Loot: The Battle over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World
A journey across four continents to the heart of the conflict over who should own the great works of ancient art
Why are the Elgin Marbles in London and not on the Acropolis? Why do there seem to be as many mummies in France as there are in Egypt? Why are so many Etruscan masterworks in America? For the past two centuries, the West has been plundering the treasures of the ancient world to fill its great museums, but in recent years, the countries where ancient civilizations originated have begun to push back, taking museums to court, prosecuting curators, and threatening to force the return of these priceless objects.
Where do these treasures rightly belong? Sharon Waxman, a former culture reporter for The New York Times and a longtime foreign correspondent, brings us inside this high-stakes conflict, examining the implications for the preservation of the objects themselves and for how we understand our shared cultural heritage. Her journey takes readers from the great cities of Europe and America to Egypt, Turkey, Greece, and Italy, as these countries face down the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum, the British Museum, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. She also introduces a cast of determined and implacable characters whose battles may strip these museums of some of their most cherished treasures.
For readers who are fascinated by antiquity, who love to frequent museums, and who believe in the value of cultural exchange, Loot opens a new window on an enduring conflict.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. After covering Hollywood's cutting-edge directors (Rebels on the Backlot), former New York Times correspondent Waxman embarks on a grand tour of some of the world's finest museums—the Met, the Louvre, the British Museum, the Getty—and the countries from which some of their most famous antiquities were illicitly taken. Skillfully blending history and reportage, Waxman traces the stories of treasures like the Elgin Marbles, then jumps into the debate over whether they should be restored to their countries of origin. She finds no easy answers: while acknowledging the dubious means by which European and American museums acquired many antiquities, she concedes that the governments clamoring for their return don't always have adequate plans for their maintenance. (Turkey compelled the Met to hand over the famous Lydian Hoard, only to have its masterpiece stolen.) Waxman's account is animated by interviews with museum curators, accused smugglers and government officials, putting a human spin on the complex cultural politics before arriving at a middle ground that strives for international collaboration in preserving a broad, global heritage. 8-page color insert, 20 b&w photos. (Nov. 1)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Roger Atwood Early this year, officials at the Metropolitan Museum of Art trussed up one of the prizes of its collection, an ancient vase known as the Euphronios krater, and sent it back to Italy. Italian authorities had presented evidence that the piece had been looted from a tomb near Rome less than a year before the Met paid $1 million for it in 1972. Faced with the prospect of a lawsuit and a ban on receiving any future loans from Italian museums, the Met, writes former Washington Post and New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman, "stalled, stonewalled, and would not be swayed -- until it was forced to do so." Seeing great institutions humbled like this might give satisfaction to some, but what is served by such returns of art? If they're meant as a statement against looting, how does shifting a pot from New York to Rome advance that interest? These are the underlying questions of Waxman's absorbing and well-researched Loot. Although her views are often unnervingly one-sided (her sympathies lean toward letting museums keep their contested holdings), she gives all actors in this bitterly antagonistic drama a hearing and writes with flair and an earnest sense of inquiry. Waxman recounts the story of Lord Elgin and his marbles and exposes lesser known but egregious cases of 19th-century pillage, such as the removal of three heads from a mural depicting the life of Egyptian pharaoh Amenophis III. Someone simply cut them from an out-of-the-way tomb in the Valley of the Kings; blank squares now indicate where the pharaoh's visages once appeared. "It is shocking. Imagine the Mona Lisa's face cut out of her canvas with a kitchen knife," writes Waxman, who was led to the scene by a guide with a flashlight. The faces are now in the Louvre, labeled simply, "From the tomb of Amenophis III" with no explanation of their pillaged past. Waxman wants the Louvre and other museums to be more upfront with the public about the unethical or illegal origin of their treasures, even if they don't return them. Pillaged artifacts become part of the landscape in their adopted country, and not always in a good way. She offers an engrossing history of the removal of ancient Egyptian obelisks to cities all over Europe, where they were erected as imperial trophies in traffic circles and plazas, including St. Peter's Square in Rome. Waxman's argument that "Western museums remain essential custodians of the past" wears thin when she conflates imperial looting of the Elgin variety with the modern phenomenon of commercial