Elginism

When it first occurred, the looting of Iraq was one of the most publicly visible destructions of a nature’s culture that had been seen, with much of the ransacking shown on live TV feeds, while troops on the ground struggled to assess the situation. It has to an extent though helped people to understand the kind of situations in which many other artefacts in museums, such as the Benin Bronzes were acquired – a knowledge that we aren’t always talking about smugglers taking an artefact, but in many cases about violent acts of vandalism taking place at the same time.

Since the dark days of 2003, much has been done to help retrieve some of the items lost during the looting, although few would dispute that the best course of events would have been for the looting to have been prevented in the first place.

A new database now aims to catalogue much of Iraq’s ancient sites, with the intention that this will allow better monitoring & protection of them.

From:
CNN

Iraq harnesses technology to protect ancient treasures
By Laura Allsop for CNN
July 21, 2011 — Updated 1517 GMT (2317 HKT)

(CNN) — Known to many as the “cradle of civilization,” Iraq is a treasure trove of important archaeological sites including Babylon, Ur and Nimrud.

Yet hostile circumstances on the ground have left the country’s antique heritage vulnerable to looting and damage.

International calls for the safeguarding of Iraq’s ancient sites have resulted in the development of a sophisticated geodatabase record of ancient sites and monuments, which it is hoped will allow them to be better monitored and protected.

MEGA-Iraq (Middle Eastern geodatabase for heritage) is being developed by the Getty Conservation Institute and the World Monuments Fund alongside Iraq’s State Board of Antiquities and Heritage.

Susan Macdonald is Head of Field Projects at the Getty Conservation Institute.

She said: “While many in the international archaeological community focused on the looting of museums, no-one was really paying much attention to this issue of archaeological sites, and that really there was no good inventory or database of records of these.”

How it works

Using Google’s freely available satellite imagery as a base map, she said, MEGA allows users to focus on particular archaeological sites, see a terrain map or an aerial view of the site and surrounding buffer zones, and scan in to access details of the site’s features.

Because of the visual nature of the geodatabase, users will have an accurate picture of the condition of a site at a given time and therefore be able to pinpoint any changes in its condition, according to Macdonald. Also, newly discovered sites, usually most vulnerable to looting, can be quickly input into the database.

An earlier project was abandoned in 2007 because of the dangerous situation on the ground in Iraq. That project was transferred to Jordan in collaboration with the country’s Department of Antiquities and MEGA-Jordan is today live and actively used.

Developments in Iraq

According to Jeffrey Allen, a consultant for the World Monuments Fund, timing is crucial to the success of the project. “We’re now trying to implement the system in much more difficult circumstances (than in Jordan), but it’s probably easier to do it now in Iraq than it would have been previously,” he said.

Developing MEGA now, he continued, will help ensure that as the country starts to rebuild itself, future infrastructural plans won’t encroach on existing archaeological sites.

While many countries have electronic archaeological databases, Macdonald said, MEGA is different in that it uses open-source software, is accessible online, requires minimal specialist training to use, and is multi-lingual.

“The real power of it comes when (many) people are using it,” she said, adding that ministries and local governments across Iraq would potentially have access to it.

Reactions to MEGA

MEGA has been met with applause from archaeologists across the globe.

Dr. Lamia al-Gailani-Werr is an Iraqi archaeologist and consultant for the Ministry of Culture there.

She said: “I think (the database) is essential. It depends on the political situation because Iraq is still not stable enough for archaeologists to go everywhere but I think it’s very good to do.”

She is working on a computerized inventory of objects in the National Museum, which will further help Iraq’s State Board of Antiquities and Heritage know what it has and help in protecting it.

The extent of illegal antiquities trade is hard to gauge, according to Interpol’s website, often because items aren’t known to be lost until they appear on the art market and because of the dearth of detailed inventories of items in countries such as Iraq.

“The fact is, every country ought to have a database for their archaeological sites,” said John Curtis, Keeper of the Middle East collections at the British Museum in London.

While theoretically MEGA has the potential to be linked up to collections inventories, Curtis stressed that it is “a survey of sites in Iraq, not objects, it’s not specifically going to help tracking lost items.

“What it might do is help them be protected in the future,” he added.

Fight against looting

Julian Radcliffe, chairman of The Art Loss Register, an international database of stolen and missing works of art and antiquities, agreed, saying: “On its own it wouldn’t do much to stop looting, but that’s true of many initiatives. Nobody’s got a silver bullet for this.”

What is constitutes, he said, is a useful starting point, an important measure among many that will help organizations such as his own and Interpol track down lost items.

“If there has been recent looting from a particular site revealed by this new MEGA database, then we would be alerted to the fact that we should look for items of the type that will have come out of that site,” he explained.

“Therefore we would say, when we see an item that we’re suspicious of, I wonder whether it came from that site,” he said.

And according to Allen of the World Monuments Fund, there is one other reason that MEGA will be important to the people of Iraq.

“I just think (it’s) going to help people have more respect for their cultural heritage because they can commodify it and they can measure how much they have in a much better way,” he said.

Zahi Hawass is a man who stirs up controversy wherever he goes, whether with his own goading of foreign governments to return disputed artefacts, or through the way that his blatant self publicising approach irritates others. He has done a lot to help Egypt’s archaeology in his time in the job, but at the same time has managed to annoy many people. It appears that this will no longer be the case however, as he has lost his job as the head of Egypt’s Supreme Archaeological Council.

(Yes – I know that this post is out of date – as are most others on the blog at the moment), but I wanted to keep it here so that the blog represents a relatively complete archive of events).

From:
Daily Telegraph

‘Real Indiana Jones’ sacked as keeper of Egypt’s heritage
He called himself the real Indiana Jones and keeper of Egypt’s heritage, and was an almost permanent presence on any television programme about the country’s colourful past.

But Zahi Hawass, the public face of the pyramids, has become the latest casualty of the revolution sweeping the Egyptian government after being sacked as minister of antiquities.

Dr Hawass was head of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities for 10 years, and before that in charge of the Pyramids and Sphinx on the Giza plateau outside Cairo. He staged regular press conferences unveiling new discoveries from the time of the pharaohs.

In honour of his claim that the film producer George Lucas consulted him before creating the character of Indiana Jones, played by Harrison Ford in films like Raiders of the Lost Ark, he was rarely seen without a large fedora hat.

But after being made minister of antiquities in one of Hosni Mubarak’s last acts as president, he has been sacked to appease growing hostility from anti-government protesters, not least archaeologists fed up with his style of management.

Social networking sites like Twitter were flooded with inevitable jokes, from “the Curse of the Mummy strikes” to comments such as “Zahi Hawass to no longer appear in every single TV special on Egypt”. Some were simpler, saying, “Please take your hat with you.”

Dr Hawass was popular among journalists, visitors and for a time Egyptians themselves for his flamboyant style and unchallenged commitment to promote Egypt’s treasures and to use them to attract tourists.

He also led populist campaigns to return Egypt’s heritage from museums abroad, most notably the Rosetta Stone from the British Museum.

However, local archaeologists accused him of stealing credit for their achievements, and “recycling” discoveries for publicity.

More seriously, as the Egyptian revolution unfolded, his finances, friendship with Mr Mubarak’s wife, Suzanne, and management of resources came into question.

He was revealed to receive a regular income from the National Geographic channel, and was put on trial over the contract under which a company which marketed a “souvenir Hawass clothing line”, including copies of the trademark hat, was awarded the rights to run the souvenir shop in the National Museum in Cairo.

He claimed that proceeds from the hats went to children’s charities, of which Mrs Mubarak was patron.

At one stage, while protesters were flooding Tahrir Square and the road outside the Television Centre, archaeologists were staging their own strike outside the offices of the Antiquities Council.

Matters were made worse when the extent of damage and looting to the poorly guarded museum and other historic sites during the demonstrations became clear.

The prime minister, Essam Sharaf, this weekend bowed to renewed protests by young activists who claim that the interim Supreme Military Council, which is overseeing the country until new elections, is keeping too much power to itself. Mr Sharaf removed half his cabinet, including Dr Hawass, on Sunday afternoon.

It is unlikely that the Egyptian government will drop its campaign for the return of the Rosetta Stone. But the scandals surrounding his removal will remove some of the pressure on the British Museum, as the financial crisis in Greece has over its other controversial exhibit, the Elgin Marbles.

Dr Hawass’s sacking will be mourned by colleagues around the world, many of whom worked with him closely for decades.

John Baines, professor of Egyptology at Oxford University, said: “Over the years he did a lot of good for Egyptian archaeology and in many cases for the Egyptian monuments, but recently he had become very domineering, and an eclipse became increasingly likely.”

From:
All Headline News

Hawass is gone, leaving Egyptian antiquities in crisis

Critics say he leaves behind a field suffering from mismanagement, corruption and, despite the massive self-promotion he engaged in as boss of Egyptian antiquities, a lack of leadership

Source: (TML)
Reporter: TML Staff
Location: Cairo, Egypt
Published: July 19, 2011 11:12 am EDT
Topics: Science And Technology, Politics

The exit of Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s antiquities supremo, was as dramatic as most of his decade-long tenure. But he also leaves an empty stage at a time when the country’s archeologists and museums that store its world-renowned treasures are badly in need of leadership.
clearpxl

Hawass, who was minister of antiquities, was one of more than a dozen cabinet officials to lose their jobs as part of a reshuffle by Prime Minister Essam Sharaf in the face of protests over the slow pace of political reforms. But Hawass left with a bang. He was besieged by employees on Sunday as he departed his office for the last time. His successor, Abdel-Fattah Al-Banna, who had campaigned vociferously to force Hawass out of office, took over the ministry only to be dismissed a day later as employees in museums across Egypt went on strike against Al-Banna’s appointment

For 10 years, Hawass was the second most famous face of Egyptian archeology, right after King Tut. But critics say he leaves behind a field suffering from mismanagement, corruption and, despite the massive self-promotion he engaged in as boss of Egyptian antiquities, a lack of leadership. Indeed, many saw him not as an ally of Husni Mubarak, Egypt’s disgraced former president, but as someone who mimicked the personality cult and highhanded ways of his former boss.

“He was the Mubarak of antiquities – he was a dictator. He didn’t tolerate criticism. He did whatever he wanted,” Nora Shalaby, a Cairo-based archeologist, told The Media Line. “His policy while in power was not to let anyone else have the spotlight. It was just about him, him, him …. He was the only one anyone knew.”

Egypt is home to one of the world’s greatest treasure troves of ancient art and relics, but like much else in modern Egypt its assets have been poorly handled amid charges of corruption and negligence. The country is now going through a difficult period as the opposition forces that brought down Mubarak demand that Hawass and others be called into account while the transitional government seeks stability.

Hawass, 64, began his career as an inspector of antiquities 42 years ago. He became director of antiquities at the Giza Plateau in the late 1980s and was named Egypt’s top chief of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in 2002. One of Mubarak’s last official acts was to elevate Hawass to cabinet minister.

As Egypt was shaken by unrest earlier this year, Hawass came under fire for his failure to protect the Egyptian Museum and other sites from theft and vandalism and for downplaying the damage. He submitted his resignation but was quickly reinstated. “I cannot live without antiquities, and antiquities cannot live without me,” he said at the time.

Remarks like that, as well as establishing a trademark style that included donning an Indian Jones-style fedora and frequent appearances on the Discovery Channel, angered critics, who said he was more intent on building a personality cult than addressing problems and running his antiquities empire.

Hawass’ website includes tabs named “great discoveries” and “fanclub.” The revival of Egypt’s struggling tourism industry, the discovery of stolen antiquities in the U.S. and the pyramid of a Sixth Dynasty queen are all reported as if they were his personal accomplishments.

A week ago, the New York Times published a profile of Hawass highlighting his ties with private business, including a $200,000 annual honorarium from National Geographic and a company mounting exhibitions of Egyptian artifacts and marketing a line of signature clothing.

Archeologists accused him of stealing credit for their work and exercising arbitrary control over access to sites and relics.

Hawass never hesitated to defend his record. In an interview last May with the magazine Scientific American he insisted he wasn’t close to Mubarak’s wife Suzanne and discounted charges of malfeasance in awarding a gift shop concession at the Egyptian Museum. Against critics of his management style, Hawass said a strong hand was needed in his job.

“If you need to control the antiquities of Egypt, you have to be very strong on the job,” he said. “Our antiquities were robbed by everyone before [I came to office]. The antiquities directors were not that strong before. When I do this, I do it for the sake of the antiquities.”

Hawass spearheaded a movement to return prominent or unique artifacts, such as the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum and the bust of Nefertiti in Berlin’s Neues Museum. Last January, he suggested New York City should return Cleopatra’s Needle, unless the officials took measures to preserve it.

Shalaby said the demand, like others, is ironic, given how poorly Egypt preserves its own patrimony.

“He couldn’t take care of antiquities in his own country, let alone take care of things returned from abroad,” Shalaby said, asserting that the campaign to bring artifacts home was probably driven by self-promotion. “I don’t doubt he wanted to get them back, but the reasons for doing were not so clear.”

Egypt’s Supreme Antiquities Authority employs 58,000 people, about two thirds of whom are security guards. But the number of sites is in the thousands and the guards are poorly paid, thus theft and vandalism are rife. Days before Hawass’ exit, U.S. officials said they had broken up an international ring smuggling Egyptian antiquities into the United States.

Despite their importance to scholarship and tourism, under Hawass’ watch Egypt’s museums are poorly maintained, said Shalaby. Exhibits are badly labeled, if at all and aren’t displayed along any coherent theme. They suffer a shortage of qualified personnel at the management level, forcing them to rely on foreign experts.

More coverage on the deal signed between Greece & the USA to restrict the importation of historic artefacts.

From:
Art Info

The U.S. and Greece Agree to Ban Imports of Most Antiquities, Despite Concerns Raised by Debt Crisis

Collectors in the market for Greek antiquities may soon find them harder to come by on this side of the Atlantic.

Standing at the Parthenon Museum in Athens, Greece last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signed an agreement with the Greek Minister of Foreign Affairs Stavros Lambrinidis to restrict imports of ancient Greek artifacts to the United States.

Once ratified by the Greek parliament, the agreement, called a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), would give the Greek government the right to restrict import of “cultural heritage” objects to the United States. It would cover a list of objects dating from the late Stone Age through the end of the Byzantine Empire in the 15th century. According to the State Department, the United States and Greece will agree upon a list of objects to be restricted, and the list will be entered into the Federal Register. This is the fifteenth such cultural heritage agreement signed by the United States.

