Armenia lays claim to the Satala Aphrodite in the British Museum

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Gevorg Martirosyan is the organizer of a campaign called "Bring the Goddess Home," and asked me to discuss it here. This campaign is aimed to repatriate "the remains of Armenian pagan goddess Anahit's statue" from the British Museum to the Armenian people". The campaign has a petition: http://chn.ge/waBIaQ and a Facebook page: www.facebook.com/AnahitGoddess.

The head and hand of a Hellenistic bronze statue were found about 1872 by a farmer digging his land in the ancient city of Satala (modern Satagh/Sedak), north-eastern Turkey in what the campaign considers "Armenian lands" (presumably the conquests of Tigranes the Great). The head made its way via Constantinople (modern Istanbul) and Italy to the dealer Alessandro Castellani, who eventually sold it to the British Museum. The hand was presented to the Museum a few years later (despite rumours that the whole statue had previously been found, the body has never come to light). The statue was believed to represent nude Aphrodite, her left hand pulling drapery from a support at her side, like the famous statue of Aphrodite at Knidos by the fourth-century sculptor Praxiteles. But the Armenian campaigners say the statue represents the Iranian goddess Anahita:

Anahit is the goddess of fertility and beauty and her statue statue is from 4th-1st century BC. It was discovered by farmers in 1872 in historic Armenian lands. Ever since then, the statue has been at the British Museum as the statue of "Aphrodite" (but not Anahit) without stating its Armenian origins. In a matter of few weeks we have gathered more than 1100 "online" signatures and we are receiving positive response from the British Museum, however, they are only willing to temporarily display it in Armenia. An organization in Armenia has collected more than 20,000 paper signatures.

Armenia has put a picture of the head on a banknote and a postage stamp. I wrote (Mar 18) to Mr Martirosyan (who had offered to answer any questions I might have) asking:

What makes you so sure it is Anahit? There is no inscription, no temple, so why her? Who actually identified the statue as Anahit, and when was that? How long has she been put on Armenian banknotes and stamps (etc)?Why is it specifically Armenian (where was the boundary of the "Armenian lands" in Hellenistic times to which you refer? Are you suggesting it was removed from Turkey illegally, if so, why should it go to Armenia - several hundred kilometres from where it was found, rather than go to Turkey, the territory from which it was taken?

So far, however, I have received no answer to these questions, either the campaigner does not know or does not want to say.

The British Museum website might be the source of the Armenian claim:

The size of the head suggests that it came from a cult statue, though excavations made at Satala in 1874 by Sir Alfred Biliotti, the British vice-consul at Trebizond, failed to discover a temple there. The statue may date to the reign of Tigranes the Great, king of Armenia (97-56 BC), whose rule saw prosperity throughout the region. The thin-walled casting of the bronze head suggests a late Hellenistic date.

I am not sure I see any justification for the BM permanently relinquishing this object, it seems to have been legally acquired under the market conditions legitimate at the time, and it seems to me that the Armenian claim is extremely tenuous.

UPDATE 22.03.12:
See now: 'How a Mythical Fertility Goddess Could Help Steer Armenia's National Election', The Atlantic March 17th 2012. Mr Gevorg Martirosyan has still not bothered even to acknowledge he received my questions, let alone attempt to answer them.

Tess Davis on Khmer "Blood Antiquities" in the US

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There are many Khmer artefacts looted in the 1975-1979 Khmer Rouge atrocities in the US. The audio clip 'Call to halt sale of 'blood antiques' on Australia Network News concerning the Koh Ker statues, one currently in Californian museum and one on the New York antiquities market. Tess Davis, executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation talks about the Sotherby's statue. She says she believes the company is still trying to salvage a deal and sell the statue.

"If I were a collector myself I would be very nervous about buying an object who's title was questioned on the front page of the New York Times," Ms Davis said. She said potential buyers need to understand the scale of the crime. "A number of American and European museums and auction houses have been caught with illicit, illicit Cambodian antiquities, many of these were taken from Khmer Rouge occupied areas during the countries long conflict, which makes them blood antiquities," she said. "It's no different to blood diamonds from Sierra Leone."

