Stolen Fragments: Black Markets, Bad Faith, and the Illicit Trade in Ancient Artefacts

Cuando coma Spicy Chicken McNuggets de McDonald's, toma tu momento para apreciar que han vuelto. Y aunque tengas muchas ganas de comerte otro McNugget, toma tu momento para dejar que el picante salga. Porque el empanizado de tempura y a la pimienta cayena no son los picantes, sino que son exactamente el picante que te gusta. Ordena por anticipado en el app de McDonald's. Bara pa pa, en McDonald's participantes por tiempo limitado. Welcome to the new books network. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Academic Life. This is a podcast for your academic journey and beyond. I'm the shows producer and your host, Dr. Cristina Guessler. And today I am so pleased to be joined by Dr. Robertta Matza, who is the author of Stolen Fragments. Black markets, bad faith, and the illicit trade in stolen artifacts. Welcome to the show, Professor Matza. Thank you for inviting me, Dr. Guessler. I am so glad that you're here and that we get to learn about your fascinating and complex book from you. Before we do that, will you please tell us about yourself? Yes, so I am a professor, an associate professor of papirology at the University of Bologna in the department of Cultural Heritage, which actually is located in Ravenna. But before this job, I held position in the States as an adjunct professor in Santa Barbara at the University of California. And then I was lecturer and then senior lecturer, so with the permanent position in Manchester, UK, where I worked on their university collections from Egypt. So my interest in ancient Egypt, especially in the Greco-Roman period when Egypt was under the Ptolemaic and the Roman Empire, was born back in the days, while I was a student at the university, again, of Bologna, where I circled back most recently. Because I started being fascinated by the idea of being able to read the actual ancient documents rather than translations and editions produced by academics. So that's me. When you were younger, what did you think you would do and how close is your current life to that vision? I think that in terms of the law of the attraction towards the material, I'm very similar to what I used to be as a young student, a university student. But what really changed in the meanwhile was the way I looked at this material as the result of sort of thieves of other countries and other people, cultural heritage. When I was at the university, I didn't really appreciate the ways in which the many complicated ways in which these material, papyrus and other antiquities from Egypt came to Europe or more broadly to what we define as the West to include North American countries. So in that respect, my vision has changed a lot. I would say from the early 2000s onwards. When you were very young, were you an avid reader, were you curious about decoding things? How did you find your way to digging into such complicated things? Well, I suppose I had a romantic kind of approach to reading. I was an avid reader of any kind of books. I was not obsessed with ancient history. So I suppose I liked to read something very far from the present. But then I was really into this kind of material only after I went to university. When I met the teacher who actually told me to deal with papyrus and then I developed a serious interest in reading ancient documents, these ancient pieces of papyrus. This book, Stolen Fragments, you tell us the story that it centers around, really wasn't on your radar, that it was around 2012 when you found out that this man, Mr. Green, was amassing this collection. How did this story come onto your radar? So, in fact, I became seriously involved in looking at this story and the Green Collection in 2014, not even 2012, when the newspapers all over the world announced the finding of new poems of Sappho, the Greek poet of archaic Greece, which were supposed to be found on a scrap of papyrus, in the hands of Enanonimus London Collector, and then it came out, of course, that the discoverer was the scholar who is the other big kind of protagonist of the book, these papyrus. Enanonimus, the man who used to teach in Oxford, Dear Cobbinc, who actually was collaborating with the Green family to a mass, a large collection of papyrus. So, that triggered my attention because it was after 2011, when we saw all the looting and robberies connected with the instability brought about by the Arab Revolution of the January of 2011. And in connection to this instability, we also saw a lot of antiquities, offered for sale through auction houses and through the web too. So, to me, to see that there were collectors amassing papyrus collection in that kind of market situation was a alarm bell ringing really. You know, signalling that something was off. I wish to recall you all that there are laws, very strict laws, regarding the possibility to export antiquities from Egypt. Actually, it's impossible to export antiquities fresh from the ground from Egypt nowadays. And also, the antiquities market on paper is supposed to be highly regulated, but in fact, it is not. And actually, the story I am telling in the book is about how fragile is the system through which we take care of the antiquities. Would people ask you about this book? How do you describe it for them? This book is the story of a huge network of dealers, traffickers, millionaires, collectors of all kinds of size and importance. who during a period of about you know 10 years or so were able to smuggle and traffic a large huge number of antiquities not only from Egypt but also from other countries mainly to the US both to other countries are involved. So I'm following the story of how the Green Collection and the Museum of the Bible were born. The Museum of the Bible is this museum that the Green family