The governments of many Mediterranean countries, including Greece, have been fighting a mostly losing battle over their national treasures for years. Collectors’ high demand for Greek antiquities leads to looting and a robust black market for historical artifacts, which ultimately end up outside their country of origin.

The objective of the MOU is to prevent the illegal trafficking of antiquities pillaged from historical sites in Greece. But opponents of the agreement, such as the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), say that it also stifles the ability to engage in the legal trade of antiquities, which can hurt museums and educational institutions. They allege that part of the problem is that Greece is not doing its part to protect its own national heritage — historical sites are underfunded and corruption is rampant. The palpable reality of the Greek debt crisis helps to back up this point.

Recommendations about whether or not to sign MOU are made by the State Department’s Cultural Property Advisory Committee (CPAC), which consists of eleven individuals representing different interests in the acquisition of artifacts: museums, archaeologists, experts in international cultural property sales, and representatives from the general public.

In October 2010, the AAMD’s legal representative, Stephen J. Knerly, put out a statement urging the CPAC to reconsider the Greek MOU. “As a result of the dire state of the Greek economy and Greece’s failed past efforts, Greece’s protection of its cultural property is likely to only become worse. Accordingly, the Committee should seriously consider these circumstances in evaluating Greece’s request for import restrictions,” it said.

Secretary of State Clinton put a more diplomatic spin on the issue, using the agreement to declare confidence in Greece as an ally. During public remarks after signing the agreement she said, “Let me just conclude by saying that America is just as committed to Greece’s future as we are to preserving your past. During these difficult economic times, we will stand with you. We are confident that the nation that built the Parthenon, invented democracy, and inspired the world can rise to the current challenge.”

While a summary of the agreement is available on the web, the State Department is withholding the full text due to diplomatic concerns. It is Greek policy not to reveal text of legislation before it is ratified by the country’s parliament.

The agreements fulfill obligations of the United States as a party to the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export, and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, which is meant to protect the pillage of cultural heritage in countries which have a rich history but limited means with which to protect it.

Similar agreements have been reached with countries as diverse as Canada, Iraq, China, and Cyprus. Most restrict imports of cultural heritage objects and are acquiescent to the requests of the country initiating the agreement. The major exception to that was the MOU signed between China and the United States, which was first suggested by China in 2004. China requested that the agreement cover objects up to 1911. The final agreement, not reached until 2009, only covers objects to 907 A.D.

The governments of many Mediterranean countries, including Greece, have been fighting a mostly losing battle over their national treasures for years. Collectors’ high demand for Greek antiquities leads to looting and a robust black market for historical artifacts, which ultimately end up outside their country of origin.

The objective of the MOU is to prevent the illegal trafficking of antiquities pillaged from historical sites in Greece. But opponents of the agreement, such as the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), say that it also stifles the ability to engage in the legal trade of antiquities, which can hurt museums and educational institutions. They allege that part of the problem is that Greece is not doing its part to protect its own national heritage — historical sites are underfunded and corruption is rampant. The palpable reality of the Greek debt crisis helps to back up this point.

Recommendations about whether or not to sign MOU are made by the State Department’s Cultural Property Advisory Committee (CPAC), which consists of eleven individuals representing different interests in the acquisition of artifacts: museums, archaeologists, experts in international cultural property sales, and representatives from the general public.

In October 2010, the AAMD’s legal representative, Stephen J. Knerly, put out a statement urging the CPAC to reconsider the Greek MOU. “As a result of the dire state of the Greek economy and Greece’s failed past efforts, Greece’s protection of its cultural property is likely to only become worse. Accordingly, the Committee should seriously consider these circumstances in evaluating Greece’s request for import restrictions,” it said.

Secretary of State Clinton put a more diplomatic spin on the issue, using the agreement to declare confidence in Greece as an ally. During public remarks after signing the agreement she said, “Let me just conclude by saying that America is just as committed to Greece’s future as we are to preserving your past. During these difficult economic times, we will stand with you. We are confident that the nation that built the Parthenon, invented democracy, and inspired the world can rise to the current challenge.”

While a summary of the agreement is available on the web, the State Department is withholding the full text due to diplomatic concerns. It is Greek policy not to reveal text of legislation before it is ratified by the country’s parliament.

The agreements fulfill obligations of the United States as a party to the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export, and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, which is meant to protect the pillage of cultural heritage in countries which have a rich history but limited means with which to protect it.

Similar agreements have been reached with countries as diverse as Canada, Iraq, China, and Cyprus. Most restrict imports of cultural heritage objects and are acquiescent to the requests of the country initiating the agreement. The major exception to that was the MOU signed between China and the United States, which was first suggested by China in 2004. China requested that the agreement cover objects up to 1911. The final agreement, not reached until 2009, only covers objects to 907 A.D.

US Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, has signed an agreement with Greece, to restrict importation of antiquities, in an aim to help prevent looting of archaeological sites.

From:
The Art Newspaper

Clinton signs memorandum with Greece restricting import of antiquities
New agreement looks to end looting and black market sales by reducing the incentive to illegally remove such objects in the first place
By Helen Stoilas | Web only
Published online 21 Jul 11

ATHENS. While in the Greece on a diplomatic visit this weekend, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Greek Minister of Foreign Affairs, Stavros Lambrinidis, concerning the imposition of import restrictions on archaeological and Byzantine objects. The new memorandum, which still has to be ratified by the Greek Parliament, would make it illegal for protected works of art to enter the US without the approval of Greek authorities.

The signing of the memorandum was yet another demonstration of the US government’s vocal support of Greece’s austerity measures to help the debt-ridden country get back on its feet. “America is just as committed to Greece’s future as we are to preserving your past,” Clinton said at the signing. “During these difficult economic times, we will stand with you. We are confident that the nation that built the Parthenon, invented democracy, and inspired the world can rise to the current challenge.”

According to a fact sheet released by the US State Department, “the agreement will strengthen collaboration to reduce looting and trafficking of antiquities, and provide for their return to Greece. It also aims to further the international interchange of such materials for cultural, educational, and scientific purposes.”

“We are trying to protect our treasures from illegal diggings and excavations,” Lambrinidis said at the signing. “That is why this MOU that we’re about to sign is so important.” Clinton said that the agreement “will protect Greece’s culturally significant objects even further from looting and sale on the international market” by helping to “reduce the incentive to illegally remove such objects in the first place”. She added: “We know from experience that measures like this work. This will be our 15th cultural property agreement. And in countries from Cambodia to Cyprus, we have seen real results.”

Some groups have not been as keen to embrace import restrictions. In October 2010 the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) submitted testimony to the State Department’s Cultural Property Advisory Committee criticising an extension of the memorandum for being “overly broad” and suggesting that the new agreement include provisions for long-term loans and a licit market for antiquities. The AAMD’s attorney Stephen J. Knerly, Jr also claimed that “Greece has not taken sufficient measures to protect its cultural property and its efforts towards protecting its archaeological sites to date are not adequate”.

The secrecy surrounding the decision-making process of the Cultural Property Advisory Committee has also been called into question. ArtsJournal writer Lee Rosenbaum (aka Culturegrrl) said on her blog: “I think that under American law, any agreement that we have officially signed ought to be public information. There is already too much secrecy in how CPAC, a federal government advisory body, operates. Once a State Department decision regarding foreign cultural-property requests is finalized, the full extent of what has been agreed to should be promptly disclosed to the American public.”

The State Department says that “a list of the types of archaeological and ecclesiastical ethnological material that will require documentation to be brought into the US” will be published in the Federal Register. “The restricted material will include objects generally associated with the Upper Paleolithic through Late Byzantine periods. The agreement and Federal Register notice will be published after the Governments have notified each other by diplomatic note that each has completed all the internal requirements for the agreement’s entry into force.”

From:
US State Department

Meeting With Staff and Families of Embassy Athens

Remarks
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Secretary of State
Westin Athens
Athens, Greece
July 18, 2011

Good morning, everyone. I am so pleased to see you, and what a setting for our time together. I apologize for keeping you waiting. Dan was making me work till the very last second. (Laughter.)

But it is for me a great personal pleasure to be back in Greece and to have this opportunity to thank each and every one of you, American and Greek alike, for everything you’re doing on behalf of this critical relationship, and especially now as we try to support the Greek Government and the Greek people through this very difficult economic period.

I’ve tried to get to Greece as Secretary of State four times. The first time, I was really excited about coming and I broke my elbow. (Laughter.) And the next two times, we rearranged schedules because of other crises in the world. Then I finally said, “I am going to Greece no matter what.” And this has been an extremely important trip as well as a delight to go to the Acropolis Museum, to sign the important memorandum between our governments to protect the heritage and treasures of Greece’s storied past, and to have serious conversations with many decision-makers of Greece about the difficult economic way forward.

It is a great pleasure too for me to be here with Ambassador Smith and Diane. Dan and Diane are exemplary examples of the Foreign Service in action and the work that they do. As Dan said, I worked very closely with them from the transition to my position as Secretary of State, and then for the first year and a half, I saw him every morning at 8:45 and he always looked good, which I found to be – (laughter) – especially unfortunate. (Laughter.) He clearly has made a commitment to serving our country, and I know what capable hands you are in here in our Embassy.

I think that coming at this time actually turned out to be very good timing because of the need to demonstrate our solidarity and support for the difficult, painful times that Greece is experiencing. And I know that you are the daily face of that relationship. All of the interactions that you have are a manifestation of our long, enduring friendship, partnership, and alliance. And I also know you care for American citizens, whom I saw in great numbers on the streets in Athens and in the museum. It was wonderful for me to see Americans from all over our country of all ages just taking in the beauty of this extraordinary country and respecting and understanding more about what it means, and all the many contributions that Greece has made to our own democracy and values.

I also am very much aware of everything you’ve done in addition to your daily jobs. You helped with the evacuation of Americans from Egypt during the upheaval in that country, and you staffed the airport, you handed out water, diapers, clothing, whatever people needed. You cared for stranded Peace Corps volunteers who hadn’t slept or eaten in days, and a group of tourists with the wonderful nickname “Grannies On Safari.” (Laughter.) So just a few of the ways that you have helped in making sure that Americans anywhere in the world are going to have a friendly face and a helping hand.

I know Dr. Jill Biden was just here a few weeks ago to celebrate the Special Olympics. And we are very grateful to everyone on Team Athens, particularly thanks to John Cockrell, for making this trip such a success. I also want to thank your family members because everyone is part of this team, and your service to this mission could not be possible without the strong support of those who are behind you here in Greece and back home.

And I especially want to thank our terrific Greek employees. I often say that secretaries come and go, even ambassadors come and go, and DCMs and political officers and economic officers and PAOs and everybody else comes and goes except our Greek employees. Some of you have been with this Embassy for a very long time. You are absolutely essential to our operation, you bring valuable knowledge and expertise, and this Embassy, like all of our embassies, simply could not work without you.

So thanks so much for what you’re doing. I know that these are hard times, but I have a lot of confidence in the resilience of the Greek people, and I believe that you will be able to go through this period of challenge and sacrifice and come out even stronger. It will require unity and solidarity, but it’s something that I fully believe will happen. So just know that the United States, and particularly this Administration and myself personally, are going to stand with you the whole way. We’ll do everything we can to be supportive as you make these tough decisions.

Let me now just shake a few hands and thank you personally, but I so appreciate everything you’ve done and everything you do every single day on behalf of the Greek-American relationship. Thank you all. (Applause.)

PRN: 2011/T51-10

A meeting of UNESCO’s ICPRPC committee in Azerbaijan has considered the protection of cultural artefacts from Azerbaijan, as well as re-visiting the standing restitution appeals for the return of the Parthenon Marbles & the Bogazkoy sphinx.

From:
News.Az

Azerbaijan appeals UNESCO to protects cultural heritage in occupied lands
Wed 06 July 2011 04:25 GMT | 5:25 Local Time

The 17th meeting of the UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Committee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Property to its Countries of Origin or its Restitution in Case of Illicit Appropriation (ICPRCP) was held.

The Department of international relations and cultural programs of Azerbaijan Ministry of Culture and Tourism reports that the issues which were included in the agenda – The restitutions appeals on Parthenon marbles (the United Kingdom of Great Britain – Greece), Bogazkoy sphinx (Germany – Turkey) were examined, the reports by member states and UNESCO partner organizations were listened.

During the meeting UNIDROIT, WCO, UNODC, ICOM international organizations, Interpol and Italian special police service Carabinieri informed on their last activities in this sphere, the European Commission’s ‘Hermes-2011′ program was presented.

At the session the participants were informed that the occupation policy carried out by Armenians against Azerbaijanis were limited not only with the territorial claims, thus, the theft of more than 100 thousand exhibits, rich cultural models in the occupied territories, their expose to the daily destruction, carrying out of archeological excavations and misappropriation of found objects. During the meeting the Azerbaijani side appealed to the UNESCO for preparation of practical and concrete recommendations for protection of cultural heritage in the occupied territories.

22 museums, where were collected 40 thousand exhibits, 927 libraries with 4,6 million books, 808 clubs, 4 theatres and 2 concert places, 8 culture and rest parks, 4 picture galleries, 85 musical schools, 103.2 thousand furniture equipments, 5640 musical instruments, 481 cinema units, 20 movie cameras, 423 videotape recorders, 5920 national male and female cloths, 40 loudspeakers, 25 large and 40 small attractions remained under occupation.

APA

Another review of Chasing Aphrodite – about the Italian’s hunt for looted artefacts in the Getty Museum.

From:
Washington Times

BOOK REVIEW: ‘Chasing Aphrodite’
CHASING APHRODITE: THE HUNT FOR LOOTED ANTIQUITIES AT THE WORLD’S RICHEST MUSEUM
By Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28 384 pages, illustrated

The 19th century was the golden age of acquisition. European and American collectors, smitten with the lure of antiquities from Greece, Italy and China, spent recklessly to assemble great collections in London, Paris and New York. No one questioned that marbles from the Parthenon would get more careful attention in London than in Athens.

Then the tide began to turn. Italians became restless at the sight of their “patrimony” being exported abroad. In 1939, Italy passed a cultural property law stating that archaeological objects found after that date were the property of the state. In Athens, Greeks demanded the return of the Elgin Marbles.

In 1970, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization brokered a landmark treaty for the protection of cultural objects. The United States and more than 100 other countries signed the agreement, which was designed to restrict the importation of illicitly obtained objects. In effect, the major powers of the world acknowledged that the value of an antiquity lay not just in its beauty but also in its archaeological context.