grave-robbing. They both involve antiquities, but, I found myself asking, what do they have in common? The former usually followed conquest and was seen as a matter of national aggrandizement for European powers (think of Napoleon stuffing the Louvre with Italian booty), while the latter has a straightforward profit motive and occurs in violation of well-established national and international laws that did not exist before the modern era. One can be excused, or at least explained in its historical context; the other is obliterating ancient sites right now and implicates all of us. Some big collecting museums still keep the door open to acquiring pillaged goods. The Met, as Waxman points out, "remains one of the few major museums that continues to collect antiquities that lack a clear provenance." Other institutions, including the British Museum and even the Getty, whose journey from chop shop of looted artifacts to chastised good citizen is well-told by Waxman, have stopped acquiring antiquities that lack a documented chain of ownership because that usually means they are plundered from ancient sites. Waxman also neglects to point out that the wanton trade in undocumented antiquities encourages forgery. Since there is no record of where and when looted artifacts are found, museums and the public can be duped by fakes. This is the subject of Unholy Business, Nina Burleigh's bracing account of the case of the James Ossuary, an ancient limestone box that turned up in Jerusalem in 2002 with an inscription reading "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus." It caused a global sensation and was exhibited in the Royal Ontario Museum before Israeli authorities revealed that it was a hoax. The box was real -- prominent Jews in the time of Jesus often preserved family bones in such containers -- but the inscription was a modern forgery, probably created in the same rooftop workshop in Tel Aviv that produced another momentarily famous relic now almost universally believed to be a fake: the Jehoash Tablet, which supposedly attested to the existence of the First Temple of Jerusalem. The ossuary shook the world because it would have offered the first material evidence of Jesus Christ. It posed a theological quandary for Catholics, who believe Mary was a lifelong virgin and that she could not, therefore, have borne Jesus any siblings. Some evangelicals were almost poignantly willing to believe in any artifact, no matter how suspect, that seemed to offer literal corroboration of the Bible. Burleigh skillfully navigates the theological dilemmas that attended the "discovery" of the ossuary and the forensic evidence that finally sank it. She leads readers through the murky world of Holy Land relic-looting, forgery and smuggling and delves deep into the mix of vanity and delusion that leads people to buy fakes. One collector, upon learning he had bought an expensive forgery, insisted to her that "I do have what they call a nose, a feel, whatever it is. . . . An object actually vibrates to me sometimes." As the Met found out with its krater, a beautiful object can betray even the most sensitive nose.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
From Booklist
The Elgin Marbles in London. The Euphronios krater in New York. Aphrodite in Malibu. These ancient objects are not only art-world treasures but also poster icons of a long-running cultural quandary: Do antiquities belong in the great museums of the West or back in their native lands? And how did they get to their pampering resting places anyway? Waxman’s comprehensive and revealing overview of cultural imperialism, art, and history stretches from Napoleon’s plunder of Egypt (circa 1800) to the recent show-trial in Italy of a Getty Museum curator. At issue mostly is how the yearning for urns feeds an epidemic of tomb raiding and a global bazaar of shady traders, wealthy collectors, and museums that look the other way. Waxman is a congenial, globe-hopping tour guide through cramped offices, dank tomb sites, and sleek, art-filled palaces. There are no simple solutions but many competing attitudes and positions. Waxman argues strongly for transparency. Museums rarely disclose where their objects came from, or how they traveled through time and landed on display. They should. Without that the cultural history remains incomplete. --Steve Paul
Customer Reviews
Scholarship ?
A number of reviewers have applauded the detailed "scholarship" of this book. I happen to disagree. Today a writer's sources can easily be checked using the internet. I have done this and found the author's "scholarship" wanting.
There are "Notes" related to page numbers at the end of the book. The note for page 32 - Chapter 2 "FINDING ROSETTA" - tells us that: "Biographical information on Napoleon Bonaparte is drawn from Flora E. S. Kaplan, `Napoleon on the Nile: Soldiers, Artists and the Rediscovery of Egypt' (New York: Dahesh Museum of Art, 2006)..." This reference is to a 48 page catalogue of an exhibition of nineteenth-century paintings presented at the illusive Dahesh Museum of Art with an essay by its former curator Lisa Small, the exhibition's organizer. (Flora Edouwaye S. Kaplan was/is the museum's director.) Is such a catalogue a reliable source for information about Napoleon in Egypt?
On page 48 we are told that Giovanni Belzoni "traveled down the Nile" to Luxor from Cairo. But, as the Nile flows from south to north, he went "up" the Nile.