the owners of Hobby Lobby Chain in the US have sponsored and actually inaugurated in 2017 but it's also a longer story that is I link the story of this huge scandal with the colonial period and the founding of my discipline Papyrology and close other close disciplines like Egyptology. So I see what has happened to the Green Collection and the Museum of the Bible as something very much linked in the Victorian let's call it that way past the 19th century when Egypt fell under the British control and the opening of this country to Europe in some ways allowed the massive export of antiquities outside that country to enrich our collection in Europe and elsewhere. And while you tell us the story of how the Green family even became interested in being a backer of this Bible collecting and this Bible Museum you take us deep through the history of how many of these items became excavated in the first place as you mentioned back in the Victorian era you you rooted in colonialism in racism you also introduce us to some key people one was Amelia Edwards and she was a Victorian woman in in in bringing to light these various people and how these things were excavated you illuminate for us a variety of motives some of which seem to be misplaced altruism sort of a white saviorism but at the root of all of this is a economics there's many in this but there's also a status in in amassing these collections can you tell us about Amelia Edwards? So Amelia Edwards is part of an environment which is of course very different from ours so she was one actually she was also a positive personality someone who was very active in the suffragette movement someone a woman with a great personality but she was of course part of a general you know cultural environment in which as you said in your question there was this strange idea was strange there was this idea that civilization was a character that only Europe and you know the white people somehow possessed and had to be to be brought to all these other countries and continents that were coming into the sphere of knowledge and also of reach because it was possible to travel more easily of Europeans and the British first and foremost this was the era of empire and we need to understand that of course for a woman of the high of the elite somehow like Amelia Edwards it was a moment of great excitement that is there was the possibility to learn from those places so Amelia Edwards was the founder of the Egypt exploration fund that was basically a bank account and little more through which subscribers of different kind of you know social environments could contribute so that archaeologists and papyrologies could go to Egypt to excavate battles to acquire antiquities on the market now at that time to purchase antiquity in Egypt was possible it was legal if you of course follow the strict rules that where you know you had to buy from certain dealers and then you had to declare what you bought to the antiquities service so that you obtained you know a stamp thanks to which you could send the material over to your place of course because Egypt was under strict British control they all system somehow was controlled not by the Egyptians who actually were even under you know the Ottoman Empire so it's a very complex political set political situation but it was controlled after all by the British and other European countries like first and foremost France who still had a foot in the administration of the country so while I see a connection between you know this Victorian period and also this idea of white supremacism that somehow was normal back in the days I see also huge differences between you know what has happened at that time and what might happen as our time what I don't I can't actually allow to happen is to have collectors behaving now as they were still in sort of colonial you know 19th century so that was triggered my interest and also my outrage towards what was happening with the Museum of the Bible one of the things that you point out is that even when there were regulations and rules and people appear to be following them it's left ongoing legal disputes between the home countries where the artifacts rightfully belong and the museums that hold them one of your examples in the book is the Rosetta Stone yeah so well of course we understand now that some objects have come to museums like the British museums and the other sort of global museum in ways that were illegal if even at the time and anyway even if they were legal back in the days today we need to ask questions of the ethics on justice is this is is it still right to keep let's say in the British Museum an object like the Rosetta Stone which is so meaningful to the Egyptian people to the point that there is a petition for this object to come back right and so I think that museums nowadays and libraries too have to think about about their role as custodians and have to perhaps be in discussion, at least in conversation with those part of the originary countries, right, provenance countries, who are calling for the material to be sent back. I'm not saying that everything needs to go back, but I do think that the discussions surrounding very meaningful, I mean highly meaningful objects, like the Elgin marbles, so to speak, the Parton on Marbles, or Rosetta Stone, or the head of Nefertiti should be open to a repatriation process. These parallels of what has happened in the past, other ongoing disputes about who has the right to hold onto something and what are ethical obligations. They all run alongside this story of the Green family and how they came to be part of this large private holding of antiquities. Can you take us into how they became interested in the first place, because it wasn't something they were originally doing if I understand this