The new philosophy touched many acquisitive institutions, but none more so than the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Founded in 1953 by oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, the Getty had one of the world’s greatest collections of Greek and Roman antiquities. A succession of curators had purchased new finds with little or no inquiry into their origins, and many had come onto the market by way of tomb robbers in southern Italy. In “Chasing Aphrodite,” Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino, reporters for the Los Angeles Times, have written a scathing indictment of the “museum industry.” In their words, “For the past forty years, museum officials have routinely violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the UNESCO treaty … buying ancient art they knew had been illegally excavated and spirited out of source countries.”

Curators at the Getty went further. They sought out collectors and urged them to donate objects to the Getty with an assurance that they would receive tax write-offs far more valuable than the art. One “donor” gave the Getty objects for which he had paid $75,000, but told the Internal Revenue Service they were worth $2.5 million. The result was $1.2 million in tax savings. In the authors’ words, “Donations began showing up on the Getty’s books in the names of prominent professionals and some Hollywood high rollers.”

Readers not accustomed to rooting for the IRS may wish to note that it was the threat of a major IRS investigation that led the Getty to end its tax scam.

But there remained the purchase of stolen antiquities. The Italians took the matter seriously and had their eye on Marion True, the Getty’s prickly curator of antiquities. On one hand, Ms. True was a reform-minded custodian who had urged more transparency in the art trade. On the other hand, as curator she had made numerous purchases of doubtful provenance, including an iconic statue of Aphrodite that showed every sign of having been plundered from Greece. The Italian prosecutor contended “that Dr. True knew, or should have known, that many objects acquired by the Getty were illegally excavated from Italy.”

Moreover, the Italians had evidence of a conspiracy: That Ms. True had used a private collection – one that was destined to be donated to the Getty – as a means of laundering items stolen from Italy.

On April 1, 2005, Ms. True was indicted on charges of trafficking in looted antiquities and ordered to stand trial in Rome. She became the first American curator to be tried on criminal charges. The Getty attempted to have the trial quashed, offering to return 24 objects, including Aphrodite, if the case was dropped. But the Italians were determined to make an example of Marion True.

The result was more than two years of hearings that exposed the squalor of the antiquities trade before a deal was finally reached. The Getty would return 40 of the 46 artifacts sought by Italy, including Aphrodite. The authors write, “After nearly ten years of denial, double-talk, rationalizations, finger-pointing, hand-wringing, second-guessing, defiance, and, finally, resignation, the Getty’s antiquities nightmare was over.”

There remained the matter of Ms. True. After five years of trial, she was excused without a verdict in October 2010 on grounds that the statute of limitations had expired. Professionally, however, she was ruined. Her undoing, Mr. Felch and Mr. Frammolino write, “forged a peace between collectors and archeologists, museums and source countries.” Whether such a peace is lasting remains to be seen, and readers must decide for themselves whether society is best served by an artifact buried and forgotten in Italy, or the same object cleaned and illuminated in a New York penthouse.

Biographer and historian John M. Taylor lives in McLean.

169 Greek archaeological sites & museums have now been upgraded to have better signage & visitor facilities.

From:
Greek Reporter

Services Upgraded in 169 Museums and Archaelogical Sites
Posted on 13 July 2011 by Anastasia Chaini

The upgrading of 20 museums and archaeological sites services, for a total of 169, will be completed by the end of the summer. The remaining 149 will go up to the A1 category in the next three years, based on the time schedule of the Minister of Culture and Tourism, Paul Geroulanos. Up until now, no Greek museum or archaeological site, not even the Acropolis, has gone up so high in the rankings.

The upgrading of the services mainly concerns the issue of leaflets in two languages​​, the placement of large informational signs, and the installation of outposts and toilets for the disabled and automatic water / soft drink machines, where necessary.

By the end of July, information leaflets will have been delivered to 20 museums and archaeological sites, which will be the first to climb to the A1 category. The number of leaflets issued will vary depending on the tourist traffic of each cultural site. On top of all sites is the ”Sacred Rock of Acropolis”, for which approximately 800,000 brochures have already been issued.
The general secretary of the ministry L. Mendoni spoke about the excellent cooperation the ministry had with the Lighthouse for the Blind of Greece, regarding the issue of brochures in a Braille system, with which 110 archaeological sites will be equipped.

In collaboration with the National Tourism Organisation, the 20 upgraded sites will be integrated into the digital convergence program of the organization which means that their guests will have the opportunity to participate in digital tours through new generation mobile phones.

Among the 20 upgraded areas are archaeological sites and museums with large number of visitors, including the Acropolis and other monuments of its surrounding area, Knossos, Olympia and the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, as well as museums with less tourist traffic such as the Museum of Byzantine Culture in Thessaloniki, and the Byzantine and Christian Museum in Athens.
Changes will occur regarding the prices of tickets, as the aim of the ministry is to introduce single daily or weekly tickets.

“All the adjustments to the new prices will have have been passed through by the Central Archaeological Council, by September, 2011, at the latest ,” said Mr. Mendoni, who hopes that by next year, vending machines will be operating in 30 sites.

An interesting look at 10 different cases (some well known, some more obscure) where countries are involved in disputes over the ownership of looted cultural property. Some of the cases have been resolved, but many are still no closer to reaching a conclusion than the day after the artefacts were originally taken.

From:
Business Insider

10 Ancient Artifacts That Countries Are Still Fighting Over
Vivian Giang | Jul. 14, 2011, 7:51 PM

Legendary historical artifacts have traded hands from conquerors to thieves and ended up thousands of miles from their origin.

The question of ownership is extremely murky.

With a black market in looted art worth as much as $6.3 billion a year, the mantra of “finder’s keepers” can be tempting. Past and present owners, however, may claim an object, sometimes leading to disputes and wars between nations.

2003: Bombing survivors demand the University of Chicago auction off Iran’s ancient clay tablets

The surviving victims of a 1997 bombing attack in downtown Jerusalem are demanding that the University of Chicago auction off ancient clay tablets belonging to Iran to pay for the damages.

The Iranian government is responsible for training the militant group – Hamas – who carried out the bombing at the Ben Yehuda mall, injuring and fatally wounding more than 100 civilians.

The ancient tablets were originally brought to the University of Chicago in 1937 for research purposes after American archaeologists discovered the 2500-year-old artifacts in Persepolis, the former capital of the Persian Empire.

Over time, approximately 37,000 of the artifacts have been studied and returned to Irans’s Cultural Heritage and Tourism Organization and approximately 5,000 remain at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute Museum.

In 2003, a United States District judge in Washington awarded the group more than $250 million in damages to be paid for by the Iranian government. The survivors suggest that the remaining clay tablets be sold by the University of Chicago to pay for their awarded damages.

The University of Chicago is arguing that governments cannot be sued by ordinary citizens.

A federal court ruling prohibits the transferring of any of the artifacts until the case is adjourned.

2005: Ethiopia reunites with their Obelisk of Axum

In 2005, a 1,700-year-old stone obelisk returned to Ethiopia after 70 years in Italy.

The Axum obelisk – considered to be a part of the one of the great kingdoms of the ancient world – was looted by Italian troops in 1937.

Dismantling and sending the 160-ton obelisk back to Ethiopia cost the Italian government $7.7 million. To refrain the obelisk from freezing, heaters were installed on the planes and the monument was wrapped in steel bars to keep it from moving during the six-hour flight.

2011: Yale University gives back 40,000 artifacts to Peru ends 100-year dispute

Yale and Peru ended a 100-year bitter dispute when the university agreed to return 40,000 artifacts originally taken from the Machu Picchu site in the Andes in the early 1900s.

Peru has claimed that the ancient artifacts — pottery, jewelry and bones — were sent to Yale for 18 months in 1911 but were never returned to the country.

In 2008, Peru filed a lawsuit against Yale to return the pieces and Peru’s President sent President Obama a letter seeking his assistance in 2010.

An exhibit for the artifacts was opened to the public in April 2011 at the Government Palace in Lima.

2011: Cambodia and Thailand wage mini war over ancient temple

In Cambodia it is called Preah Vihear and in Thailand it is called Khao Phra Viharn, but both countries claim ownership of the temple at the Cambodia-Thailand border believing it is on their own land.

Ownership of the ancient, stone-walled temple has been the subject of dispute between the two countries since withdrawal of the French in the 1950s.

In a 1962 decision, the International Court of Justice gave Cambodia sovereignty of the surrounding land. Shortly thereafter, Thailand withdrew from the International Court of Justice.

Cambodia has requested that the International Court of Justice formally clarify its decision.

The mini-war resumed in 2008 when the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization announced the temple a World Heritage with ownership to Cambodia.

In February 2011, the United Nations ordered a ceasefire between the two nations after 10 people perished but the dispute resumed in April resulting in the deaths of 18 people and evacuation of 85,000.

Ongoing: Egypt seeks the return of their Sphinx’s beard currently stored in a basement in Britain

The Sphinx — a symbol of ancient Eygypt — is a monument built in the image of Pharaoh Khafre from the fourth dynasty.

The beard of the 4,600-year-old artifact accidentally fell off, was carted away and sold to the British Museum in 1818.

For the past 160 years, it has been stored in the basement of the museum with no plans to be returned to Eqypt.

Ongoing: The Rosetta Stone dispute between Eqypt and Britain

A black basalt stone discovered in Rosetta, Eqypt in 1799 by a french officer is still the subject of dispute between nations today.

Known as the Rosetta Stone, the famous artifact has inscriptions in ancient Greek, demotic characters and hieroglyphics. The 2,200-year-old stone is believed to hold the secret to translating hieroglyphics and Eqypt’s ancient past.

In French’s surrender to the British in 1801, the Rosetta Stone was transferred to the British Museum in London.

Eqypt has continued to seek for the stone’s return.

Ongoing: India’s Hindus and Muslims dispute over Babri mosque

In the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, Muslim clerics and leaders rallied against a court ruling over the site of a demolished mosque.

The 2010 high court ruling gave ownership of two-thirds of the land to Hindus, resulting in Muslims rejecting the verdict and appealing at the supreme court level.

Hindus and Muslims have quarreled over the Babri mosque for more than a century. Hindus claim the site is the birthplace of their god Rama.

In 1992, the Muslim mosque was demolished by Hindu mobs — the riot was considered one of the worst in India’s history, killing 2,000 people.

Ongoing: Eqypt wants 3,000-year-old statue back; Germany claims its too delicate to move

Eqypt has been conducting an ongoing campaign to get more than 5,000 artifacts from around the world that they claim belongs to them.

Their main leader is Zahi Hawass – the antiquities chief for Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities – and at the top of his list is the bust of Nefertiti – which was allegedly stolen in 1913 by German archaeologists using illegal documents.

The 3,300-year-old bust is a statue of the wife the pharaoh Akhenaten, whose name was erased form monuments after his death in 1338 B.C. by priests who disapproved of his religious practices.

Germany claims that the statue is too delicate to make the long trip back to Eqypt.

Ongoing: Greece demands the return of their Elgin Marbles; the British refuse

In a dispute with the Prime Minister David Cameron, Greece asserts that the return of the Parthenon marbles to Athens could potentially alleviate the country’s current financial crisis.

The marble sculptures were given to Lord Elgin in 1799 by the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire who once controlled Greece.

Cameron has refused to move the marbles from the British Museum back to Greece

Ongoing: Native American tribes clash over burial remains

An ancient burial ground is the center of dispute between two Native American tribes who believe the land is the resting ground for their ancestors’ remains.

Archaeologists found 174 ancient Native American remains at the site believed once to have been shared by the Gabrielino-Tongva and Juaneño Band of Mission Indians in California’s Huntington Beach.

Half of the remains have been unearthed

An interesting followup to the previous post about the ongoing problems of artefact looting within Greece.

From:
SAFE

Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Repatriation Effects: Greece’s National Archaeological Museum

In the Galleries:

While we all revile the looting of archaeological sites and the illicit trade of artifacts, we can now begin to review the effects of the repatriation of ancient material back to the countries of origin. Here I am not referring to Native American remains, but the statues and vases created by the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean. Recently, I visited the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece, which has seen financial and public relations troubles partly due to the national economic crisis. Here, I saw the 2007 repatriated kore from the J.P. Getty Museum standing amongst other statues without any bells or whistles describing its sordid history. Also on display was a bronze athlete, repatriated in 2002, propped in its own corner. I believe that the return of these objects reflect legal and ethical principles, which absolutely must be upheld.

While the national discourse in Greece regarding ancient cultural heritage is strong in its attempts to lure in tourism, I question how the everyday Greek citizen feels toward their ancient heritage. There seems to be a prevalent sense of a general disregard and annoyance bordering on anger regarding the material remains of the past. Rather than culture, most Greeks are focused on making ends meet and finding jobs as well as putting their children through school and hoping that they also will be able to find jobs. Whether or not they visit the multi-million euro, new Acropolis museum if they can afford the entrance fee is one thing, but another is the expense the country has born in order to fight for the repatriation of artifacts on the international stage (ex. The Parthenon Marbles at the British Museum).

In 2010, Greece proposed an MOU with the United States, requesting help to end the international trade in illicit antiquities (CPAC’s decision has still not been made public). Now, reports of further looting are circulating and what little funds that the government has left is being funneled into paying museum and site guards during the summer tourist season as well as other public employees who are still waiting for months and months of back pay. Greece is in an unfortunate position and I do not want to hastily simplify the complicated situation. However, I feel inclined to ask, if the preservation of heritage should be higher on the list of issues to worry about. If this is so, can or should heritage be used to bring about solidarity and social cohesion? Can heritage bring the hope that seems to be in short supply during these trying times in this most magnificent nation?

William St Clair, Author of Lord Elgin and the Marbles, is giving the 21st annual Runciman lecture at Kings College London tomorrow.

From:
Kings College, London

21st Annual Runciman Lecture
Thursday 2 February 2012
Great Hall, Strand Campus, 18.00
Looking at the Athenian Acropolis: from modern times to antiquity
Speaker: William St Clair

William St Clair will discuss the ways in which the Acropolis has historically been interpreted by three main constituencies, the people of Athens, visitors from abroad, and those who only saw Athens in their imaginations with the help of pictures. Beginning in modern times when current viewing conventions were invented, and going back through chronological layers, he suggests how his approach can improve our understanding of how the Acropolis was understood in antiquity.

His starting point is that it was the viewers who made the meanings.

The talk will include images never previously shown.

William St Clair, FBA, FRSL, is Senior Research Fellow, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. His books include Lord Elgin and the Marbles, That Greece Might Still be Free and the work on which the approach is based, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period.

Sir Michael Llewellyn Smith will introduce the speaker and Bettany Hughes will give the vote of thanks.

The British Museum has strict rules in place that limit the selling off (known as deaccessioning) of artefacts in its collection, unlike museums in some other countries. This means that (with a few exceptions), the museum can only ever grow larger – the only way of shrinking it is to split it into separate smaller institutions.