On page 55 we are told that Akhenaten "moved his capital from Thebes, today's Luxor, to a city he founded 150 miles to the south, a capital he called Akhetaten, known now as el Amarna." El-Amarna is actually north of Luxor. Furthermore, Wikipedia gives the distance from Luxor to el-Amarna as 250 miles.
On page 56 the author gives an inaccurate copy of a quote from page 139 of "Imperialism, Art and Restitution" claiming that it is from Ludwig Borchardt's 1912 diary. It is actually a translation of Borchardt's 1923 account "Porträts der Königin Nofret-ete" in "Ausgrabungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft im Tell el-Amarna". (This is clearly indicated in a footnote on page 139 of "Imperialism, Art and Restitution" which can be read online using Amazon.com's LOOK INSIDE for ISBN 978-0521859295.)
The author's account of Emile Prisse d'Avennes on pages 72 and 73 is taken from a magazine article "Prisse: A Portrait" by Mary Norton published in `Saudi Aramco World', November-December 1990 which is available online at: http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/199006/prisse-a.portrait.htm. According to Norton, "Prisse settled down among the ruins of Karnak at ancient Thebes, and began to sketch and take papier-mache impressions from the thousands of inscriptions and bas-reliefs adorning some half-million square meters (140 acres) of temples, palaces and tombs." With Waxman this becomes: "He was a gifted artist who made hundreds of sketches, papier-mâché impressions, and plaster casts of thousands of inscriptions and reliefs that covered the tombs and temples in Egypt". Waxman gratuitously adds the "plaster casts", omits the "palaces" and extends Prisse's area of study from Karnak to Egypt. Is this a fair use of the source material?
The zodiac ceiling from the Temple of Dendera is described on pages 74 and 75. According to the author: "One inscription actually records a solar eclipse that occurred on March 7 in the year of 51 BC at 11:10 a.m. Other carvings show the position of the constellations from June 15 to August 15, in 50 BC." There are no notes for pages 74 and 75. So how did the author come by this information? (According to NASA http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov there was indeed an annular solar eclipse on March 7 in 51 BC [-0050 astronomical numbering system] but is this really recorded at Dendera?)
Brian Fagan's "The Rape of the Nile" (1975/2004), Peter Watson and Cecilia Todeschini's "The Medici Conspiracy" (2006), and William St. Clair's "Lord Elgin and the Marbles" (1967/1998) were all noted as sources by the author.
The death of Christo Michaelides and the consequences for Robin Symes are related on pages 352-354 of "Loot". According to a note by the author: "Information about the battle between Symes and the Papadimitriou family is from interviews, contemporaneous British press accounts, and Apostolidis, `Network'." Apparently Peter Watson and Cecilia Todeschini used the same sources for their almost identical account given on pages 248-263 of "The Medici Conspiracy" published in 2006.
The author describes her pilgrimage to the Acropolis on pages 233 to 237. "I mount from the southeast side" (i.e. from the new "Acropoli" metro station) ... "It is hot, too hot. Sweat trickles down my back. ... I think of the pilgrims filing on this path for the festival of Athena, the virgins and the young men leading garlanded cattle, and I remember the sculptures of the Parthenon that depict the pageantry of the ancient festival, occurring once every four years and culminating in a ceremony to place a new woolen robe, or peplos, on the gold and ivory statue of Athena in her temple." This is absolute rubbish. The ancient Greeks approached the Acropolis from the the northwest via the Agora. The peplos was placed on a life-sized wooden statue of Athena Polias in the Erechtheion not on Phidias' hugh chryselephantine statue in the Parthenon.
So much for the "scholarship". As a journalist, the author collected (by tape recorder?) an array of opinions from archaeologists, museum curators and fellow journalists. Surprisingly, the author's anecdotal evidence suggests that most of the inhabitants of the archaeological source countries didn't - and don't - care much about their own "cultural patrimony". For example, the local museum at Usak which now houses the repatriated "Lydian Hoard" had only 769 visitors over a five-year period.
According to judge Omer Erdogmus (quoted on page 158) the Lydian Hoard "treasures were brought back, and Turkey could not protect them." ... "We Turks didn't make these treasures," he finally said. "They were made by other civilizations and found in Turkey. It's the heritage of all humanity, the heritage of the whole world. This land belongs to us, but what we find under the soil, if we can't look after it, maybe other people should."