correctly? Yes, exactly. So, I was really struck when I discovered that this family, which is a family, very prominent in the American public scene, but much less you know, renowned in the context where I belong, that is Europe, I was struck by the entire story, because from what I was able, I've been able to reconstruct, they were dragged into Bible, antiquities and other objects collecting by these men whose name is Scott Carroll, and an entire, I don't know, environment of these evangelical Christian preachers who seemed to be very interested in the materiality of the Word of God, so to speak, that is, during the late 1990s, there was an entire sort of group or environment of evangelical Christians that started somehow being driven into antiquities collecting. So, what Scott Carroll and others proposed to the Green was to amass a collection going to buy in countries like Turkey, Israel, Egypt, perhaps, and also the Gulf countries where antiquities could be sourced cheaply, that means could be sourced illegally. So, this is the first step, and then there was also this system, the fiscal system, which is actually legal at some extent, through which if you amass a collection, and then you decide to give it to a charity institution like Museums Education, charity institutions like Museums, Universities and Libraries, you obtain a tax deduction, a tax deduction, however, which is calculated not on the price you paid for those antiquities or other items, but based on the fair market value that those objects have at the moment of donation. So, the sort of trick that was put in place by the Green and their acolytes was to source material cheaply, and then to wait sometimes and through a system of scholars and experts who are to decide the fair market value, they were able to gain massive tax deductions through those donations. You understand that that was, of course, something to the expenses of the American taxpayers, even if there is a loop in the legislation. And of course, to the huge expenses of those countries which are targeted by networks of smuggler and other criminals who are, you know, robbing from archaeological sites, museums, and so forth so on. So, it's really a sort of white collar kind of crime system, criminal system that nowadays started being under the radar of investigators, but not so much. We haven't seen that many prosecutions and actual people don't pay for these kinds of crimes. Of course, the Green and their museum did the right thing that was, they gave material back to Egypt, Iraq, and other countries, but nobody really paid for anything in terms of serving time in jail or, you know, restoring justice more deeply. So, I think that unless we start seeing prosecutions and penalties also for those academics who were, you know, embedded in the system, things won't change much. I mean, for Christis, for instance, the auction house, which was, you know, called to court by the Green because they bought from Christis some material that then turned out to be hot, I mean, to be illegal, they just paid, they went to an agreement, a private agreement with the Green, probably they paid a huge amount of money to the family, but that's it. And for them, it's nothing. I mean, it's really something that bothers me a lot. You mentioned in the book that these large auction houses have insurance that covers them in case something like this happens, but as far as individuals being stopped through having a criminal record, that's not really something that you're seeing. No, I'm not seeing that. That is actually what I'm seeing is a market, which is still very much operating as if nothing has happened in these recent years. Of course, there are also, you know, dealers who pay attention to these things, but they are a minority. And auction houses, they are shielded by the law. So in a sense, they are allowed to behave the way they do because they operate as intermediators. So they are always saying, but it's the duty of the buyer and the seller to think about, you know, to go through all the documents and check that everything has been done by the book. So there is this sort of, you know, it's not my duty. And then the buyer says, I'm being cheated. And actually, sometimes the buyers wanted somehow to be cheated because when I see provenance as described in auction houses catalogues, I cannot think other than, you know, people wanted to be cheated. I mean, the information are so scanty. And then of course, there are sellers who are playing the game of, you know, selling for high prices through these auction houses without actually having a title to do so. It's very sad. It's also sad this taste like, you know, really the taste of the wealthy who want to have in their houses, let's say, the funeral mask of a person that in ancient Egypt 2000 years ago. It's not fancy at all. I think that we have to insist with how vulgar it is to appropriate these objects who actually are so sensitive. First of all, they were entombed with a person, right? And second, okay, we have excavated these objects, but it's not just for the wish to look at the object, but it's more for thinking about the culture and the society in which this dead person portrayed in the mask lived. So while I understand that objects like these need to be eventually shown in museums with the context, with the care, I see the act of showing objects, ancient objects in private houses of the wealthy, really of bad taste and vulgarity, the vulgarity of the entire show off. I don't understand. I think that we need to make antiquities collecting for the sake of decoration and cool to stop all these masks. You invite us into a scene in the book that relates in many ways to what you were just hearing it. There's a funerary mask and it's going to be used for demonstration, but the demonstration destroys