Christie's due diligence: this does not compute

What Christie's says about its due diligence checking provenances of antiquities:

“We are always on the alert for material of this type in case an attempt is made to introduce looted items into the commercial art market, and we work closely with UNESCO, Interpol and other entities to ensure any such attempts will be caught,” said Sung-Hee Kim, communications liaison at Christie’s, who said to date, the auction and art house has not encountered any such items.... 

According to Kim, Christie’s has a policy of not accepting items for sale without a legitimate signed title confirmation. In addition, they require provenance pre-dating the year 2000 as well as pre-dating any periods of significant conflict.

What Christie's does: 

In the three first cases, Christie’s ‘due diligence’ seems to have stopped short of tracing the collecting history back one step further, which would have opened the window on the Becchina transactions.  In the fourth case (lot 93), Christie’s record lists the 1986 and 1997 transaction dates in the lekythos’ collecting history, but completely avoids mentioning the authorities’ raid of Horiuchi’s warehouse in Switzerland or the subsequent passage or ownership of the vase by the convicted Aboutaam brothers, through their ‘Phoenix Ancient Art’ gallery in New York and Geneva.

The Provenance of the Jesus' Wife Papyrus Doesn't Pass the Smell Test

File this in under "antiquities: fishy provenance": The NY Times explains how it is that the fragment of papyrus containing the tantalizing references to Jesus' wife came to Harvard:

Dr. King first learned about what she calls “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” when she received an e-mail in 2010 from a private collector who asked her to translate it. Dr. King, 58, specializes in Coptic literature, and has written books on the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Mary of Magdala, Gnosticism and women in antiquity. 

The owner, who has a collection of Greek, Coptic and Arabic papyri, is not willing to be identified by name, nationality or location, because, Dr. King said, “He doesn’t want to be hounded by people who want to buy this.” 

When, where or how the fragment was discovered is unknown. The collector acquired it in a batch of papyri in 1997 from the previous owner, a German. It came with a handwritten note in German that names a professor of Egyptology in Berlin, now deceased, and cited him calling the fragment “the sole example” of a text in which Jesus claims a wife.

So a professor of Egyptology, now conveniently dead, told the previous owner, also now conveniently dead, this bombshell information, and the previous owner then did not announce the astounding fact to the world or try to donate the fragment to a museum or put it up on the market for millions, but instead sold the papyri privately to another owner who kept it for 13 years before asking the Harvard prof to translate it. As they say on Saturday Night Live, oh realllly?!

It would be interesting to know whether Dr. King raised any questions or an eyebrow when told this tale, but it would appear not, since she seems to be passing it on as if it were simply to be taken at face value. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

The owner could certainly answer some questions by authorities that might make it possible to retrace the trail the owner describes, and perhaps eventually lead to the discovery of other pieces of the fragment. On the other hand, we might well learn that the provenance provided is a cover story. But of course, none of these questions can be posed, since the owner is remaining anonymous becausehe doesn't want to be hounded, Dr King tells us, by buyers.

The Museums Will Be Protected Next Time Round

The military has just released FM 3.07, its new field manual on Stability Operations.  Those concerned that the lessons of the looting of the Iraq National Museum might not have been learned will be pleased to find that among the "Essential Stability Tasks" is that of protecting key personnel and facilities. The eight tasks under this heading include the requirements to "protect and secure places of religious worship and cultural sites," and to "protect and secure strategically important institutions (such as government buildings;medical and public health infrastructure; the central bank, national treasury, and integral commercial banks; museums; and religious sites)."

A bare mention, but nonetheless extremely important, and arguably far more consequential than the ratification of the 1954 Hague Convention. It means that cultural heritage protection is now embedded in the task matrix that operational planners will take as the starting point for future war planning. This is a victory for all those who have been working inside and outside the military and defense establishment to make sure that the U.S. never again acts with the indifference towards cultural heritage that it did in April 2003. 

The field manual also mentions cultural heritage protection in a very prominent place: the epigraph to Chapter 5 quotes Harry L. Coles and Albert K. Weinberg's history of Civil Affairs, Civil Affairs: Soldiers Become Governors:

Because of the ideological aspect of the struggle and because the United States acted as  a member of a coalition of Allies, U.S. military leaders sometimes had to add to their traditional roles as soldiers those of the statesman and the politician. They were beset by the problems of resolving conflicting national interests and of reconciling political idealism and military exigency. On another level—in feeding hungry populations, in tackling intricate financial and economic problems, and in protecting the cultural heritage of a rich and ancient civilization—they had to exercise skills that are also normally considered civilian rather than military.

Whether this quotation means that Civil Affairs will develop the capacity to protect the cultural heritage of a rich and ancient civilization is not clear. Certainly, the record in Iraq and Afghanistan does not reflect any major beefing up of capacity in that regard yet. But with Corine Wegener and others pushing hard on this, we may well also see a great improvement in the military's ability to protect sites and museums during transitions.

What still needs to be done is to help the military to think -- now, not when it is too late -- about what tactics and tools it can and should be prepared to use to secure and protect museums and archaeological sites (as well as other cultural sites).

3 Modest Suggestions for Improving Archaeological Site Protection

Derek Fincham suggests that if we want to protect antiquities currently at risk, "we need a cooperative coordinated approach which rests on a transparent market and loan procedure which works in conjunction with law enforcement and customs officials of many nations." This is exactly right, but needs a bit of flesh put on its bones. Here are three steps that need to be taken for this coordinated approach to work:

1. Transparency must be established in a way that satisfies the archaeological community that the provenance of antiquities is clear. That means creating a legally-binding mechanism for reviewing and approving antiquities for sale (presumably a board that would be run by archaeologists). It also means requiring all sales that take place to be registered so that it is known who is buying and selling, and at what price.

2. Sales of approved antiquities could then be not simply tracked, but taxed, in the model of sin taxes or user fees, with proceeds dedicated to a) paying for the provenance-review board, and b) funding programs (probably run out of the State Department's Cultural Heritage Center) that assist anti-looting and anti-smuggling efforts in those countries from which the artifacts originated. A tax of 5% on the Mesopotamian figurine recently sold for $57 million would have yielded a sum greater than the total 2003 budget of the Iraq State Board of Antiquities. Doubling their budget would dramatically improve their capacity to tamp down on site looting.

3. Both the provenance-review committee and the bureaucracy for administering anti-looting and anti-smuggling programs can be paid for from the tax proceeds. Ideally, there would be a governmental agency that would allocate tax proceeds to both these efforts, but the U.S. has no such agency. An oversight board should be created for this purpose.