Ms Davis has an answer to those among collectors applying the 'Witschonke Premise' that countries which cannot unaided stop the looting of archaeological sites on their territory should not be helped:

The Cambodian Government have introduced measures to combat looting, but Ms Davis said the problem is a global one. "As long as there is a demand for stolen and looted Khmer art there will be looting," she said.

And Ms Davis said while it is often assumed most of the looting is being done by poor villagers, this is not always the case. "When you look at these vast temple complexes that have literally been taken apart stone by stone and carted over the border to Thailand," she said. "I mean think about this, this is sandstone blocks we are talking about, weighing hundreds, if not thousands of pounds, that is not being done by poor villagers, that would require money and organisation."

Indeed, criminal organization to commit culture crime. Collectors are often buying no-questions-asked, items supplied to markets by culture criminals.

US law is loathe to help the victims of culture crime, even though US citizens are responsible for the perpetuation of its effects. Ms Davis has recently discovered French laws from 1925 which could help Cambodia prove title over looted antiques. I was struck by her explanation of this (2:06 before the end onwards, not reported in the article): "from 1975 to 1979 most of Cambodia's legal profession died in the killing fields, law schools and libraries were decimated, and as a result, the codes, decrees and regulations that once governed the country's archaeological sites and antiquities were nearly lost to history, but recent research at the national archives in Phnom Penh have unearthed [...] dozens of documents that demonstrate that cultural heritage [...] has long been protected[..], and in particular a series of laws of 1925".

AUDIO
Connect Asia's Liam Cochrane speaks to Tess Davis
Created: Fri, 02 Mar 2012

The Norton Simon Art Foundation and their 'Koh Ker' Statue

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In Koh Ker, northern Cambodia, is a temple, dating from the mid-900s. Flanking an entrance there, were a pair of sandstone statues depicting scowling athlete-combatants in intricate headdresses positioned in battle-ready stances. The pair of sculptures ('five feet tall and weighing 250 pounds'), were still in position in old photos of the temple. The site however was one of those plundered in the 1970s amid the chaos of power struggle and genocide, when the Khmer Rouge ravaged Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Looters hacked their way into long-inaccessible temples, pillaged priceless antiquities and sold them to Thai and Western collectors. All that remains on site now of these two statues are the broken off feet and the heavy pedestals. The statues have both left the country under unclear circumstances, and both are now in America.

One of them was offered for sale in Sotheby's New York in March 2011. The sale was stopped and the object is the subject of an investigation. New York Times journalists Tom Mashberg and Ralph Blumenthal indicate one possible manner in which the Sotheby's matter could soon be resolved:

Working with the Unesco office in Phnom Penh, Cambodia has asked Sotheby’s to bargain with a wealthy Hungarian antiquities collector who has offered to pay $1 million for the statue and present it to Cambodia as an act of good will. “There is no question the statue was looted in the final stages of the war,” said the collector, Istvan Zelnik, a former Hungarian diplomat in the region who has visited Koh Ker. His own collection forms the Zelnik Istvan Museum of Southeast Asian Gold in Budapest. “The best solution is that I purchase it for purposes of donation,” Mr. Zelnik added.

The other statue is also in America. In 2007 archaeologist Eric Bourdonneau located it as being the one on display since 1980 at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California. Although drilled for the insertion of two massive metal rods for display, the lower portion of the knocked-off statue matches perfectly the pedestal from which it had been detached and which still stands in situ on the site. This statue also "surfaced" on the market, this time in New York, in 1975. Norton Simon, an industrialist and collector, reportedly bought it in that year from a leading Madison Avenue antiquities dealer, William H. Wolff.