In marked contrast to this though, in various places across Britain, churches (& related institutions) that are short of cash are ending up selling off their artefacts, to try & pay for the repair & upkeep of the buildings.

Surely, on a national level, we ought to be focussing more on maintaining our own heritage, rather than desperately trying to cling on to items that we took from foreign countries, during different eras, when such acts were tolerated more than they would be today?

From:
The Independent

The great Church art sell-off runs into trouble
Parishes accused of off-loading treasures just to fund building maintenance
By Andrew McCorkell
Sunday, 26 June 2011

Increasing numbers of churches are trying to sell valuable historic artefacts and paintings to pay for repairs and upkeep. But the great parish sell-off, which could turn into a sort of high-class countrywide boot sale, is running into opposition.

A case to be heard at the end of this summer will test the freedom of parishes to sell off their prize possessions. At the centre of it is a 16th-century helmet that has hung above a marble tomb at Wootton St Lawrence Church, in Hampshire, for more than 300 years. Known as an armet, the Wootton artefact marked the resting place of Sir Thomas Hooke and was sold for £54,000 at auction in December to an anonymous American collector.

The Church of England admitted that permission had been granted, but the Winchester Consistory Court has decided to “set aside the faculty” which authorised the sale. The faculty will be “considered afresh”. The Royal Armouries challenged the item’s export, saying it should have first been offered to the Armouries or another British museum. The Church of England conceded there had been other recent cases, but would not provide details.

The Hampshire church is far from alone. St Leonard’s Church in nearby Sherfield-on-Loddon admitted to sounding out the possible sale of a 15th-century helmet, though inquiries have been withdrawn in the wake of the Wootton case. In January, proposals to sell Auckland Castle, the home of the Bishop of Durham, were shelved, though controversial plans to sell its historic paintings by the 17th-century Spanish artist Francisco de Zurbaran, worth £20m, were still being considered.

Earlier this month it was announced that four late 14th-century masterpieces depicting the Passion of Christ that were given to the Church of St Michael and All Angels in Withyham, East Sussex, in 1849 are to be sold to pay for renovation work. The paintings, by Niccolo di Pietro Gerini, are valued by Sotheby’s at more than £1m.

Philip Venning, the secretary of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, said the problem was being exacerbated by the sale of big collections of silver and furniture. He said: “Often items can date back to medieval times and be things of considerable importance – or odd things like books, or ancient wood chests. Our worry is that there are inevitably an enormous number of churches facing financial difficulties. We know there is going to be a big problem with redundancy in years to come, and so increasingly churches will turn to other ways of raising money. Perhaps the easiest way is to see if they can sell off a treasure or two.”

Janet Gough, the director of the CofE’s cathedral and church buildings division, said English Heritage estimates the costs of maintaining its listed churches at £115m a year.

“There is a repair grant scheme managed by the Heritage Lottery Fund which gives grants of £25m a year, and the Government refunds a proportion of the VAT paid out on repairs to listed churches,” she said, adding that the CofE will now have to raise an additional £80m each year.

Times have changed a lot since the Seventh Earl of Elgin removed half the marble sculptures from the Parthenon, but looting of archaeological sites continues to be a problems for Greece, as it is in many other countries around the world. Looting is a problem that must be tackled in multiple ways, if it is to be prevented.

Protecting the sites of the looting is possible in some cases, but in somewhere such as Greece, there are vast tracts of land rich in buried relics, that have yet to be excavated. Underwater remains from shipwrecks & land areas that have become submerged presents an even trickier problem.

Blocking artefacts leaving the country is a second level of defence – but as with any type of defence against smuggling, where there are long land & sea borders, it is hard to guarantee that things do not slip through the net.

Many artefacts that are going to be traded on the international markets, tend to pass through other countries on the way to their eventual destination – the use of Geneva as a hub for trafficking in stolen artefacts is just one particularly notorious example.

Auction houses or private dealers represent the next step in the chain – the auction houses ought to be the easier of the two to stop, but recent cases show that they are often more concerned with making a sale than asking too many questions about the origins of what they are selling.

Finally, ultimate culpability rests with the buyers. If no one was willing to acquire unprovenanced artefacts, then the market would dry up – it is as simple as that. With no money in the system to drive the looting, those who are currently pilfering archaeological sites would find that there was no financial benefit in what they were doing. This is by far the most critical step & applies in equal measures to private collectors & museums. In the end, the individual that buys the artefact without asking an questions about where it came from is the only thing that creates a demand for looting around the world.

From:
Kathimerini (English Edition)

30-06-11
Illicit antiquities trade continues to thrive in Greece
Short-staffed archaeological sites are easy targets
By Iota Sykka

The majority of visitors to state museums in Greece find the experience disappointing. There are various reasons for this, including closed halls due to staff shortages — a factor which also affects service — and impractical opening hours. However, what is a disappointing situation to many presents an ideal opportunity for a few.

The issue of museum security — particularly when it comes to safeguarding archaeological sites — is a constant headache for the Greek Ministry of Culture, which is struggling to cope with the limitations of being short-staffed.

However, it is clearly failing in its efforts: In mid-April antiquities were stolen from the ancient site of Eleusis, while prior to that there had been another theft in Arta at the beginning of the year.

Part of a tombstone column unearthed in Ancient Amvrakia and destined for the nearby Archaeological Museum of Arta never made it there. In the case of the antiquities stolen from Eleusis, the Greek Police’s Antiquities Theft Department managed to locate them with the ministry’s assistance and the ancient works will soon return to the archaeological site. However, the Archaeological Department is still concerned and so are regional antiquities ephorates.

The issue of illicit trading in antiquities has long been a major subject at conferences organized by archaeologists. Even more so considering that certain museums around the country have yet to record the treasures lying in their storerooms, while in some cases, artworks have not been restored at all.

Safeguarding and reclaiming cultural treasures from illicit trade was the subject of an interesting conference at the Acropolis Museum. The conference minutes, which were published recently, point to the fact that illicit trade is of major concern and goes beyond the field of antiquities. As it turns out, the country’s ecclesiastical heritage has been dealt a heavy blow as well.

The Culture Ministry records thefts by region and the results show that the areas which are most vulnerable are Epirus, Thessaly, the Peloponnese, Central Greece, the Ionian Islands and the Cyclades.

According to data compiled by V. Sakelliadis, there is intense activity in the aforementioned areas, resembling the spike in thefts during the 1970s and the 1980s.

Topping the stolen items list are religious icons (343), followed by woodcuts (36), sculptures (33), metal and ceramic objects (13) and sanctuary doors (11). Most thefts take place in the fall and winter time while ephorates don’t usually discover that items are missing until the weather improves.

Equally interesting is a chapter regarding the repatriation of stolen items, prepared by Smaragda Boutopoulou. Repatriation, it seems, has been on the rise since the 1940s. By the 1980s there had been 12 cases of repatriation, a figure which grew to 24 in the 90s and to 29 in the 2000-08 period. The conclusion? Out of 78 cases of repatriation, 15 were court-ordered, 37 were settled through out-of-court procedures, six were due to the Greek state purchasing the items and 21 were cases of voluntary surrender by foreign nationals.

According to Boutopoulou, a total of 1,938 ancient artifacts were repatriated from 1945 to 2008: 62 were repatriated during the 1960-80 period, 101 were returned to Greece in the 80s, the figure rose to 613 in the 90s, and over 1,161 repatriations have been recorded since 2000.

The conference’s findings are numerous and of great interest. They include a presentation of Greek antiquities around the world by specialist Alexandros Mantis, a talk by Eleni Banou on the case of antiquities repatriations from the Shelby White collection, and an analysis of the global ring of illicit antiquities trade and Greece’s position in it, by journalist Nikolaos Zirganos.

Rosa Proskynitopoulou, head of the Documentation and Protection of Cultural Goods Department at the Culture Ministry, admits that the ministry is highly active as far as trying to locate stolen antiquities goes, but not when it comes to museums.

“Above all, we have illicit excavations taking place in unguarded places. Incidents have increased in this area,” Proskynitopoulou told Kathimerini. As for repatriation, she said that the department is putting major emphasis on this issue, especially when it comes to negotiating the return of documented antiquities.

While Proskynitopoulou did not divulge more information, it is no secret that the department operates with only nine multitasking archaeologists, who also aid the police in their investigations.

In the past, announcements regarding the department being staffed by 47 experts (including a public prosecutor, legal advisers and police officers, among others) never made it beyond the stage of promises. Despite all its problems, however, the Documentation and Protection of Cultural Goods Department is currently on the right track regarding a number of cases of illicit antiquities trading in the United States and the UK.

Many museums jealously guard their large collections of artefacts sourced from far corners of the world, pleased with the number of visitors that are drawn to their institutions to see them. Surely though, when it ends up that the foreign museums have more of a cultures artefacts that the national museums in their home country have, isn’t it time to re-think whether the balance needs to be redressed?

From:
Modern Ghana

MORE DOGON IN MUSÉE DU QUAI BRANLY, PARIS THAN IN NATIONAL MUSEUM, BAMAKO?
By Kwame Opoku, Dr.
Feature Article | 16 hours ago

“Malian cultural heritage has for several decades, undergone a massive transfer toward Europe and the United States. Analyzing the phenomenon in its universality, it seems very clearly to be the translation of an unequal relation between poor (weak) and wealthy (powerful) nations. The cultural assets of poor nations are being exported to rich nations. Examples to the contrary do not exist”.

There is no doubt that the current exhibition at the Musée du Quai Branly, entitled, “Dogon” is the most comprehensive and definitely one of the best exhibitions on the well-known culture of the Dogon, Mali. The exhibits are all so impressive that one cannot easily pick out any objects as more interesting and show them to readers, especially Africans who may not be able to visit this excellent exhibition in view of existing restrictions placed on Africans seeking to visit Europe. In any case, France would not accept as ground for requesting a visa for France, the current exhibitions on Dogon, Angola and Voodoo in Paris.

But how did the Musée du Quai Branly manage to assemble such a large number of impressive Dogon artworks? According to the catalogue of the exhibition, Dogon by Hélène Leloup, in addition to the Dogon objects held by the museum, several institutions and individuals also lent their artefacts.(2) The lenders are listed in the catalogue. It is interesting to note that some of them did not want to be mentioned by name. Did they want to avoid any possible claims of restitution by Mali from where the Dogon objects may have been illegally removed or acquired under suspicious or dubious circumstance? It is noticeable that not one African or Malian institution or individual person is mentioned in the list of lenders. There is only one African name among the contributors of articles in the catalogue. In the acknowledgements, no African name is mentioned. However, the editor, Hélène Leloup, extends a general thanks to the Dogon people who had revealed some secrets to her and expresses the hope that they will keep their country as quiet and beautiful as their ancestors created it:

“Merci â tous les Dogon qui m’ont confié quelques secrets. Qu’ils gardent ce pays, si tranquille et si beau, comme leurs ancêtres l’ont créé.”

How are we to understand this? Does the author really believe in what she is writing? She knows better than most of us the destruction of the Dogon area and the damage caused by the looting of artefacts, first under colonial rule and in the independence period by the intense looting of artefacts by impoverished Malian peasants which all end in Western countries. Does she really believe that the Dogon can keep their area as their forefathers left it? Looting under colonial rule and since Independence as well as other developments surely cannot be ignored, even by the anthropologists. The author knows very well that no country that has experienced colonialist aggression and imperialist domination can ever remain the same or preserve wholly its traditions. Does she not want Dogon society to make any progress? The wish expressed here reminds us of the old anthropologists.

In many ways Marcel Griaule and his team of anthropologists started the rush for Dogon artefacts which set in a train of activities that ensured that the Dogon way of life would undergo fundamental transformations. Polly Richards has written: “Ever since the studies in the 1930s of Marcel Griaule and his team. Dogon people have gained worldwide attention for their spectacular masking traditions. Seventy years on, with the annual exodus and return of young men to cities seeking work, with the influx of tourism, increasing desertification, and most significantly with the penetration of Christianity and Islam and developments in national politics, the Dogon region is somewhat altered.” (3)

Most readers are no doubt aware that the Musée du Quai Branly inherited from the Musée de l’Homme and the Musée National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie. (which no longer exists) various African objects from the two institutions. These institutions were enriched by the artefacts which had been stolen/looted/extracted from the former French colonies during the nefarious Dakar-Djibouti expedition (1931-1934) as well as by other seizures under the colonial regime. The infamous expedition had been authorized by the French Government to collect all artefacts in the African territories it deemed necessary for studying the corresponding societies. The brutal methods used by the expedition have been described by one of its members, Michel Leiris in his famous book, L’Afrique Fantôme. (4) Extortion, stealing and intimidation appear to have been the most favoured methods of this group of eminent scholars. (5)

Since Independence, African countries have sought to recover some of their looted or extorted cultural artefacts but with little success. The Musée du Quai Branly seems determined not even to consider requests for restitution. Sally Price has quoted a Director of the museum, Germain Viatte as saying,

“France is both universalist and secular. We need to recognize that [museum collections] belong to the history of our own country, but also to cultures that may have disappeared, or be on the way out, or hoping for cultural revival. We need to take all this into account, but without giving in to a kind of paternalism, confining other people to their particularities and reserving universalism exclusively for ourselves because we’re worried about being “politically correct”. We cannot give in to claims for restitution like those presented to the English for the Parthenon marbles or the Benin bronzes. But what we can do is set in motion international collaboration designed to find viable compromises between different, often incompatible interests, for example, between restitution and the protection of objects.” (6)

The unwillingness of the French even to consider restitution claims and other demands from Africans prompted Aminata Traoré, a former Minister of Culture from Mali, to issue her famous statement on the occasion of the opening of the Musée du Quai Branly: “In our opinion, the Musée du Quai Branly is built on a deep and painful paradox since almost the totality of the Africans, Amerindians, the Australian Aborigines whose talents and creativity are being celebrated, will never cross the doorstep of the museum in view of the so-called selective immigration. It is true that measures have been taken to ensure that we can consult the archives via Internet. Thus our works of art have a right of residence at a place where we are forbidden to stay”. (7)

Since Independence, Mali, like most African States, has been the object of intense plundering. (8) Most of the looted artefacts end up in the United States and the European States where there are profitable markets for African artworks. Mali has enacted legislation that imposes control on export of antiquities and archaeological objects, by making it obligatory to obtain export license from the National Museum in Bamako. Within the framework of the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property (1970), Mali has signed an agreement with the United States by which the United States undertook to prohibit the import to its territory of listed items unless they are accompanied by documents certifying that the materials left Mali legally and are not in violation of Mali laws. It is worth noting that most of Mali artefacts that are outside the country seem to be in the United States.

