They could be, and were, waived, but that required an official report by the Administration which exposed the conduct of the Egyptian regime. Neil Hicks, in the Huffington Post, just brought out: “Furthermore, on the day that Under Secretary Sewall spoke in Cairo news emerged that the Obama Administration removed the human rights conditions from its budget request to Congress for foreign assistance to Egypt.”

Perhaps for the time being, artifacts should stay here not only to signal a growing intolerance of human rights abuses by the military dictatorship, but also to remind citizens here of a time when the glory of Egypt was not sullied by brutalist military rulers intent on quashing all and any challenges to their power.
 

Missed Italian Opportunity

Socialist Italians ignore US needs

In Numismaster and World Coin News, there is a useful summary by Richard Giedroyc on the extension of the Italian MOU.  Meanwhile, the anti-collecting clique in the archaeological blogosphere are once again disingenuously claiming that opposition to the MOU means support for the trade in "looted and stolen coins."

This is not the case at all.  As Mr. Giedroyc's article clearly sets forth, the concern is that as applied by US Customs, restrictions ban import of coins lawfully on markets abroad, including within Italy itself. But if they are legally on the market in Italy, why can I not buy them with certification of that fact? The US ancient coins market is one of the biggest in the world, well worth the dealers of a small European country making the effort to accommodate and reassure. I am sure nobody buying coins here wants to buy illegal goods.  I cannot see why the Italian numismatic trade associations do not negotiate with US Customs an acceptable form of certification that the coins they sell are legally on the market in Italy, and have been exported from there in accordance with European law. That way they will pass through US border controls without a glitch and also collectors can have peace of mind about the items they purchase and need not fear Federal overreach, waking up one morning to find the FBI on their doorstep asking to see their collection. Why can the Italians not see this?

Egypt Poor Stewardship: Prosecutors investigating disappearance of 157 artifacts

Prosecutors investigating disappearance of 157 artifacts Al-Masry Al-Youm Friday Feb 12 2016

Ancient Egyptian antiquities Mohamed Ramadan, the supervisor general of the office of the antiquities minister, said the ministry had submitted a memorandum to the public funds prosecutors on February 16, 2014, under former Antiquities Minister Mohamed Ibrahim, stating that the committee responsible for transferring some artifacts from Sakkara store (1) to the Grand Egyptian Museum has committed irregularities. News websites have reported the disappearance of 157 artifacts from the Sakkara storage. The Antiquities Ministry submitted a request to the top prosecutor to give the ministry a permit to conduct an inventory to the storage. 

"Rethinking Antiquities: Restitution and Collecting in the Time of ISIS"

An important meeting will be taking place on March 1, 2016  in New York City, sponsored by the  Committee for Cultural Policy and the Cardozo School of Law. This will be a panel discussion under the title "Rethinking Antiquities: Restitution and Collecting in the Time of ISIS". It is a sad commentary on the times we live in that there should even have to be such a discussion, the so-called Islamic State cannot be even considered a legitimate country. How can anyone consider repatriating antiquities to it when we have seen what they will do with them? The objects are far better off and safer in the hands of collectors and museums in the free western world than among the bigoted ideological vandals of such a dystopic absurdity.

Here is a reaction of one of the panellists, noted cultural property lawyer Bill Pearlstein to a recent New York Times article entitled Islamic State Destruction Renews Debate Over Repatriation of Antiquities:

The New York Times is correct to observe that the widespread destruction of cultural heritage in failed or failing states has lead to a quiet reevaluation in senior museum circles of the current policy bias in favor of national retention and reflexive restitution. Western archeologists insist that antiquities remain in the nation where they are found to keep them off the market and reduce site looting. This misses the point where the threat to cultural heritage is iconoclastic; that is, ideologically driven destruction of cultural objects viewed as apostate. We need to rethink the bias towards national retention by taking into account the quality of national stewardship, especially where there is a clear and present danger to cultural heritage (including excavated sites, objects ex situ, objects in situ and related stratigraphic context). When cultural heritage is demonstrably at risk of domestic iconoclasm, the issue is whether objects ex situ must remain in country and at risk because of inflexible adherence to the principle of universal national retention. For example, it would make sense in principal to let international organizations rescue endangered objects and hold them in trust for safekeeping pending restoration of stability. Ricardo Elia, an archeologist at Boston University, misses the mark badly by stating that “It was only a matter of time before some in the art-collecting community tried to turn this cultural nightmare to their own advantage.” Elia’s reflexive hostility towards any form of antiquities collecting causes him to blame Western collectors, who favor preservation of objects, rather than the iconoclasts, who favor their destruction. Similarly, Allison E. Cuneo, a doctoral candidate in archaeology at Boston University, appears to believe that solutions favoring preservation over retention are “neocolonialist.” This is sloganeering and fails to address the issue. Archeologists are right to protest when unrestricted market demand drives looting and destruction of stratigraphic context. They are wrong to insist on universal national retention when to do so ensures the destruction of heritage sites and objects already out of context. Rescuing cultural heritage from the iconoclasts will require flexible thinking. I do not see that coming from the archeological community which seems content to blame old enemies instead of coming to grips with new ones.