Koh Ker statue, Norton Simon Art Foundation M.1980.15.S (Photo © 2012 Norton Simon Art Foundation)

There is a 1925 French colonial law declaring all antiquities from Cambodia’s temples to be “part of the national domain” and “the exclusive property of the state.” This law seems to have remained in force after Cambodian independence in 1953:

Tess Davis, executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation and the Cambodia scholar who dug out the law, said it had been analyzed by three French-speaking lawyers conversant in cultural heritage litigation and by [Anne] LeMaistre[, the Unesco representative in Phnom Penh]. All four say it “nationalizes ownership of Cambodian cultural artifacts.” If international legal authorities and American civil courts agree, the law could establish 1925, rather than 1993, as the dividing point after which Cambodian artifacts taken without government permits can be treated as stolen property.

Archaeologist Eric Bourdonneau says the relics were looted in the early 1970s. He said French records in Paris indicate that the statues were in place in 1939, and that the Koh Ker temple was thickly covered by jungle and inaccessible by road until it became a military staging area for Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese forces in the 1970s.

The New York Times journalists Mashberg and Blumenthal sum up the antiquities trade and the Koh Ker affair thus:

The quiet tussle over the relic reveals the swampy terrain of auctioning antiquities with incomplete or disputed pedigrees. Sellers with a good-faith belief in their ownership rights enter a landscape in which ethics and regulations are evolving, governments are increasingly assertive, and lawyers versed in arcane statutes are as necessary as jungle guides. “We live in a different world, and what was acceptable 50 years ago is no longer so,” said Matthew F. Bogdanos, a Marine Corps Reserve colonel and a lawyer, [...] “Whatever the letter of the law may state, in the end you have to ask yourself, ‘Does the item pass the smell test?’ ”

One collector is putting a million dollars of his own money into doing the right thing and sending pone of the pair back to the country from which it was stolen against a backdrop of slaughter and destruction - after all what collector would want a 'blood antiquity' on display in their collection? Perhaps the Norton Simon Art Foundation might consider the time has come to make a similar gesture.

Source: Tom Mashberg and Ralph Blumenthal, 'Mythic Warrior Is Held Captive in an International Art Conflict', The New York Times, February 28, 2012

Vignette, two trunkless legs of stone alone in the jungle stand (after Agnes Dherbeys, The New York Times),

Peruvian Viceregency of Spain Illegal?

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The US courts have told the Tampa-based deep sea salvage company Odyssey Marine Explorations that they have to return to Spain the gold and silver coins and other finds which they took in 2007 from the wreck of the Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, which sank off Portugal in 1804. At the time of the discovery the find was estimated to be worth around $500 million to collectors, which would have made it the richest shipwreck in history.

Now Peru has asked the Supreme Court to put a hold on the return of the treasure to Spain because it claims that the treasure was ultimately "stolen from the Peruvian people" by Spanish colonialists.

"Cultural Property Observer", Washington lawyer Peter Tompa ('Peru to Supreme Court: Spain Stole It First!')postulates:

Shouldn't the ardent repatriationists of the archaeological community support Peru over dastardly Spain? Surely if they pushed for Yale to return study artifacts from Machu Picchu, they should root for Peru in its efforts to take back what they are due from whatever source. Or, is their ire selectively employed against American companies and institutions? Perhaps "finders, keepers" is the best rule after all.

I find the lawyer's argument rather difficult to follow. Yale University hanging on too long to the loaned excavation archive from Machu Piccu is a relatively cut-and-dried case.

The area that is now Peru in 1801-4 was a viceregency of Spain, under the rule of the Bourbon king Charles IV and administrated by Viceroy Gabriel de Aviles. The Peruvian mines and Lima mint (where many of these coins were struck) were Spanish-run for the Spanish Crown. Do the Peruvians expect the US Supreme Court to declare the entire Viceregency of Peru illegal? The Spanish Empire as a whole? On what grounds do they expect this re-writing of history?

I suppose if the US Supreme Court is going to negate colonial claims in such a manner, it’d be equally logical for the US Government to give the land Washington DC stands on back to the Nacotchtank and Piscataway and start paying them back-rent going back to 1791.