Poverty and corruption in Mali have not made it made it easy to achieve full implementation of restrictions on export of artefacts. The African dealers who supply Western markets with Malian artefacts sometimes obtain export licence for one object and use the permit to export another. It has been accepted by most experts that so long as there exists in the West a lucrative market for Malian artefacts, so long will the African dealers and their assistants continue to loot and smuggle artefacts to the Western world.

The Dogon exhibition at Quai Branly will no doubt impress most visitors. The important issue is not whether the museum that inherited Malian and other African artefacts looted in the colonial regime and in the post independent period can organize a successful exhibition but whether Mali and the other African countries should continue to be deprived of their cultural property. Would the lenders of Mali objects to Musée du Quai Branly be willing to “lend” Malian artefacts to the Malian National Museum or shall we be faced with the standard arguments that these objects are too fragile to travel to Bamako or that the climate of Mali would have deleterious effects on the Malian artefacts now in Europe and United States of America? Would the museum that is willing and proud to lend African artefacts to museums in China be also ready to “lend” Malian objects to Mali? (9)

An aspect of the Dogon exhibition which I noticed is the determination to exhibit African artefacts in extremely dim light. It seems to be a common practice followed by the French in exhibitions on African art. We noted this tendency in the exhibition, Ode au Grand art africain. (10) The same practice is followed in two other exhibitions taking place in Paris at the same time as the Dogon exhibition, namely, Angola Figures de Pouvoir at the Musée Dapper and Vodun African Voodoo at the Fondation Cartier. (11) The Voodoo exhibition displays some of the African objects on the ground floor where daylight permeates the exhibition space. But the majority of the objects are shown in the basement, in semi obscurity. The effect of this dimness is that many of the notes displayed at the exhibitions are not easily legible. I have not found any reasonable explanation for displaying African art objects in semi-darkness in the Western world. Could it be that these exhibitions, usually organized by ethnologists or persons greatly influenced by anthropological writings want to reinforce the idea that Africa is a dark continent with mysterious ways of life and cultures? European visitors who visit these exhibitions could hardly avoid concluding that African culture and Africa represent darkness and obscurantism whilst Europe and European culture represent light and enlightenment. The moment the average visitor enters an African exhibition she is plunged into darkness; her senses are invaded and she is made to feel she is in an obscure world, at the mercy of unknown spirits and dangerous objects and creatures. Is that what the curators seek to achieve? Have these curators been following Hegel and the racist philosophers of the so-called European Enlightenment?

Paris may be a city of light but as far as exhibitions on African art are concerned, there seems to be a strong tendency to present darkness and mystery as essential elements of African culture. Instead of showing African art objects as they are in their social and cultural context, including the strong light in Africa, they are presented in semi- obscurity. The curators seem to appeal more to the fears and prejudices of the Western viewer instead of letting her trust her vision of beauty, excellence and craftsmanship. After more than 500 years of contact between Africa and Europe, some Westerners feel an imperative need to present Africa and African cultures as exotic and mysterious. We are yet to see a major European exhibition of a Western culture in Paris plunged into semi- darkness.

The Dogon exhibition goes from Paris (5 April-24 July 2011) to Bonn (14 October 2011-22 January 2012) but will not go to Bamako or any African capital. It seems to be assumed that Malians do not need to know more about Dogon art and other Africans do not need to know about Malian art. This way of ignoring the need and interest of Africans in major exhibitions on African culture is fairly widespread and has become the hall-mark of major exhibitions in New York, Paris, London, Berlin and elsewhere even though many of these exhibitions were organized with the help of Africans and African institutions. This was the case with the recent Benin exhibition, Benin-Kings and Rituals, Court Arts from Nigeria, and the Ife exhibition, Kingdom of Ife: Sculptures from West Africa. Is there an assumption that Africans know about their own cultures and other African cultures? Nobody seems worried that resources about Dogon culture which are easily available to French children are not accessible to Malian school pupils? Have the French taken control of the narrative of Dogon culture similarly to the way Neil McGregor attempted to attribute to the British Museum the control over the narrative of Greek history?
Not Bamako, Lagos or Accra but Paris appears to be the place for viewing African art. Is anybody worried by this or do Africans not matter as far as concerns the acquisition of knowledge about African art and culture?

A short comparison of the catalogue of the exhibition, Dogon with the catalogue of the permanent exhibition of the National Museum of Mali shows immediately the imbalance in the relations of Mali with France. The Malian museum appears to have fewer Dogon artworks than the French museum. (12)

Considered against the colonial background of robbery and oppression which enabled the Dogon artefacts to be taken out of Mali, the logical question is when these objects will be returned to their country of origin as requested by UNESCO and the United Nations. Sculptures and other artefacts seized on the pretext of studying cultures and societies should have been returned at the latest at the time of Independence. Or are the French scholars and institutions that received the fruits of the Dakar-Djibouti Expedition (later on transferred to the Musée du quai Branly) still studying them after the seizures in 1931-34?

Those who are loud in declaring the need for protection of human rights do not seem to be in a hurry to recognize and protect the elementary human right to independent cultural development.

“All that I do has always interested me, but I nevertheless find the time too long and I can only be momentarily passionate about my work, inasmuch as the methods employed for the investigation resemble very much the interrogations of a magistrate rather than friendly conversations, and these methods of collecting artefacts are, nine out of ten, methods of forced purchase, not to say requisition..

All this casts a certain shadow over my life and I am only partially at peace with my conscience.

Many adventures like those relating to the seizures of kono, on the whole leave me no remorse since there is no other way to obtain such objects and sacrilege itself is a sufficiently grandiose element, inasmuch as current purchases leave me perplexed, for I have the impression that we are turning in a vicious circle: one pillages the artefacts of the Negroes on the pretext of teaching people to know and like them; that is to say, to train other ethnologists who will also like them and pillage their artefacts”. Michel Leiris (13)

Kwame Opoku, 19 June 2011.

NOTES
1. Samuel Sidibé “The fight against the plundering of Malian Cultural Heritage and Illicit Exportation”, p.79, in Peter R. Schmidt and Roderick J. McIntosh (Eds.), Plundering Africa’s Past, Indiana University, 1996

2. Hélène Leloup, Dogon, Somogy Editions d’Art, Musée du Quai Branly, 2011.

See Annex I for the list of lenders.
3. Polly Richards, “Masques Dogons in a Changing World,” African Arts. Volume XXXVIII, Number 4, Winter 2005, pp. 46-53.

4. Gallimard, 1953: Odile Tobner, “Vérité sur l’art des colonies” www.billetsdafrique.info

« Ces ouvres d’art n’ont été ni reçues ni acquises honnêtement, elles ont été volées ou escroquées à leurs possesseurs impuissant ou trompés. Si on en veut un témoignage, entre mille, qu’on lise le récit de l’ethnologisation des Dogons par Marcel Griaule, fait par Michel Leiris » (Michel Leiris, L’Afrique Fantôme).

Philippe Baqué, Un nouvel or noir : pillage des œuvres d’art en Afrique, Paris – Méditerranée, 1999, Paris. An account of the methods used can also to be found in this excellent book by Philippe Baqué where he describes the methods used by ethnologists, art collectors and art dealers to secure cultural objects from Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. Objects which were too big or heavy were broken into pieces to facilitate transportation. Pressure was used on villages to sell religious objects which were not for sale at ridiculous prices dictated by the French.

Bernard Dupaigne, Le scandale des arts premiers – La véritable histoire du musée du quai Branly, Mille et une nuits, Paris, 2006. The author recounts the controversies surrounding the creation of the Musée du Quai Branly

5. K.Opoku, “ Benin to Quai Branly: A Museum for the Arts of the Others or for the Stolen Arts of the Others?” http://www.museum-security.org

6. Sally Price, Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac’s Museum on the Quay Branly University of Chicago Press, 2007, p. 124.

7. See Annex II
8. Samuel Sidibé, Peter R. Schmidt and Roderick J.McIntosh, op. cit. pp. 79-86;

Samuel Sidibé, “The Pillage of Archaeological Sites in Mali.” African Arts. Autumn 1995.

Sidibé, Samuel. “Mali: When Farmers Become Curators.” The UNESCO Courier . April 2001. http://www.unesco.org/courier/2001_04/uk/doss22.htm

Joshua Hammer, “As demand for its antiquities soars, the West African country is losing its most prized artifacts to illegal sellers and smugglers”. http://www.smithsonianmag Kléna Sanogo, “The Looting of Cultural Material in Mali”,

http://www.mcdonald.cam.ac.uk/projects/iarc/culturewithoutcontext/issue4/sanogo.htm

Kléna Sanogo, « Quelques aspects de la lutte du Mali contre le pillage du patrimoine culturel », Grégory Compagnon, (Ed.), Halte au pillage, Editions Errance,Paris, 2019, pp. 409-426.

Claire Hilmer, SAFE ,”Say YES to Mali” http://www.savingantiquities.org

U.S. Department of State, International Cultural Property Protection web site http://exchanges.state.gov/culprop/index.html

K. Opoku, “Let Others Loot for You: Looting of African Artefacts for Western Museums”, http://www.modernghana.com

See also Annex III below.
9. “Le musée du quai Branly s’associe au musée national de Chine”

http://french.peopledaily.com.cn/Culture

10. K. Opoku, « Do African Sculptures ever die? Comments on the exhibition “Ode au grand art africain: Les statues meurent aussi » Paris.

http://www.afrikanet.info

11. “Vodun African Voodoo”. Fondation Cartier, Paris, 5 April -25 September, 2011.

12. Le Musée National du Mali; Catalogue de l’exposition permanente, Editions Snoeck, Gand, 2006. Copyright, Editions Snoeck, Musée National d’Ethnologie,Leiden.

13. Lettre de 19 septembre,in Michel Leiris, Miroir de l’Afrique,Quarto Gallimard, Paris,Editor, Jean Jamin. 1996 p. 204 Translation from. French by K.Opoku

“ …Tout ce que je fais m’intéresse toujours beaucoup, mais je trouve quand même le temps bien long et ne puis jamais me passionner que momentanément pour mon travail, d’autant plus que les méthodes employées pour l’enquête ressemblent beaucoup plus à des interrogatoires de juge d’instruction qu’à des conversations sur un plan amical, et que les méthodes de collecte des objets sont, neuf fois sur dix, des méthodes d’achat forcé, pour ne pas dire de réquisition.

Tout cela jette une certaine ombre sur ma vie et je n’ai la conscience qu’à demi tranquille.

Autant des aventures comme celles des enlèvements du kono, tout compte fait, me laissent sans remords, puisqu’il n’y a pas d’autre moyen d’avoir de tels objets et que le sacrilège lui-même est un élément assez grandiose, autant les achats courants me laissent perplexe, car j’ai bien l’impression qu’on tourne dans un cercle vicieux : on pille des Nègres, sous prétexte d’apprendre aux gens à les connaître et les aimer; c’est-à-dire, en fin de compte, à former d’autres ethnographes qui iront eux aussi les « aimer et les piller Michel Leris.”

See also, “ Extrait de L’Afrique fantôme année 1931 et de la correspondance de Michel Leiris, http://www.michel-leiris.fr”

ANNEX I
LIST OF LENDERS OF DOGON ARTEFACTS TO MUSÉE DU QUAI BRANLY.

This list is based on the information given on p.4 of the catalogue of the exhibition where they are grouped under countries.

Belgium Antwerp – Lucien Van de Velde
Saint-Niklaas – Su and Jan Calmeyen Collection.

Canada Montreal, Musée des Beaux Arts
Toronto- The Art Gallery of Ontario

France Paris :
Quentin and Majolaine Blazy
Patrick and Beatrice Caput Collection

Musée Dapper
Musée du Quai Branly
Jean- Michel Huguenin
Max Itsikovitz
Guy Ladriére
Germany
Cologne – Jörg Rumpl Collection
Düsseldorf – Simonis Archives
Landshut – Skulpturenmuseum im Hofberg,

Stiftung Fritz und Maria Koenig
Italy
Rome – Chantal Dandrieu and Fabrizio Giovagnoni

Switzerland
Basel – Bernhard Gardi
Geneva – Musée Barbier-Mueller
Zug – Udo Hortsman
Zurich – Musée Rietberg
United Kingdom
London – Arteas Ltd.
Norwich – Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection

United States of America
Bloomington – Indiana University Art Museum
Houston – Museum of Fine Arts of Houston
The Menil Collection
New Orleans- New Orleans Museum of Art
New York – Brooklyn Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Francesco Pellizzi
Laura and James Ross
San Diego – Richard and Susan Slesinger Ulevitch

San Francisco – Robert T. Wall Family
Seattle – Seattle Art Museum
Tenefly – Drs. Daniel and Marian Malcolm

ANNEX II
Those who can read French are encouraged to read the full statement issued by Aminata Traoré, a great intellectual of our times, on the occasion of the opening of the Musée du Quai Branly.` This text “Musee du Quai Branly et Immigration choisie: droit de cite” has been published at many places e.g. AFRIKARA-www.afrikara.com

« Talents et compétences président donc au tri des candidats africains à l’immigration en France selon la loi Sarkozy dite de «l’immigration choisie», votée en mai 2006 par l’Assemblée nationale française. Le ministre français de l’Intérieur s’est offert le luxe de venir nous le signifier, en Afrique, en invitant nos gouvernants à jouer le rôle de geôliers de la «racaille» dont la France ne veut plus sur son sol. Au même moment, du fait du verrouillage de l’axe Maroc-Espagne, après les événements sanglants de Ceuta et Melilla, des candidats africains à l’émigration clandestine, en majorité jeunes meurent par centaines, dans l’indifférence générale, au large des côtes africaines.

L’Europe forteresse, dont la France est l’une des chevilles ouvrières, déploie, en ce moment, une véritable armada contre ces quêteurs de passerelles. Or les oeuvres d’art, qui sont aujourd’hui à l’honneur au musée du Quai Branly, appartiennent d’abord et avant tout aux peuples déshérités du Mali, du Bénin, de la Guinée, du Niger, du Burkina-Faso, du Cameroun, du Congo. Elles constituent une part substantielle du patrimoine culturel et artistique de ces «sans visa» dont certains sont morts par balles à Ceuta et Melilla ou des sans-papiers traqués au coeur de l’Europe et, arrêtés, sont rendus, menottes aux poings à leurs pays d’origine. Dans ma Lettre au président des Français à propos de la Côte-d’Ivoire et de l’Afrique en général, je retiens le musée du Quai Branly comme l’une des expressions parfaites de ces contradictions, incohérences et paradoxes de la France dans ses rapports à l’Afrique. A l’heure où celui-ci ouvre ses portes au public, je me demande jusqu’où iront les puissants de ce monde dans l’arrogance et le viol de notre imaginaire.