it. It was as a historian and a human being difficult to read that scene. For you to research it, I believe it must have been incredibly difficult for the people there. It seemed to have no emotional impact whatsoever. What really bothered me about that scene, which actually you can still check online, it's seen on YouTube, is that this washing up, because it was a washing up in a sink of a kitchen, the kitchen of a department of classics. This was really what struck me as unbearable. There were professors involved, professors who involved their students. They are graduate, for sure, I don't remember if they were also undergraduates. That is something that a papyrologist, a specialist, could not bear. We exposed what was happening in order for it to stop. In that scene, you see, of course, the director, the first director of the Green Collection, who was this Scott Carroll, this preacher and the PhD graduate, who has worked in various colleges, Christian colleges, who were doing most of the dismounting. The washing up in the sink of this mask, but then everyone in the room, which included a number of specialists and papyrologists as well, was doing something that is really unethical from the standard that we are supposed to follow. I was really disturbed, and this happened more than once from, let's say, 2011, 2013, at least, in that university and in other situations where the Green Collection was somehow presenting their approach to the study of these artifacts before the opening of the museum. Actually, it was our sustained criticism to that methodologies and to the way, you know, they were presenting the material that stopped them making it something even bigger in the museum. If you go online and go and read those parts of the book, where I talked about these topics, you would see that they had plans to have an entire section of the museum dedicated to the dismounting of Mami Cartonage, Mami masks, like the one you see in the video, but they stopped because we started being publicly outraged about those plans. The video that we're referring to, if I'm recalling the scene from the book correctly, they dissolve this mask in water in the sink, and then they invite people who are there, as you said, some of them are academics, some of them are students to pick it apart, claiming that this is a way to find fragments of papyrus that has important writing, that they're going to discover, and that this is the method to do it, and you point out in the book that there are many methods of imagery collection that don't involve destruction of anything, and that the field of archaeology itself has moved far from the Victorian method of take everything you can, don't record how you found it, don't have a goal of keeping everything intact to the more modern method of archaeology, which is to learn, observe, understand social structures, and to destroy nothing, to leave the least harm you can while you learn the most and you preserve the most. Yes, exactly. So what they were doing was something that actually the Victorians were doing, because by chance, while excavating, you know, these tombs and cemetery, the archaeologists, or say more that's kind of, you know, more than archaeologists, they were people who were, you know, adventurers, the first generations, they realized that some of the mummies were wrapped up in these cases that were made of a sort of papier-mache, that sometimes, but not always, could be made of fragments of discarded, you know, documents, but only a fraction of these cartonage and mummies could, you know, have traces of old written material. So nowadays, what we do eventually is to try to find non-invasive methodologies in order to look through, it's possible, of course, to look through the bandages and all these plastic kind of material. And of course, when something is made in the context of, let's say, a university lab or any other kind of scientific environment, it is nowadays photograph documented in various ways, while these people were just doing mad things that only in the Victorian period, or later on, little later on, was made. So it was like, you know, a source of time machine going back to the beginning of the discipline that under our eyes in 2010 and so forth, so it was completely out of any kind of reasonable way of scientific way of practicing our disciplines, yes so the other aspect that struck me was this strange mix of people that the green hired in order to let's say study and curate their collections. So there were these people involved into you know Evangelical Christian preaching and teaching that has nothing to do with you know the highly specialized field of papyrology and other textual oriented disciplines and then of course there were also attempts at hiring highly renowned academics who at the beginning jumped into the sort of the green collection scholars initiative because of the Monet. So what attracted at first a lot of academics was the possibility to see the research funded by these millionaires who seemed to throw money around but while I was talking to many colleagues who at the beginning were approach the state on board for a while and then left was the feeling that actually those in charge like for instant Scott Carroll and others were completely unable to you know to provide high scientific standards and the proof is also that they bought for instance for Jerry's right like the Dead Sea Scroll fragments in the possession first of Mr. Green and others and then of the museum were declared to be all forgeries so you see it was a mad sort of endeavor. You also invite us into another parallel there's the Ryland family from the UK who was the really it sounds like the money behind an important collection and throughout all of the collections that you you take us through and the people that we meet