Is academia to blame for the bloody trade in antiquities?

Holding an ancient Egyptian funeral mask, a professor smiles at the small group of PhD students, faculty and external visitors gathered at Baylor University’s Classics department, promising: “We’re in for some interesting things today.”

In a scene still available on YouTube, Scott Carroll then plunges the “mummy mask” into a sink of soapy water before pulling apart the soggy layers to reveal what seems a truly astonishing discovery: the papier-mâché mask once worn by Egyptian nobility was made from papyrus on which was written some of the earliest Christian texts ever found.

The valuable discovery justified, in Dr Carroll’s eyes, the inevitable damage. “One less mummy mask but new papyri texts of Homer, Euripides, Thucydides, the earliest-known of Romans and numerous large sections of the most illusive [sic] and valuable of all Greek works – the lyricist Sappho!” he later boasted on Facebook.

But all was not as it seemed. One of the fragments – part of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans – was, it would later emerge, written hundreds of years after the mask was made in about 2,300 BC, and furthermore had already been catalogued in a famous collection at the University of Oxford. Other poetic fragments had also been added to the “mishmash” of texts found that day to add substance to spectacle, Dr Carroll admitted eight years later in 2020.

That shocking scene from January 2012 is the intriguing start to a new book by University of Bologna papyrologist Roberta Mazza, one of the experts who publicly raised concerns over such miraculous finds for more than a decade.

Although it is a story centred on old scraps of paper, there is nothing musty about the cast of Stolen Fragments: Black Markets, Bad Faith and the Illicit Trade in Ancient Artefacts. They include an evangelical Christian billionaire determined to spare no expense in assembling a Museum of the Bible in Washington DC – Steve Green, president of the Hobby Lobby craft chain who is thought to have spent up to $40 million (£30 million) on biblical relics – a feted University of Oxford researcher, Dirk Obbink, arrested on suspicion of selling artefacts from an Oxford library, shady Israeli papyrus dealers, Egyptian tomb raiders and US preachers keen to impress congregations by holding up the original “Word of God”.

But Dr Mazza’s tale also goes beyond the so-called Hobby Lobby scandal, which eventually led to Mr Green returning 5,000 Egyptian antiquities – mostly papyrus fragments – and 6,500 clay cuneiform objects to Egypt and Iraq, and paying $3 million in fines in 2020 for improperly trafficking items into the US. It examines how academics have long engaged in questionable practices to obtain important historical items – enriching themselves in the process – and how incentives in modern-day academia are driving a black market of theft, smuggling, fraud and violence, all by-products of the illicit trade in antiquities that is costing lives and ravaging sites of utmost cultural significance.

In this sense, the fake staging of historical finds was a good place to start, explains Dr Mazza, who was, until recently, based at the University of Manchester. “I wanted to find something triggering and engaging but also an event that encapsulated many of the negative behaviours we’ve seen over the years,” she told Times Higher Education.

“What happened at Baylor was nothing new – no one was asking where this mask had come from, how it had been found. Everything was focused on the idea of discovery – one which will please an audience – with the professor as the modern Indiana Jones.”

That is scarcely surprising, however, as the figure of the buccaneering maverick – willing to disregard the rules to bring home a sensational find – has long been romanticised in academic archaeology, continued Dr Mazza. Nineteenth-century explorers of the Nile would delight in telling stories of how they sneaked out Egyptian treasures under the noses of officials keen to take their share under the 1891 “partage” system of profit-sharing, Stolen Fragments explains. The British Museum’s keeper of Egyptian artefacts, Ernest Budge, once boasted of cutting into pieces a papyrus roll containing columns of poems by the Greek poet Bacchylides to smuggle it out of Egypt, hidden between newspaper pages.

“The incentives were all about the discovery – not about understanding the context of a find, which might tell us if it is part of a collection, for instance,” said Dr Mazza, adding: “I wanted to explain how this is still happening, and why we need to change practices in our discipline.”

Beyond financial gain, many scholars in the past were driven by a sense of colonial white entitlement to the treasures of Egypt, which had been gathered from across the Mediterranean over millennia and were perceived to belong more to Europe’s intellectual tradition rather than to the Arabs and Muslims who have lived there in more recent history, she explained. “I want people to engage these questions of how we acquired many items but also how we can preserve our shared world heritage together,” Dr Mazza said regarding her discipline’s problematic past.

A new threat identified by Dr Mazza in Stolen Fragments is how scholars engage with items of potentially immense historical significance that emerge on the antiquities market. With an estimated 400,000 antiquities looted in the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq War alone, tough questions must be asked about whether academics should publish about these eye-catching finds of dubious provenance – particularly because an academic paper can cause an item’s value to skyrocket, she said.

For instance, the Gilgamesh Dream tablet – a 3,600-year-old religious text – was acquired by a US dealer who said he found it in a job lot of clay objects he bought for $50,000 in 2003. With an article on its true significance pending, it was sold four years later for nearly $500,000. It was later acquired by Mr Green for $1.67 million in 2014, although it was one of many items returned after it emerged it was likely stolen from an Iraqi museum.

Yet a big paper on a long-lost find can also launch a career, Dr Mazza noted.

“If academics want to proceed in their careers, they need to publish extraordinary pieces about important new texts and objects, but there is often violence behind this trade,” she said. “There are still colleagues willing to publish about material of illegal provenance,” she added, recommending that papyrologists might instead focus on the less glamorous work of studying existing texts stored in libraries across the world.

Patty Gerstenblith, director of the Centre for Art, Museum and Cultural Heritage Law at DePaul University, agreed that there remains a problem in the world of papyrology.

“Ethical principles concerning publication of unprovenanced materials – or materials without a pre-1970 provenance – have been common in the archaeological world for a long time and there has been improvement in that regard. Text scholars tend to see themselves as different and it seems like relatively few – unless they’re also archaeologists – are reluctant to study and publish unprovenanced text materials,” said Professor Gerstenblith, who had warned Mr Green about the risks he was running with his collection. “I don’t think the Hobby Lobby cases will change anything,” she concluded gloomily.

That may be because the less-heralded work of calling out infringements of rules prohibiting the international trade of items discovered after 1970 – which, in the case of papyrus, often involves the shredding of larger texts into less identifiable fragments – is less rewarded by institutions keen to share in the limelight. And this work is often dangerous, recounts Dr Mazza, who describes how an eBay dealer threatened to throw acid in her face if she pursued her investigations into the stolen items he was selling.

“There were moments when I felt it was a bit dangerous,” recalled Dr Mazza on her efforts to blow the whistle on the sale of stolen items, including those finding their way to the Museum of the Bible. “When you’re dealing with big money who can employ expensive lawyers, it can be scary, even though I knew I was telling the truth.”

With a number of other scholars, Dr Mazza helped create enough noise for the US government to investigate the Washington museum’s activities, while universities also took action. Dr Carroll, known for bringing plastic bags full of papyrus fragments to the Museum of the Bible, has left academia and is now telling his stories of how “archaeology proves the Bible is true” to churches across the US. His former collaborator Dr Obbink is being sued by Hobby Lobby for £5 million over his sale of items, many of which were allegedly pilfered from Oxford’s Egypt Exploration Society collection, where he was a custodian. He has denied any wrongdoing.

“There were times when it was scary but academics do have a certain power and we need to access that power in a good way – it certainly helped that my university was backing me,” reflected Dr Mazza. “I believe in the idea of the public intellectual – there are moments when we do need to call out what is happening. That is our responsibility.”

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com