Nous sommes invités, aujourd’hui, à célébrer avec l’ancienne puissance coloniale une oeuvre architecturale, incontestablement belle, ainsi que notre propre déchéance et la complaisance de ceux qui, acteurs politiques et institutionnels africains, estiment que nos biens culturels sont mieux dans les beaux édifices du Nord que sous nos propres cieux. Je conteste le fait que l’idée de créer un musée de cette importance puisse naître, non pas d’un examen rigoureux, critique et partagé des rapports entre l’Europe et l’Afrique, l’Asie, l’Amérique et l’Océanie dont les pièces sont originaires, mais de l’amitié d’un chef d’Etat avec un collectionneur d’oeuvre d’art qu’il a rencontré un jour, sur une plage de l’île Maurice. Les trois cent mille pièces que le musée du Quai Branly abrite constituent un véritable trésor de guerre en raison du mode d’acquisition de certaines d’entre elles et le trafic d’influence auquel celui-ci donne parfois lieu entre la France et les pays dont elles sont originaires.

Je ne sais pas comment les transactions se sont opérées du temps de François Ier, de Louis XIV et au XIXe siècle pour les pièces les plus anciennes. Je sais, par contre, qu’en son temps, Catherine Trautman, à l’époque ministre de la Culture de la France dont j’étais l’homologue malienne, m’avait demandé d’autoriser l’achat pour le musée du Quai Branly d’une statuette de Tial appartenant à un collectionneur belge. De peur de participer au blanchiment d’une oeuvre d’art qui serait sortie en fraude de notre pays, j’ai proposé que la France l’achète (pour la coquette somme de deux cents millions de francs CFA), pour nous la restituer afin que nous puissions ensuite la lui prêter. Je me suis entendue dire, au sein du Comité d’orientation dont j’étais l’un des membres, que l’argent du contribuable français ne pouvait pas être utilisé dans l’acquisition d’une pièce qui reviendrait au Mali… Exclue à partir de ce moment de la négociation, j’ai appris par la suite que l’Etat malien, qui n’a pas de compte à rendre à ses contribuables, a acheté la pièce en question en vue de la prêter au musée. Alors, que célèbre-t-on ? La sanctuarisation de la passion que le président français partage avec son ami disparu ainsi que le talent de l’architecte du musée ou les droits culturels, économiques, politiques et sociaux des peuples d’Afrique, d’Asie, d’Amérique et d’Océanie ?

Le musée du Quai Branly est bâti sur un profond et douloureux paradoxe à partir du moment où la quasi-totalité des Africains, des Amérindiens, des Aborigènes d’Australie, dont le talent et la créativité sont célébrés, n’en franchiront jamais le seuil compte tenu de la loi sur l’immigration choisie. Il est vrai que des dispositions sont prises pour que nous puissions consulter les archives via l’Internet. Nos oeuvres ont droit de cité là où nous sommes, dans l’ensemble, interdits de séjour. A l’intention de ceux qui voudraient voir le message politique derrière l’esthétique, le dialogue des cultures derrière la beauté des oeuvres, je crains que l’on ne soit loin du compte. Un masque africain sur la place de la République n’est d’aucune utilité face à la honte et à l’humiliation subies par les Africains et les autres peuples pillés dans le cadre d’une certaine coopération au développement. Bienvenue donc au musée de l’interpellation qui contribuera je l’espère à édifier les opinions publiques françaises, africaine et mondiale sur l’une des manières dont l’Europe continue de se servir et d’asservir d’autres peuples du monde tout en prétendant le contraire.

Enfin, je voudrais m’adresser à ces oeuvres de l’esprit qui sauront intercéder auprès des opinions publiques. «Vous nous manquez terriblement. Notre pays, le Mali, et l’Afrique tout entière subissent bien des bouleversements. Aux dieux des chrétiens et des musulmans qui ont contesté votre place dans nos coeurs et vos fonctions dans nos sociétés s’est ajouté le dieu argent. Vous devez en savoir quelque chose au regard des transactions dont certaines acquisitions de ce musée ont été l’objet. Il est le moteur du marché dit libre et concurrentiel supposé être le paradis sur Terre alors qu’il n’est que gouffre pour l’Afrique. Appauvris, désemparés et manipulés par des dirigeants convertis au dogme du marché, vos peuples s’en prennent les uns aux autres, s’entre-tuent ou fuient. Parfois, ils viennent buter contre le long mur de l’indifférence, dont Schengen. N’entendez-vous pas les lamentations de ceux et celles qui empruntent la voie terrestre, se perdre dans le Sahara ou se noyer dans les eaux de la Méditerranée ? N’entendez-vous pas les cris de ces centaines de naufragés dont des femmes enceintes et des enfants? Si oui, ne restez pas muettes, ne vous sentez pas impuissantes. Rappelez à ceux qui vous veulent tant dans leurs musées et aux citoyens français et européens qui les visitent que l’annulation totale et immédiate de la dette extérieure de l’Afrique est primordiale. Dites-leur que libéré de ce fardeau, du dogme du tout marché qui justifie la tutelle du FMI et de la Banque mondiale, le continent noir redressera la tête »

Aminata Traoré « Nouveau millénaire, Défis libertaires »http://1libertaire.free.fr/ArtPremierInterditSejour.html http://www.afrikara.com2

ANNEX III
ICOM RED LIST
Reproduced from Red List Africa
The looting of archaeological items and the destruction of archaeological sites in Africa are a cause of irreparable damage to African history and hence to the history of humankind. Whole sections of our history have been wiped out and can never be reconstituted. These objects cannot be understood once they have been removed from their archaeological context and divorced from the whole to which they belong. Only professional archaeological excavations can help recover their identity, their date and their location. But so long as there is demand from the international art market these objects will be looted and offered for sale.

In response of this urgent situation, a list of categories of African archaeological objects particularly at risk from looting was drawn up at the Workshop on the Protection of the African Cultural Heritage held in Amsterdam from 22 to 24 October 1997. Organised by ICOM (International Council of Museums), within the framework of its AFRICOM programme, it brought together professionals from African, European and North American museums to set up a common policy for fighting against the illicit traffic in African cultural property, and to promote regional and international agreements.

The Red List includes the following categories of archaeological items:

• Nok terracotta from the Bauchi Plateau and the Katsina and Sokoto regions (Nigeria)

• Terracotta and bronzes from Ife (Nigeria)
• Esie stone statues (Nigeria)
• Terracotta, bronzes and pottery from the Niger Valley (Mali)

• Terracotta statuettes, bronzes, potteries, and stone statues from the Bura System (Niger, Burkina Faso)

• Stone statues from the North of Burkina Faso and neighbouring regions

• Terracotta from the North of Ghana (Komaland) and Côte d’Ivoire

• Terracotta and bronzes so-called Sao (Cameroon, Chad, Nigeria)

These objects are among the cultural goods most affected by looting and theft. They are protected by national legislation, banned from export, and may under no circumstances be put on sale.

An appeal is therefore being made to museums, auction houses, art dealers and collectors to stop buying them.

This list is of objects which are particularly at risk, but in no way should it be considered exhaustive. The question of the legality of export arises with regard to any archaeological item.

ICOM and the Protection of Heritage
ICOM is an international and non-profit organisation dedicated to the development and advancement of museums and the museum profession. Founded in 1946, ICOM counts 15,000 members, providing a world-wide communications network for museum professionals of all disciplines and specialities. It is a non-governmental organisation (NGO) in formal association with UNESCO, and has been granted advisory status by the United Nations Economic and Social Council. Its Paris-based (UNESCO House) Secretariat and Museum Information Centre ensure the day-to-day running of the organisation and the co-ordination of its activities and programmes.

The fight against illicit traffic of cultural property is a priority for ICOM. Museums must be at the forefront of this fight by ensuring that they have a scrupulous acquisitions policy which conforms to the ICOM Code of Professional Ethics.

In Africa, in the framework of AFRICOM (the ICOM programme for Africa), a number of concrete initiatives have been launched to stem looting and thefts. Regional workshops have been organised to reinforce co-operation between museums, police and customs. The improvement of inventory procedures with the finalisation of the Handbook of standards. Documenting African collections has been an essential tool for protecting museum collections. The proper circulation of information on stolen works through the publication of One Hundred Missing Objects. Looting in Africa has raised the awareness of professionals and public alike, and has been a factor in the recovery of items. In October 1997, a new stage was reached in Amsterdam where African, European and North-American professionals rallied in favour of the protection of African cultural heritage. As part of the development of a joint policy to combat trafficking of African cultural objects, recommendations were formulated in the fields of North/South collaboration, training, awareness-raising and research. A Red List of particularly endangered archaeological objects was drawn up.

Since October 1999, AFRICOM has become the International Council of African Museums, an autonomous pan-African organisation for museums, with headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya.

Terracotta, bronzes and pottery from the Niger Valley (Mali)

http://archives.icom.museum/redlist

These objects come from mounds in the flood plains of the Niger river. They are usually known as Jenne after the name of the town close to the archaeological site of Jenne-Jeno, but are actually found throughout the Niger valley. This site is a national heritage site and is included in the UNESCO World Heritage List.

These terracotta sculptures, whose height ranges generally from 20 cm to 40 cm, represent mostly human figurines, often found intact. The human form is represented either kneeling or sitting, with arms crossed over the chest, or hands on thighs, gestures often being asymmetrical. Some horsemen and footmen may have their torsos wound about by a cross belt supporting a quiver. The bodies are smooth or covered with round pastilles, made from fine-grained clay. Pottery, some of which includes anthropomorphic motifs, and metal figurines are also found in this region. Among zoomorphic representations, snakes feature prominently.

The shaven-headed human heads sometimes wear headgear and are characterised by protruding lips, triangular noses and above all by projecting eyeballs, whose brows are in the form of concentric grooves, and whose eyelashes are incisions radiating out from the eye.

One subgroup stands out. It features longer and cylindrical bodies, smaller eyes not surrounded by incisions, as well as a large number of bracelets. These artworks are often classified into styles, from Bankoni and Segou. They come from the Bamako, Segou and Bougouni regions of the South of Mali.

The Musée national of Mali owns all statuettes found during official excavations. The majority of other statuettes known to exist from the Niger valley have been put into circulation by the looting of archaeological sites, 80% or 90% of which have been violated. Very little is therefore known about the cultures which produced these items, in spite of the very large number of objects now available on the art market. Their exact provenance will remain forever unknown, as also their date. The range of dates which the thermoluminescent examinations can provide is so wide that it leaves unresolved the problem of accurate dating.

Given the urgency of the situation, programmes to raise awareness among the local population have been set up and the authorities are in a position to intervene and seize looted objects, as in Thial in 1990, and more recently in the spring of 1999, in a village close to Jenne.

Two years on from the opening of the New Acropolis Museum, it is still the most popular attraction in Athens, but ticket prices are rising, as the initial subsidies are gradually removed. The museum has been a resounding success story for Greece – advertising an entirely different image of the country from the typical sun washed beaches of the islands, or the protests associated with the financial crisis.

From:
Kathimerini (English edition)

Tuesday June 21, 2011
The Acropolis Museum: A reintroduction
Despite chaos in the surrounding area, organizers are busy preparing its birthday celebrations
By Iota Sykka

At 11 a.m. on Thursday, as the country was aboil with developing news on the political front, so was the area connecting Amalias Avenue with Dionysiou Areopagitou Street, as the double-parked tour coaches waiting for their passengers to come out of the Acropolis Museum were hiding the traffic lights.

The entire pedestrian area was in a state of absolute Greek pandemonium. The sightseeing train was packed with visitors, as were the nearby cafes next to the souvenir shops selling poor-quality copies of treasured antiquities. Street musicians contributed to the noise as well, while drivers flouted the no-car law up and down the pedestrianized walkway. Two years ago, when the city was feverish with the museum’s inauguration, such a state of affairs would have been unthinkable.

On Monday, the new Acropolis Museum is celebrating its two-year anniversary. The figures indicate that fewer visitors went to the museum in its second year (1,309,859) compared to its inaugural year, when it drew 2 million people. There is an extra thorn here, and that is the issue of free tickets. Overall, the museum has fared well in comparison with others in the capital, but if one considers that 40 percent of its tickets are free, a new problem arises.

The president of the museum’s administrative board, Dimitris Pandermalis, wants to address the issue, even though he has kept the price of tickets at 5 euros, and is counting on the revenues of the museum’s gift shops, cafe and restaurant (since last fall, revenues from the latter have been going into the museum’s till). The Acropolis Museum employs 200 members of staff and needs about 4 to 5 million euros a year to cover costs. Another snag is the fact that the museum is still awaiting a presidential decree which will solve the issue of the lack of a director. The matter is still in the hands of the Council of State, the country’s highest administrative court. However, once that is cleared up it will embark on a fresh round of visits to various ministries.

“The museum is reintroducing itself,” said Pandermalis, who has also been at the receiving end of criticism regarding the presentation of a number of exhibits. The visiting routes in some exhibition areas have been revamped while previously unseen artworks are going on display and others are being moved to more suitable spots. In the Parthenon Hall, the plaster frames of five metopes have been replaced by transparent plexiglass cases. Meanwhile, explanatory signs have been enriched and the staff are being trained to handle difficult visitors and medical incidents.

The Acropolis Museum is making an effort to get to know its audience better and is recording its visitor profiles. More importantly, it has embarked on a series of collaborations with universities and institutions. One of the most impressive projects is a collaboration with the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and Geonalysis SA for the digitalizing and reproduction of the Parthenon frieze. This involves three-dimensional scanning of the sculptures and their reunification inside the museum. Other projects include a museum tour guide program using mobile phones, a program carried out in collaboration with five institutions.

Monday’s two-year anniversary will be celebrated with a music event. The Symphony Orchestra of the City of Athens will perform in the courtyard of the museum at 9 p.m. Meanwhile, ornaments which once adorned the Parthenon will be incorporated into the festivities.

The museum will offer visitors a chance to admire a number of original pieces from the corner ornaments which decorate the tip of the two pediments. They can also learn the details of a unique piece of jewelry which has been restored and find out how the artist transported and transformed his nature-inspired idea through the art of marble carving. Meanwhile, members of the museum’s staff will answer visitors’ questions and the museum will stay open until midnight.