Map: The Spanish colonies in South America, 18th Century [Wikimedia]

American Academic Opposes Italian Repatriation

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In the comments section of a Planet Princeton article 'Princeton University Returns Art to Italy', Florida-based US academic Dr Robert Steven Bianchi („Ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman art and archaeology, modern art” "President at Bianchi Associates, Inc" and a Lecturer in the firm "Archaeological Tours") reacted in the same way as many collectors' lobbyists:

The repatriation of these objects is absurd in the extreme. The Italians boast of their ability to repatriate works of art but simultaneously cannot manage their vast cultural heritage. The deplorable conditions at Pompeii and the condition of the sites in Rome itself, particularly that of the Colosseum are but two examples of the hypocrisy – the Italians cannot take care of their own so they launch witch hunts against those who cherish, protect, preserve, and educate the world about that heritage in order to conceal their own disregard for and indifference toward their own cultural property.

The objects in question were returned to Italy it seems in absence of any evidence that they had left the country by lawful means, so it is not really a question of Italy "boasting" of its "ability to repatriate" unlawfully appropriated items.

It is likening chalk to cheese to compare the preservation of portable antiquities in collections with massive roofless ruins (non-portable antiquities) in the open air. The American mentions the Colosseum, this Flavian building has stood in the centre of the city for coming up to two thousand years. After it went out of use for its original purpose, it has been damaged by stone robbers and earthquakes in Antiquity. By the 1640s the ruins were so overgrown that a botanist found over 3200 species of plants growing on, in and around its walls. Nearly 400 years later then, no wonder that there are problems with slowing down the dynamics of disintegration.



Here's a recent photograph of the Colosseum which illustrates the sort of problems the American's comparison ignores. Instead of sniping, one would have thought the US academic would have made a more useful contribution by coming up with an idea how to protect the fragile ruins already damaged by 2000 years wear and tear from wind, rain, frost, alternate heating and cooling cycles, rising ground water, tourist erosion and all the other effects which threaten these sites. Simply suggesting other countries (scil. his own) hang on to the smaller stolen artefacts does not really seem to me to be very helpful approach to the wider problem.

Phot. Alessandro Bianchi, Reuters

The Return of Cultural and Historical Treasures: the Case of the Netherlands

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Jos van Beurden is a Dutch research journalist who has published extensively on the protection and endangerment of cultural and historical treasures. He has just published a book: "The Return of Cultural and Historical Treasures: The Case of the Netherlands". This analyses 34 cases in which the Dutch state and Dutch heritage institutions have handed over cultural and historical treasures that were acquired in colonial times and more recently. He investigates the dynamics of their return practice and gives his analysis extra depth by including cases in which return has not materialized.

The shrinking divisions between a poor South and a rich North, colonizer and colonized, and source countries and art and antique market countries impact our thinking about return. How do Dutch heritage institutions deal with this new reality, when the return of their objects or collections comes under discussion? That is the central question in this critical book.

The book seems a useful addition to the literature about the return of colonial trophies, Nazi-spoliated art and human remains.

France returns 20 Maori heads to New Zealand

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Since 2003, New Zealand has been engaged in an ambitious program of collecting back Maori heads (mokomokai) and skeletal remains from museums around the world. On Monday, authorities in received 20 ancestral heads of Maori ethnic people once held in several French museums as a cultural curiosity. French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand and New Zealand's ambassador presided over a solemn ceremony at Quai Branly museum in Paris. The heads were encased in a box.

Some Maori heads, with intricate tattoos, were traditionally kept as trophies from tribal warfare. But once Westerners began offering prized goods in exchange for them, men were in danger of being killed simply for their tattoos, French museum officials have said. [...] The practice of preserving heads was begun by Maori as a way of remembering dead ancestors. In the decades after Europeans arrived, the heads became a curiosity and sought-after trade item, prompting Maori to ramp up their production levels.

Associated Press, 'France returns 20 Maori heads to New Zealand', January 23, 2012

Vignette: mokomokai from Roen