 

Jordan Museums: Coin Theft was Inside Job

Only now is some poor stewardship and past skulduggery in Jordan's state museums coming to light (Raed Omari, "Ancient coins were replaced with fakes between 2001-2002" Jordan Times Feb 09,2016). Recently it was discovered that the collection of the Citadel Museum in Amman had been tampered with. There were 401 ancient coins, but someone replaced 400 of these priceless pieces with fake ones. In response to lawmakers' questions about this, the government admitted that other cases of this were known, fifteen years ago it was found that fakes were switched for genuine ancient coins at museums in the capital in 2001-2002. These coins had originally been in many museums across the country and had been "probably substituted by fake ones during the distribution of artifacts to museums". The case was referred to judicial authorities but it seems the culprits were not caught. It seems the Jordanian authorities were so embarrassed by this lapse in security and egregious example of poor stewardship that they neglected to publish pictures of  what was stolen so that the legitimate trade could help recover the stolen coins. They obviously also need to put security measures into place to  keep the same thing from happening again.

Chinese Antiquity Confiscations and Sales

Online dissertation Lu, Di Yin. 2012. Seizing Civilization: Antiquities in Shanghai's

Custody, 1949 – 1996. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University.

Abstract:

Seizing Civilization uses the Shanghai Museum as a case study to examine an extraordinary process of art appropriation that persisted from 1949 to 1996 in the People's Republic of China (PRC). At the heart of this story is the museum's destruction of the preexisting art market, its wholesale seizure of privately-owned antiquities, and its sale of these objects on the international market. My findings show that museum employees used these events to create public art collections in the PRC. The Shanghai Museum pioneered the techniques that Chinese museums use to transform craft objects, as well as select ancient paintings, ceramics, and bronzes, into canonized cultural relics. I argue that the application of these techniques explains the erasure of provenance at Chinese Museums, and demonstrate how state cultural institutions render acquisition ledgers, private collecting records, and connoisseurship disputes invisible. I examine cultural relics' transformation into Chinese cultural heritage in five chapters . I first demonstrate how museum employees appropriated private collections during nation-building campaigns such as the nationalization of industries (1956) . Second, I investigate changes to the Chinese art historical canon, placing them in the context of art market takeovers, the wholesale acquisition of ethnic minority artifacts, as well as municipal programs in salvage archaeology. Then, in two chapters, I reveal the Shanghai Museum's active participation in antiquities confiscation and divestment during the Cultural Revolution (1966 – 1976), which enriched public art collections on a previously unprecedented scale. I conclude with an examination of the mass restitution of expropriated property in the 1980s and 90s, which underpinned the museum’s dual function as both a preservationist institution, as well as a political and commercial enterprise . The antiquities and events I analyze not only explain the ascendency of a dominant narrative about Chinese civilization, but also reveal the limits, contradictions, and challenges of PRC national patrimony.

The Shanghai Museum expropriated privately art collections to exhibit as the cultural inheritance of all Chinese, transforming antiquities from private to public property.

Egyptian Regime Arrest Coin Collector

The Egyptian military dictatorship have arrested another collector in their efforts to seize control of artifact collecting. The Cairo Post is smugly reporting: "Antique coins smuggling attempt foiled at Luxor airport. Antique is the correct word, these are not archeological artifacts, far from it.

An attempt to smuggle 148 antique coins was foiled by the authorities at Luxor International Airport, Youm7 reported Saturday. The coins, dating back to the Mohamed Ali Dynasty (1805-1952), were seized with a 33-year-old Egyptian passenger heading to Qatar, source at Luxor airport told Youm7. Officials at the archaeological unit at the airport inspected the objects and approved their authenticity, said the source. The passenger has been arrested while the antique coins have been confiscated to be delivered to the Ministry of Antiquities, in accordance with the provisions of 1973 Antiquities Protection Law 117, he added. Since the outbreak of January 25 Revolution in 2011 and its consequent security lapse across Egypt, the Tourism and Antiquities Police, in coordination with Cairo airport’s authorities, thwarted several attempts to smuggle ancient Egyptian antiquities.

Except they are not, each time they boast of another antiquity found in a foreign auction, they are boasting of their own failure to prevent their own citizens stealing them from under their noses.American collectors are being penalised for their own failure to protect the bits of the global heritage which currently lie in territory under their disfunctional rule.

Not to mention incompetence, the archeologists employed by the airport clearly have the same knowledge of and interest in coins as archeologists elsewhere, they inspected the coins at the airport   and "approved their authenticity" and the newspaper adds them to their list of "thwarted attempts to smuggle ancient Egyptian antiquities". The coins shown are modern coins of the Republic of India.