Leaving behind the building erected by Swiss-born architect Bernard Tschumi in collaboration with Greek architect Michael Fotiadis the other day, everything seemed in place for the upcoming celebration. Standing on a pedestal, an owl could be seen at the museum entrance, while members of staff murmured that the area is welcoming the wise birds once again.

Meanwhile, beneath the entrance area, the excavation site is not going to open to the public before the end of the year as originally announced. Nevertheless, the area appears to inpire the public as a number of visitors throw 20 cent coins, regardless of the fact there is no water.

For more information, visit http://www.theacropolismuseum.gr.

Another review of the new children’s book by Anthony Horowitz, about a plot to return the Parthenon Marbles from the British Museum to Athens.

From:
Guardian

Scorpia Rising by Anthony Horowitz – review

Sunday 8 May 2011 11.00 BST

‘The detail is amazing, he drags you straight into the room’

The finale of the enthralling Alex Rider series, comes with a bang, and this time, the majority of the book is from the bad guy’s point of view. Alex returns this time with SCORPIA, the evil criminal organisation, on his tail. Jack Starbright, his new guardian is with him this time as Alex goes to Cairo, in Egypt, with him and Mr Smithers, Horowitz’s version of James Bond’s Q; the gadget man. At the beginning, we see the arch-villain: Zeljan Kurst, meeting a dying Greek millionaire in the British Museum. I recently visited the Museum myself and the detail is amazing, he drags you straight into the room. This book will see, a major twist, Smither’s final shocking gadget, and a new side of Alan Blunt. I would recommend this, to anyone between the ages of 10 to 13, because it’s a bit violent for under 10′s.

The British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles have published a tribute to the journalist & author Christopher Hitchens, who was a long standing supporter of the campaign to return the Elgin Marbles to Athens.

From:
Sourcewire

Tribute to the late Christopher Hitchens from the BCRPM
Friday, 16 December 2011

The British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles (BCRPM) today paid tribute to the late Christopher Hitchens who died earlier this week, for his keen support for the return of the Parthenon Marbles to Greece.

Eleni Cubitt, Honorary Secretary for the Committee said: “We are all deeply saddened by the news of Christopher’s death and we send our sincere condolences to his family at this time. Christopher’s contribution and belief in our cause was a great strength to me personally and he will be sorely missed as one of our key supporters.”

Christopher Hitchens is the author of ‘The Parthenon Marbles: The Case for Reunification’ and he attended the launched of the third edition of the book on 23 May 2008 at Chatham House in London. This edition is dedicated to James Cubitt, founder of the BCRPM and has a preface written by Nadine Gordimer.

Mr Hitchens felt the opening of the new Acropolis Museum provided the ideal opportunity to re-state the case for the return of the Elgin Marbles to Athens. When the new Acropolis Museum opened in June 2009, Christopher Hitchens visited and wrote an article, ‘The Lovely Stoes’ which was published in Vanity Fair (July 2009). His concluding sentence reads: ”And one day, surely, there will be an agreement to do the right thing by the world’s most “right” structure.”

Hitchens interest in the marbles began 25 years ago when he read an essay by Colin Macinnes, author of the 1950s novel Absolute Beginners, who had taken an interest in the Parthenon Marbles early on when no one else was really looking into why they were not returned to Greece. Hitchens, having heard nothing about them before, felt compelled to find out more.

He wrote his first article in 1983 on the subject in The Spectator and later went on to publish his book ‘The Parthenon Marbles: The Case for Reunification’ in 1987. In the book Hitchen insists the Greeks have a “natural right” to the sculptures, and that they belong on the hill of the Acropolis “in that light, in that air. Pentelic marble does not occur in the UK”.

The argument still hasn’t been won and the Parthenon Marbles still remain in the British Museum.

The BCRPM has asked its member’s, many of whom met with Christopher at the book launch, to send in their own tributes and thoughts, which will be put up on the web site in due course.

For more information visit http://www.parthenonuk.com

Following Christopher Hitchens death, Stephen Fry talks about why he now thinks that the time is now right for the Parthenon Marbles in the British Museum to return to Athens.

From:
StephenFry.com

A Modest Proposal
By Stephen Fry
December 19th, 2011

Greece is the Word

I have a modest proposal that might simultaneously celebrate the life of Christopher Hitchens, strengthen Britain’s low stock in Europe and allow us to help a dear friend in terrible trouble.

Perhaps the most beautiful and famous monument in the world is the Doric masterpiece atop the citadel, or Acropolis, of Athens. It is called the Parthenon, the Virgin Temple dedicated to Pallas Athene, the goddess of wisdom who gave the Greek capital its name.

The Acropolis contains other temples and represents in the minds of scholars, historians and all who care about our past and the source of our civilisation, the pinnacle of Athens’s Golden Age under the leadership of Pericles; that period of peace between the wars against Persia which they won, and the wars against their neighbours Sparta, which they lost.

For students and lovers of architecture the Acropolis (over which I made a spectacular fool of myself some years ago) will always remain one of the most perfect examples of the Doric order ever constructed. The Romans and Arabians later added arches, ogees, domes, pendentives, barrelled vaults and squinches to the basic elements of architecture, but the Parthenon’s grace has never been surpassed. Its influence is all around us. Pillars, pilasters, porticos, pediments, architraves, entablatures, triglyphs and metopes may sound strange but we see them every day in high street buildings, town halls, 18th century churches, squares and crescents. Some people who spot trains or birds are called sad. I am a sad corbel, buttress and apse spotter – one who loves that there is a name for everything in architecture, a full and rich anatomy.

Doric elements were not the only thing that came from Greece. 5th century BC Athens was a city state that gave us Aristotle and his devising of logic, categories, ethics and poetics; Plato and Socrates led ceaseless quests for the discovery of the truth behind people, phenomena and politics. Their refusal to take as true any baseless, unprovable assertions made by priests, tyrants and hierarchs but instead to examine honestly from first principles took nearly two millennia to be rediscovered by the renaissance and then enlightenment philosophers who shaped our modern world very much with Periclean Athens in mind. Euclid and Archimedes are to this day heroes to all mathematicians and engineers. Their blend of rationalism and empiricism is at the heart of all science and sense. The sheer magnificent beauty of Euclidian geometric theorems and their proofs, has never, most mathematicians would agree, been surpassed.

The duty of Athenian citizens to play a part in justice through the tribunals on the Areopagus Hill was taken seriously, as was democracy in the form of regular voting: there was even an agreed assumption that theatre as a total art form that combined mask, dance, poetry, drama, history, music and religious ceremony was an essential element of public life and formed part of an open analysis of Athenian identity. As Nietzsche pointed out in his supreme The Birth of Tragedy, the Greek people had gone from tribal blood feuds, war and savagery to a peak of civilisation in a very short time indeed. Nietzsche chose the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus as representatives of the two sides of the Greek (and of course all human) character. One part harmonious, reasonable, artistic, musical, mathematical and idealistic, the other consumed by appetite, lusts and loss of reason through desire, greed and ambition. Whether we call these Freud’s ego and id or Forster’s prose and the passion, which we must “only connect”, no civilisation I can think of seems so clearly to display through its art, rhetoric, philosophy and politics just what it is to be a human, a social and collective being, what Aristotle himself called in a phrase almost worn away by universal use, “a political animal”.

Of course we are not talking about an ideal society. Slavery, the subjugated role of women, open paederasty and xenophobia, helotry and harlotry – these are not things wholly in tune with the temper of our own times. Read E. R. Dodds’s masterly The Greeks and the Irrational and you will see they weren’t all algebraic geniuses with a bent for brilliant oratory and logical exposition. But Athenian education, open enquiry, democracy, justice and a harmony of form in sculpture and architecture were quite new to our world and indeed their ability to question themselves is one of the things for which we are most indebted to them.

We have them to thank for the Olympic Games too, and the next Olympiad of the modern age will of course be held in London in 2012, and very excited and pleased about that I am. Excited and pleased because I love sport and always and automatically want to line up on the opposite side of cynics, curmudgeons, wet-blankets, pessimists, and (literally in this case) spoilsports.

I am also excited and pleased because the occasion — the largest regular gathering human beings on the face of the planet — offers…

A) a remarkable opportunity to appease the dead spirit of the great Hitchens

B) to make up to some small degree for our recent devastating and pathetic humiliation in Europe

C) to redress a great wrong and

D) to express our solidarity with, affection for and belief in Greece and the ideals it gave us.

The Hellenic Republic today is in heart-rending turmoil, a humiliating sovereign debt crisis has brought Greece to the brink of absolute ruin. This proud, beautiful nation for which Byron laid down his life is in a condition much like the one for which he mourned when they were under the Ottoman yoke in the early nineteenth century, taking time off from the comic ironic tones of his ottava rima masterpiece Don Juan to insert this mournful threnody….

The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!
Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace,
Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung!
Eternal summer gilds them yet,
But all, except their sun, is set…
And where are they? And where art thou?
My country? On thy voiceless shore
The heroic lay is tuneless now—
The heroic bosom beats no more!
And must thy lyre, so long divine,
Degenerate into hands like mine?
‘Tis something, in the dearth of fame,
Though linked among a fettered race,
To feel at least a patriot’s shame,
Even as I sing, suffuse my face;
For what is left the poet here?
For Greeks a blush–for Greece a tear….

Two years ago a new and beautiful Acropolis museum was completed, allowing visitors a much more intelligent enlightening, captivating and informative journey through the history and meaning of the Acropolis than the rather rocky hillside rambles of the past.

A year earlier, in 2008, the Italian and Greek Presidents had taken part in a ceremony in which a fragment of marble sculpture taken from Greece and left in Italy 200 years earlier was returned to Athens. This small fragment had been taken by the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Lord Elgin.

The greater part of the haul was taken to England where they have been housed in the British Museum in London since 1816 under the now highly charged name of the Elgin Marbles. Even at the time plenty of Britons thought the Ottoman Empire’s granting permission to take so many elements of the Parthenon (and the stunning Erectheum, the temple with its famous caryatids further down the hill) away from their home and into London was little short of looting.

MARBLES

What has all this to do with Christopher Hitchens, polemicist, shamer of Clinton, Kissinger and Mother Teresa, champion of Orwell and Payne, scourge of tele-evangelists and mountebanks everywhere? Well, in 1997 Hitchens wrote a book called The Parthenon Marbles, the Case for Reunification. In it he lays out how, inspired by reading Colin MacInnes (of Absolute Beginners fame) on the subject, he threw himself into finding out more about the marbles and came to what he saw a frankly irrefutable case for their return.

It was, as the author Simon Raven pointed out, the Greeks who maintained that anyone who tells you what happens to a person after they die is either a fool or a liar. The speculation over Hitchens’s soul’s fate has been as disgusting and degrading as the age of indulgences, sold pardons and chantry chapels, but comes as no surprise to anyone. His legacy however, his doctrine of decency, his war on bullies, tyrants, liars and frauds, now that can be honoured and it can be called, if you wanted to do so, his imperishable soul.

Arguments for keeping the Elgin Marbles in the BM usually boil down to:

A) If Elgin hadn’t appropriated them they would probably have rotted or crumbled away so we saved them and deserve to keep them

B) Once you go down the path of museums returning ransacked treasures to their countries of origin then all the great museums and galleries of the world will have their collections dispersed to the great detriment of scholarship, visitor access and common sense

C) Every year, more people see them in the British Museum than visit Athens, so to move them would be to reduce their availability to be seen.

Argument A is most peculiar. As Hitchens put it, if you rescue furniture from a neighbour’s fire and keep it for them while they rebuild their house you then give it back, you don’t claim rights over it. Hitchens points out in his book how gracious Greece has been about the whole affair. It was Melina Mercouri (at whose funeral he was a pall-bearer), the actress, singer and politician, who really got the campaign going and always conducted it, on her part, with great good grace.

The British Museum has been utterly intransigent over point B. “Over my dead body” appears to be the view of each successive Director. The current chief, Neil MacGregor has had a brilliant tenure but is quite as foursquare against the return of the marbles as his predecessors. It is axiomatic that no museum or gallery ever likes to de-acquire. “What next?” they cry. “Every mummy, every Babylonian pot, the Rosetta Stone? The Royal Game of Ur? The Madonna of the Rocks and Rembrandt’s self-portraits at the National? Cleopatra’s Needle?”

Well, the answer to that is NO. We are discussing a specific part of an existing building, which we now know can be properly and professionally curated and displayed. The argument “Oh, once you go down that path…” has never held water. The weirder kind of libertarians said it about seat belts. “Oh, once you make people wear seat belts it’ll be helmets and roll bars next…” that kind of drivel. “Once you ban hunting, they’ll ban fishing.” If you ban citizens from owning Uzi machine guns it doesn’t mean you’re “going down the path that will lead to the banning of shot-guns and peashooters. Get a grip everyone.

Humans have will. We can go down a path and then turn left or right, or turn right round. Legislature is, perforce, nuanced and (we trust) skilfully drafted precisely so as to introduce regulation with the minimum loss of wider rights and liberties. “Going down the path” of the return of the Elgin Marbles need not be fatefully precedential. We could decide to let it not be. Of course plenty of countries will seize their chance to have a go at demanding returns of this artefact or that, but this is happening anyway. The Parthenon affair is a special case. Italy returned their fragment two years ago and haven’t been badgered, bullied and ballyragged since.

Greece made us. We owe them. They are ready for its return and have never needed such morale boosting achievement more. And it would be so graceful, so apt, so right.

As for Point C, visitor numbers, well that is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, not to mention a counsel of despair. As Kevin Costner almost said, ‘If you move it, they will come.”

Not everyone likes the new Acropolis museum it must be admitted: apparently its construction flattened the musician Vangelis’s charming house and the reinstalled friezes would, say some scholars, be hardly more ‘authentic’ in their new home than they are in Bloomsbury. But the stone quarried from Mount Pentelikon, the dazzling white pentelic marble from which the Parthenon is made, is for Greece what the marble of Carrara was for Michelangelo and it belongs in its homeland, it expresses it. There really is such a characteristic as terroir. Which is why something as disgusting as retsina tastes so delicious on a beach in Patmos and so horrific in a warm kitchen in Wincanton.

