Limited market for looted antiquities

In the wake of the Baghdad museum brouhaha, many journalists showed their lack of any real knowledge of the antiquities trade. The fact is, there is not much evidence for the existence of wealthy, corrupt collectors in the mold of Dr. No, commissioning skilled thieves to acquire museum masterpieces for their hidden private galleries. And as this Financial Times article states, the market for stolen antiquities isn't as wide open as it used to be, especially when it comes to the more valuable pieces:

The looters who rampaged through Baghdad's National Museum last month will find that stealing the thousands of objects was the easy part. Selling such fully catalogued antiquities will be harder.

Museums, auction houses and dealers have been quick to mount a united front against the despoliation, pledging full support in returning any suspect objects that come their way and backing an amnesty in the hope that the thieves will not destroy their seizures in frustration.

The greatest treasure, the Warka [Uruk] vase of the third millennium BC, was recovered this week by US forces. Although some collectors in the countries bordering Iraq might be prepared to pay low sums for antiquities they can never exhibit or sell, the chances of a major work surfacing on the market are negligible.

The antiquities trade has cleaned up its act. Until the 1980s many antiquities that had been illegally smuggled out of Italy, Greece or Egypt escaped the scrutiny of museum curators. Tomb robbers made a good living exporting their spoils to dealers in London, Brussels, Paris and New York.

But tighter national heritage laws and more international co-operation have greatly reduced the traffic. Today a member of the Antiquities Dealers Association in the UK must show the provenance of any object in stock valued over £2,000, and James Ede of Charles Ede, the London dealer, is pushing the International Association of Dealers in Ancient Art, of which he is chairman, to lower its validation criterion below the current £10,000 mark. . .

In practice objects from ancient Iraq are not a major part of the business . . . However, there is a brisk trade in Babylonian and Assyrian cuneiform tablets and cylinder seals of the 2nd and 3rd millennia BC, which can be sold for less than £1,000. . .

Most of the 500 lots in Christie's early summer sale on the 13th are estimated at less than £5,000. They include tablets and cylinders from ancient Iraq.

Also just ran across this article, which is one of the few in the general press to discuss the divide between the antiquities world's anti-collecting (academics, archeologists) and pro-collecting (museums, dealers, collectors) factions, and how that rift undermined the possibility of presenting a cogent plan to the US government in the period leading up the invasion of Iraq:

It's a dirty business, the antiquities trade," said Jane Waldbaum, president of the Archaeological Institute of America, a scientific group that largely opposes the antiquities traffic. "They will say they only buy from reputable dealers. But where do they buy things from?"

Countered William Pearlstein, a Manhattan lawyer who represents museums and collectors: "What the archaeologists have trouble understanding is that we have a regulated market. In their view, even the most careful collector is still aiding and abetting tomb robbers."

The intensifying bitterness of those divisions prevented the two sides from uniting in the days before the Iraq war, a time when each mounted separate and ultimately unsuccessful efforts to prevent the destruction of Iraq's treasures.

While members of the American Council on Cultural Policy, a 2-year-old organization of dealers, collectors and museum curators, met with both the Department of State and the Pentagon to map out plans to prevent the destruction of Iraq's antiquities, the archaeological institute found itself on the outside. The two groups were unable to put together a joint statement.

"We wanted a statement that was more comprehensive and didn't just address the bombing," said Patty Gerstenblith, a DePaul University law professor who helped spearhead the institute's efforts.

The archaeologists were "asleep at the switch," complained Ashton Hawkins, former counsel for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a founder of the cultural policy council.

In the end, the council's do-not-bomb list prevented destruction from the air, but neither Hawkins' group nor Gerstenblith's, was able to persuade commanders on the ground to station troops around the Iraqi museums or libraries that were stripped of treasures dating to 3000 B.C.

Posted by David on May 12, 2003 6:19 PM