Özgen Acar, the foreign affairs columnist at "Cumhuriyet" (quoted on page 138) opposes, for now, the return of the Pergamon Altar to Turkey and the return of the Parthenon marbles to Greece. "I'm very happy these were carried away in the nineteenth or eighteenth centuries, because they were protected," he says. "If not, piece by piece those marbles would have been used to build mosques or churches. Luckily they were taken away and protected on behalf of mankind. ...."
I didn't buy the book. I borrowed a copy from my local library.
Loot
This is an enjoyable read and I admit I learned/remembered some things about ancient art, but it is flawed in the way that a lot of current nonfiction is: it seizes on one argument and makes it over and over again while supplying some generic historical information that could be found in textbooks along with gossip about elites. In this case, the argument has to do with whether or not cultural artifacts residing in museums should be returned to their countries of origin. Some say yes, some say no, but that is about as far as the analysis goes. There is little in the way of discussion about what forms cultural identity and why objects are important (or not) and not much supplied about the history of the objects themselves beyond a few good stories. There are brief and unenlightening excerpts from interviews with museum directors and curators; none of these go very deep or say much beyond what the author is saying over and over again.
A Problem That Is Not Going To Go Away
Sharon Waxman's new book is a winner in more ways than one. As several reviewers have commented, she has brought us new insights on the key personalities involved in the antiquities trade, done her homework in regard to the history and paper trails and best of all she makes the case for why the museum world and responsible governments will have to pay attention. The problem of restitution and return of artifacts is here to stay and it's not going to disappear into the woodwork.
Is it possible to hold a grudge for 120 years? Apparently yes, according to Kwame Opoku and Zahi Hawass, two men who have taken every opportunity to call for the return of African antiquities, regardless of whether they were looted, stolen, bought or given away under permit. They look at all of these objects as part of any nation's patrimony, and like two terriers in a rat field they intend to stand their ground till the bitter end.
They purposely seek out confrontations with heads of major museums either in person or in print, of whom Opoku has singled out James Cuno as a target. Director of the Art Institute of Chicago and author of the controversial Who Owns Antiquity? Cuno argues that "antiquities are the cultural property of all humankind, evidence of the world's ancient past and not that of a particular modern nation. They comprise antiquity, and antiquity knows no borders." He argues that retention of new finds and reclamation of old ones will lead to a dangerous politicization, thus he believes that there is such a thing as too much protection. His attitude is that now is the time to broaden, not restrict, access to antiquities, a stand that seems typical of the other large museums.
Opoku, a retired legal adviser in Vienna, takes an unrelenting opposite view that challenges Cuno and calls for the return of all antiquities. This power struggle created by Hawass and Opoku has if anything exposed a fatal weakness in the monolithic institutions of the West. That is a central and timely point made by Waxman. As she says, there is in the larger museums, "an unwillingness to adapt to the changing mores of a shifting global culture. The politics of `us versus them' has to give way to a reaffirmation of the value of cultural exchange, and its real embrace by both sides."
She also shows how in defense of their position the large museums of the West have distanced themselves from the concept of the National museum, the institution that is often used to tell the story of a nation's past and confirm its present importance. They now prefer to be known as encyclopedic museums, products of Enlightenment idealism, and institutions whose collections represent the world's artistic legacy.
Irene Rowland a professor at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture, based in Rome, in a recent review explained how the great encyclopedic museums of the West found themselves on their high horses, since they "were predicated, perhaps to a one, on the idea that their local public constituted the world's best people, and hence the most deserving to stand in the presence of high culture, with a smattering of primitives to drive that sense of superiority home."
Rowland has kindly provided a stepladder on the off chance that they now find it difficult to get down from their lofty positions. She says, "the only plausible arrangement for museums today is to work as a peer among peers in schemes of international cooperation, already increasingly the norm for archaeological expeditions. The day is long gone when English, German, and American scholars could move in to tell the locals what was what and take their findings back to their encyclopedic museums to enlighten those who are deemed most capable of enlightenment."
Rowland and Opoku provide a way of the future in the development of a system that we can all believe in, the International Museum to which all nations and cultures would make their own contributions.
Waxman also helps by calling for "changing attitudes and shifting paradigms," but above all she points the finger at one of the central obstacles, provenance, the history of every object in every museum, collection and art salon. A more open attitude toward provenance may be just the thing to start everyone on the right road toward a meaningful and peaceful solution before too much blood is spilled, as it surely will be.
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