As it happens the British Prime Minister’s office and the Department of Culture , Media and Sport are, even as we speak, planning a ‘Great’ campaign in which they wish to show the world what is Great about Britain (in fact the Great is really of course is a geopolitical term, as in Greater Manchester, not a profession of superiority, but never mind). I am patriotic I think. I fact I know I am. And like most people who truly love their country, I don’t think it perfect but want it always to strive to be better, nobler, kinder, smarter. I want to be proud of it. Some will see the ‘Great’ campaign as a Ladybird Book version of Blair’s embarrassing Cool Britannia ‘initiative’ back in the 90s. A step back to a heritage museum Britain where we’re all the best of (Julian) Fellowes and grandeur parallels diversity, tolerance and innovation. I wish them well and offer this thought:

What greater gesture could be made to Greece in its time of appalling financial distress? An act of friendship, atonement and an expression of faith in the future of the cradle of democracy would be so, well just so damned classy. The City of London whose “interests” Cameron wishes to protect, but which independent observers say is now if anything less secure in its hegemony than ever before, has buildings in which people sit all day betting “against” Greece, or “taking positions” as they would rather put it. In other words they get home from the office happy in the thought that their transactions have hurled another thunderbolt into the land of Homer and Plato, Themistocles and Pindar. May they rot.

There is much talk of “repatriating powers” from Europe amongst Eurosceptic and even middle-of-the-road politicians. To repatriate a power takes treaties, rows, enmities, alliances and betrayals. To repatriate a collection of stolen marbles take good will, moral courage and a decisive belief that right can be done. Oh, and I suppose a Hercules transport aircraft or large ship. Rope, voiding, bungees, castors. That kind of thing. Bean-shaped foam too I shouldn’t wonder.

How can we British be proud until we sit down with Greek politicians and arrange for the return of their treasure? It would be a dignified, but a thrilling celebration. No need for head-hanging apology or anything silly, just a recognition that the time is now right. Remember that dipping of the head, that bow, made by the Queen to the fallen of Ireland on her last visit there? Symbols mean a great deal. If the Hulture Secretary, Jeremy … oh, you know who I mean … or the Prime Minister or his Desperate Deputy did have the grace and guts to make this gesture, perhaps at the opening of London 2012 and then following it up in Athens with a full reinstallation it will achieve many things: it might remind us of what we all owe Greece, it might encourage us to visit the country and spend a little tourist money on its ferries, islands, temples, attractions and dazzling beauty: those blue seas, the warmly hospitable people, the theatres, temples, statue, beaches and bottles of resinated Domestika.

Such a fine gesture might also help make the rest of Europe decide we are not always the perfidious Albion they have traditionally believed us to be. I believe we would gain far more than we lost. A simulacrum in plaster or resin could hang in the BM where the real ones now do and an series of photographs could display the process of the return and the history behind it.

I certainly wouldn’t rename them the Hitchens Marbles, Christopher would bridle and writhe at such a thought, but those who wanted to, might discover the part he played in this long struggle and know that he wasn’t all about trashing icons, vilifying statesmen or taunting faith-healers. He once defined an educated person as one who knows the limits of their knowledge. His own self-professed philhellenism stemmed as much from the great gift Greek civilisation had given him and has given all of us– the confidence to doubt, to reason and openly to question. To know how little we know. To be curious about ourselves.

It’s time we lost our marbles.

x Stephen Fry

In the mid 1980s, when interest in the reunification of the Parthenon Marbles was not as high as it is now, Christopher Hitchens chose to write his second book about the Parthenon Marbles – and why he thought that they should be returned to Greece. This book still is perhaps the text that most eloquently summarises the arguments for the return of the sculptures & refutes those against. It has since been reprinted in three different editions, each time summarising the current status of the case, with introductory passages written by various others involved with the campaign.

His book was the first thing that I read when researching the design of the New Acropolis Museum – which led to my interest in the reunification of the Parthenon Marbles ever since then.

Particularly in his later works, I disagreed with much of what Hitch wrote, but in other cases, his clear understanding of the arguments led me to change my own mind on subjects. Throughout his life though, he steadfastly maintained his assertions that the Parthenon Sculptures should be returned to Greece.

Farewell Christopher, you will be missed.

(Interestingly, I notice that the Reuters obituary was written by Sharon Waxman – herself an author of a book on disputed artefacts in museums)

From:
Reuters

Christopher Hitchens: A salute to intellectual honesty
By Sharon Waxman
Sun Dec 18, 2011 2:42pm EST

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Nothing sharpened Christopher Hitchens’ mind like cancer.

He wrote the best, most piercing, most clarifying prose of his career as he faced down the specter of his own demise.

As he dealt with fatigue and nausea, with the anger, disgust and frustration that must accompany what he knew was a death sentence, Hitch poured it all into words that were as painfully honest as they were hilarious.

“I sympathize afresh with the mighty Voltaire, who, when badgered on his deathbed and urged to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies,” he wrote in September 2010 in Vanity Fair, to those who hoped for a last-minute conversion to faith.

His illness was a terrible irony. Hitchens was at the peak of his career. For decades he had toiled in the margins of the intellectual elite, plunging into distant political conflicts that only a few Americans noticed, and hanging with the denizens of British literary journalism and highbrow fiction.

None of this paid very well, and despite Hitch’s fancy accent, he did not come from money. But suddenly he got rich and pretty famous.

He was diagnosed with cancer just a few years after writing the 2007 bestseller “God Is Not Great.” It turned out that attacking George Bush, Bill Clinton and Mother Teresa got him nowhere near the notoriety that he won for taking on God. (Or “god,” as he always wrote it.)

Hitch became a constant presence on the debate circuit on the topic of atheism, a familiar face on the shows of Jon Stewart and Bill Maher (another vocal atheist) and a sought-after blogger, letter writer and columnist. (“It seems there is no utterance of mine that isn’t worthy of publishing,” he told me, when I asked him to think about blogging for TheWrap.)

And so: Cancer was very ill-timed.

“Rage would be beside the point,” he wrote, on learning of his illness, in one in a series of columns in Vanity Fair that won him a national magazine award. “Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read — if not indeed write — the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger? But I understand this sort of non-thinking for what it is: sentimentality and self-pity. Of course my book hit the bestseller list on the day that I received the grimmest of news bulletins, and for that matter the last flight I took as a healthy-feeling person (to a fine, big audience at the Chicago Book Fair) was the one that made me a million-miler on United Airlines, with a lifetime of free upgrades to look forward to … To the dumb question ‘Why me?’ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?”

WITHSTANDING THE GLOATERS

And of course, his religious detractors found much irony here, much about which to gloat.

But it was here where Hitchens rose to the challenge so few of us could imagine, using humor and a core intellectual honesty to face down the existential challenge that was suddenly of immediate relevance.

He absorbed many horrible insults, including those from observers who called his cancer some kind of divine retribution, something he somehow “deserved.”

He responded thusly in September 2010:

“The vengeful deity has a sadly depleted arsenal if all he can think of is exactly the cancer that my age and former ‘lifestyle’ would suggest that I got. Why cancer at all? Almost all men get cancer of the prostate if they live long enough: it’s an undignified thing but quite evenly distributed among saints and sinners, believers and unbelievers. If you maintain that god awards the appropriate cancers, you must also account for the numbers of infants who contract leukemia. Devout persons have died young and in pain. Bertrand Russell and Voltaire, by contrast, remained spry until the end, as many psychopathic criminals and tyrants have also done. These visitations, then, seem awfully random. While my so far uncancerous throat, let me rush to assure my Christian correspondent above, is not at all the only organ with which I have blasphemed … And even if my voice goes before I do, I shall continue to write polemics against religious delusions, at least until it’s hello darkness my old friend. In which case, why not cancer of the brain? As a terrified, half-aware imbecile, I might even scream for a priest at the close of business, though I hereby state while I am still lucid that the entity thus humiliating itself would not in fact be ‘me.’ (Bear this in mind, in case of any later rumors or fabrications.)”

I never could decide whether to laugh or cry at this prose. In the end, I could only marvel at Hitch’s ability to pierce the heart of his own mortality with such detachment and wit.

He always jumped into the middle of great moral debates. And he never took the side that was easiest to defend. In fact, it was easy to suspect that he liked to take the opposite argument — just because.

This aspect of Hitchens — the gadfly who loved the spotlight — used to annoy me. I first remember seeing him a couple of decades ago on a talk show like “Meet the Press,” and he showed up a vision of scruffiness — unshaven, and wearing Birkenstocks. I thought it stunk of anti-establishment grandstanding.

But I watched him over the years, and changed my mind when I got to know him during the release of my last book, “Loot,” about stolen antiquities. The fate of the Elgin Marbles — the Parthenon sculptures taken to England a century and a half ago — was another of his thankless causes, rooted in that core of intellectual honesty.

(The sculptures were taken by stealth. They belong in Greece. Not a lot of Brits spent their time saying so. Hitch did.)

He came to debate the topic with me at a New York Times lecture in 2008, and after beating up the British cultural establishment for about an hour, we headed out to a lunch at an empty Italian restaurant. It lasted for four hours, and he drank his way through many whiskeys and regaled the table with tale after ribald tale of his adventures.

It was one of the most memorables afternoons I’ve spent, ever.

Farewell, Hitch. We salute your brilliant mind, and a moral heartbeat that pulsed so strongly throughout.

And that pen. Oh how we will miss that pen.

A few weeks ago, France announced that they would return various Māori heads taken from New Zealand. This article looks at some of the other well-known disputes over artefacts.

From:
Daily Telegraph

Famous disputes over ownership of ancient artefacts
10:30AM BST 09 May 2011

Elgin Marbles

France has agreed to return more than one dozen Maori heads taken from new Zealand more than a century ago. Here are some other ongoing disputes between nations over prized ancient artefacts:

Probably the most famous, and one of the longest running, disputes over ownership of ancient artefacts is the battle between Britain and Greece over the Elgin Marbles.

The collection of classical Greek marble sculptures – also known as the Parthenon Marbles – were originally part of the Parthenon and other buildings on the Acropolis of Athens. But in the late 18th century Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin and the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire at the time, obtained a controversial permission from the Ottoman authorities to remove pieces from the Acropolis.

From 1801 to 1812, Elgin’s agents removed about half of the surviving sculptures of the Parthenon. The Marbles were transported by sea to Britain where they eventually came to be exhibited in the British Museum.

The Greeks want them back, claiming that the marbles should be returned to Athens on moral and artistic grounds. They argue that presenting all the existing Parthenon Marbles in their original historical and cultural environment would permit their “fuller understanding and interpretation” and also that the marbles may have been obtained illegally and hence should be returned to their rightful owner.

The Kohinoor diamond

The Koh-i-noor, which means “Mountain of Light” in Persian, is a 105 carat diamond (in its most recent cut) that was once the largest known diamond in the world.

It originated in the state of Andhra Pradesh in India along with its double, the Darya-i-noor (the “Sea of Light”). It has belonged to various Hindu, Mughal, Persian, Afghan, Sikh and British rulers who fought bitterly over it at various points in history and seized it as a spoil of war time and time again. It was finally seized by the East India Company and became part of the British Crown Jewels when Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India in 1877.

India has claimed the diamond and have said that the Kohinoor was taken away illegally and it should be given back. In a July 2010 interview, David Cameron stated that the gem could not be returned to India as the move would set an unworkable precedent: “If you say yes to one you suddenly find the British Museum would be empty.” The gem remains the property of the British Crown and is kept in HM Tower of London. It is a popular attraction.

Pemulwuy’s head

Pemulwuy was a fierce Aboriginal warrior who led a war of resistance against the British in Australia 200 years ago. The British, showing no mercy, dismissed him as a “pest to the colony” and, in 1802, they shot him, cut off his head, and sent it to Britain to study (nobody had ever seen Australian Aborigines before).

Where the skull is today is a mystery but many believe the warrior’s head is still in England, where the remains of 3000 Aborigines were bottled by the British and sent home for scientific study.

When it first arrived in England, the skull was reportedly kept at the Royal College of Surgeons in London, and later may have been moved to the Natural History Museum. However, the museum has no record of it.

There are fears that the skull could have been destroyed during the German bombing of the college in 1941, while some believe Pemulwuy’s skull was bottled and returned to Australia in 1950, and then lost.

But Sydney’s Aborigines are desperate to get the head back and give it the traditional burial it deserves. Last year they asked Prince William to help locate the head.

Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, Prince William’s private secretary, has said that the Prince was deeply moved by Pemulwuy’s story and had started a “supremely important search” to locate the skull.

Machu Picchu artefacts

Yale University last year agreed to return thousands of artefacts to Peru that were taken away from the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu nearly a century ago after a bitter long-running dispute that involved Peru filing a lawsuit in the US against the school.

Under the deal more than 4,000 objects, including pottery, textiles and bones, will be sent back to Peru after an inventory of the pieces is completed.

The artefacts were originally taken from Machu Picchu by scholar Hiram Bingham III between 1911 and 1915 and donated to Yale.

In a statement, the university said it “is very pleased with the positive developments in the discussions” with Peru.

Peru has been seeking for years to get the artefacts back. It says they include centuries-old Incan materials, including bronze, gold and other metal objects, mummies, skulls, bones and other human remains, pottery, utensils, ceramics and objects of art.

Peru filed suit against Yale in 2008 arguing that the university violated Peruvian law by exporting the artefacts without getting special permission from the Peruvian government and by refusing to return them.

Yale responded that it returned dozens of boxes of artefacts in 1921 and that Peru knew the university would retain other pieces. Yale described the artefacts as “primarily fragments of ceramic, metal and bone” and said it re-created some objects from fragments.

A new children’s novel by Anthony Horowitz revolves around a plot to return the Parthenon Marbles to Greece. Unfortunately, it appears that those in favour of return are cast as the bad guys in this particular version of the story…

From:
BBC News

Book Review: Alex Rider – Scorpia Rising
Last Updated: Wednesday June 08 2011 10:57 GMT

Author
Anthony Horowitz

The story
This book is different from all the other Alex Rider books as it explains the villain’s plot right at the beginning, whereas most other Alex Rider books you have to work out what the villain is up to.

In this book, Scorpia are hired to return some statues called the Elgin Marbles in the British museum to Greece. To do this they plan to blackmail MI6 by showing the world that MI6 have been using a teenager to do all their work.

The characters

The main character is of course orphan Alex Rider, a teenage spy who is looked after by his carer Jack Starbright.

All the MI6 characters also make an appearance at some point in the story. The criminal organisation Scorpia also reappears in this book (hence the title).

Highlights

The highlights of this book are the unexpected twists and character development. The descriptions of the cities are also excellent and the book has a very strong start.

Any weak bits?

This is the last in the Alex Rider books and we felt the ending was good for a single book, but not for the end of the series.

It isn’t dreadful and could just be a matter of personal taste, so see what you think about it. But before you start on this book, we’d recommend reading all the other eight books before this one.

Unputdownable?

This is one of the best Alex Rider books. You don’t really notice how good it is until you finish and you take in all that happened.

We thought this was our second favourite Alex Rider book, after Scorpia.

Hit or Miss?

Hit.