you keep coming back to these questions of how and why collections come to be where they are stored the ethics behind it and what drives people to hold these objects. Can you tell us a bit about the Rylands? So the Rylands for me the example of the Rylands was very dear because actually in 2009 the same year you know the Green family started collecting I was hired at the University of Manchester who which now is somehow the institution who inherited this Rylands library which is a sort of treasure trove of collections that these family of cotton magnate of the 19th century you know Victorian Manchester amassed in the colonial period. Of course as I said before you know to collect in the Victorian period is something completely different than collecting nowadays but there are some patterns if you like in the wish in the in the kind of in the drive that push people collecting so for instance for the Rylands the beginning was really similar in a way to the green that this was a family of great you know Christian methodists I mean non-conformist of the time very much interested in the Bible who started a collection of Bibles and then went into more you know wider kind of collecting but the real difference was first of all of course the political and historical climate completely different. The other thing was that the Rylands relied on the best scholars they could hire at the time and made their entire collection public since the very beginning so there are similarities but there are also a lot of differences and first of all you know the political climate is something completely different. Towards the end of the book you tell us that researching and writing this book has left you with some rage and that your goal was to let the rage go. You also let us know in the book this is not about an opinion in any way about whether or not there should be a museum devoted to the Bible it's or about certain types of documents and who values them it's about our collective ethics as a field and as human beings about these materials and that your hope in finishing the book was to read the rage. I feel in some ways you passed it on to the readers. Yes. Well yes I think that my book is a deep critique of my field and more in general of the way academia a large part of academia as a system has been has behaved in recent and less recent years. I was clear on the fact that I like to be in a society where everyone is allowed to express their own opinions and ideas as long as you know the civil way of keeping the conversation going is maintained. So in principle I'm not against a family of evangelical Christians who want to you know sponsor a museum where a certain kind of the history of the Bible is told what is important however is that there are you know voices like mine and those of others who disagree with their way of seeing the history of the Bible and we keep this conversation going. The rage that I let go in the book in the last part of the book is towards my colleagues. Yes because I do think that academics are very tender to be very I don't know how to say that in English there is a sort of they are greedy so they want to publish material sometimes for you know some kind of economic you know aim but in most cases because of their CV you know they have some every one of us has their own their own kind of material something that we really are attracted by and while there are some of us who stop and think about you know the ethic behind the way that kind that material has come to our desk there are many others too many others who don't care they just say oh scholarship comes first or you know hiding this document would be a betrayal to the document and to scholarship while in my opinion you know there are ways of holding the material for a while and somehow making just not only to the material, but to the societies, to the communities from where that material has been taken away. So, Michael is for a far more just and ethical academia. One where many voices are allowed to speak, but at the same time, one where some rules, ethical rules, are not betrayed, betrayed, as I've seen in the past. We're starting to come to the close of our time together. My final question is, what do you hope listeners will take away? Well, first of all, I really hope that the reader will enjoy the story. Actually, I wrote it in a way that I hoped was kind of not a true crime, but a kind of true crime. Sort of, you know, the story, I hope the story would sound engaging. And then what I hope is for the non-specialist readers to think more thoroughly about what they see in museums, in libraries, but also what they see online, for instance, on sale on eBay, that is another big part of the story, all these material that is openly illegally sold through eBay and other platforms online. So I would like people to think about also the topics I was explaining before, that is how we use or exhibit artifacts antiquities, has an impact that goes beyond our own generation, and goes beyond, you know, Europe or America. So there are other parts of the world in which we live, which have been dispoiled, deprived of their own cultural heritage for centuries. So we need to find ways to repair what we have done in the past. Thank you so much for being here today, Professor Roberta Masa, and sharing about your book, stolen fragments, black markets, bad faith, and the illicit trade in each and artifacts. I'm Dr. Cristina Guestler, you've been listening to the academic life. Please join us again. When you eat spicy chicken McNuggets, take a moment to appreciate that they have returned. And although you have many desire to eat another McNugget, take a moment to let the spicy come out. Because the deliciousness of Tempura and the spicy chicken are not just spicy, but they are exactly the spicy you like.