Since early last summer, the Egypt Exploration Society (EES) has been increasingly concerned about the sale of P.Oxy. 5345, the once-called First Century Mark fragment, and three other pieces of papyrus from the EES Oxyrhynchus collection.  These four early gospel fragments, each conveniently including passages from the consecutive the New Testament books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, are some of the most important historic scriptures to come on the (il)licit market in recent years and were apparently sold, without the knowledge or consent of the EES to Hobby Lobby Inc., which purchased the artefacts in early 2013.  

The seller was Dirk Obbink, an American papyrologist, who was appointed to the University Lectureship in Papyrology at Oxford in 1994, taking over the post vacated by Peter Parsons when the latter took up the Regius Chair of Greek.  Obbink's appointment at Oxford combined a variety of responsibilities, including a Tutorship at Christ Church, where he lectures on a wide range of classical material as well as the direction of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project and its related Imaging Papyri Project.  Obbink's involvement as the seller of these ancient texts appears to be a side pursuit with which he has been involved for a considerable period of time.   

The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, most of which are now the property of the Egypt Exploration Society, is a substantial collection of thousands of papyri fragments discovered during six excavation seasons carried out by British Classicists Bernard P. Grenfell and Arthur S. Hunt from 1896 until 1907.  The literary material was uncovered outside the ruins of the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus, near the modern-day city of El-Bahnasa (in the Al-Minya governorate), on the left bank of the Bahr Yussef in Egypt.  There, at the turn of the century, more than 100,000 fragments were unearthed from the city's rubbish mounds, saved by the ravages of time, with the help of Egypt's arid climate and the layers of dry sand which created the ideal conditions for preserving organic matter.  

Some of the textual finds from Oxyrhynchus have been breathtakingly important, like the literate lines from Homer's first book of the Iliad.  Others are more mundane, but give us a clear, if ancient dustbin view of everyday life. Snippets found at the site document everything from shopping lists, to documents outlining the hazards of bee-keeping, and even a cost vs. benefit analysis of transport by boat or donkey.

For biblical scholars, the New Testament papyri found in the garbage heaps of Oxyrhynchus constitute the oldest, most numerous, and most geographically concentrated group of first to third century Christian texts found in any singular area.  Given the vast size of the Oxyrhynchus cache, textual critics and scholars are still deciphering, reconstructing and publishing the transcriptions of the papyrological and parchment fragments discovered by Grenfell and Hunt's team more than a century after their original discovery. 

In a strangely Ponzi-like scheme...

As the scandal reaches biblical proportions, it appears that Hobby Lobby Inc., agreed to the purchase of the four contested fragments, (see the purchase agreement and other documents provided by Michael Holmes, Director of the Museum of the Bible's Scholars Initiative) via a private sales agreement dated January 17, 2013.   

In that agreement, the US-based craft company is listed as the purchaser of six items including the four New Testament papyri whose dates are listed as "circa 0100 AD".  Oxford scholar Dirk Obbink is listed as the objects' private seller.  The heavily redacted invoice, released publically last June, itemized the objects to be included in the sale and sequences the invoice as number "17". This leaves one to speculate as to who Obbink's sixteen previous invoices were issued, and if they too might involve ancient artifacts that were not in the scholar's purview to sell.  

At the time this purchase agreement was drawn up, Obbink's role as the director of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project, gave him hands on access to any number of ancient texts for scholarly interpretation.  Yet his sale's agreement to Hobby Lobby makes no mention of the four fragments true owners, the EES, or any other provenance collection history for that matter.  Nor does their agreement state when or under what condition these slips of papyri left the territory of Egypt or in what capacity Obbink was acting as the UK-based seller.  

Instead, Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., seemed more focused on obtaining the fragments' in time for an upcoming exhibition at the Vatican in Rome and for control of any future academic publication.  Under their mutually negotiated sales agreement, Hobby Lobby agreed to Obbink's stipulations for exclusivity regarding the research and publishing of the circa 100-300 CE fragments.  They also granted him permission to retain the fragments for a period of four years so that he could conduct scholarly research.    

Yet the path to this sale is filled with contradictions and some statements made by several overlapping actors who were aware of the sale rebut the facts and one another. 

In a video interview at the National Apologetics Conference, held on October 16-17, 2015, almost three years after the alleged sale, the Green Collection's controversial former buyer, Scott Carroll commented on seeing the Mark fragment on a pool table along with a number of pieces of mummy cartonnage, in what is believed to have been, but was not explicitly stated to be, Obbink's office in Oxford at Christ Church.    

Here is a brief excerpt from that interview between Carroll and the Evangelical Protestant Christian apologist Josh McDowell.  The full seven minute video is also included below. 

On December 1, 2011 Carroll took to social media and wrote on Facebook "For over 100 years the earliest-known text of the NT has been the so-called John Rylands papyrus.  That is about to change with a sensational discover[y] I made yesterday.  Stay tuned for the update."  The same day he tweeted the same in shorter form on the social media site Twitter. "For over 100 years the earliest known text of the New Testament has been the so-call John Rylands Papyrus. Not any more."

In this instance Carroll was referring to the Rylands Library Papyrus P52, also known as the St John's fragment, (accession reference P. Rylands 457), a papyrus fragment which Carroll believed was superseded, in terms of earliest known NT scripture by the yet to be published fragment shown to him in Oxford by Obbink.

In 2018 Professor Obbink himself reported to EES that he did show the Mark papyrus to Scott Carroll in his rooms, where he claimed it was temporarily there for teaching purposes.  Obbink reported that Scott Carroll and he discussed whether the fragment could be displayed in an exhibition at the Vatican but without conclusion and insisted that he had never said that the papyrus was for sale.  Obbink also informed the EES that while he did receive some payments from the Green Collection for advice on other matters, he had not accepted any payment for or towards the purchase of this previously unpublished text.  The exhibition Obbink obliquely referred to would have been the Verbum Domini which highlighted 152 pieces from the Green's collection and which opened in Rome on March 1, 2012, long before the sales agreement between Obbink and Hobby Lobby was finalized. 

Jerry Pattengale, former Executive Director of Education Initiatives at Museum of the Bible also gave his own version of his long and sometimes contentiously bumpy relationship with Obbink, Carroll, the Museum of the Bible's benefactors and the controversial sale of the stolen EES artifacts.  In an article penned for Christianity Today on June 28, 2019, Pattengale reported being present during the infamous viewing of the Mark fragment on Obbink's pool table and writes that he and Carroll were about to leave the scholar's office, when Obbink stood up and told them “I have something you two might like to see.”

According to Pattengale, Obbink then opened a manila filing envelope containing the four papyrus pieces of New Testament Gospels of Matthew 3.7-10, 11-12; Mark 1.8-9, 16-18; Luke 13.25-7, 28, and John 8.26-8, 33-5, which the scholar  was purportedly shopping to the pair of MOTB affiliates on behalf of a confidential seller.  In Pattengale's version he tries to paint an innocent portrait of himself as having been duped by the Oxford professor.  He even goes so far as to admit that he was the individual who photographed Obbink’s handwritten list of the four manuscripts for sale, reporting that he carried the slip of paper, folded up in his own wallet, for years.

In reality, it was the file metadata of the photo of the handwritten inventory which tied the photo to Pattengale, and which showed that the image was taken near Indiana Wesleyan University, where Pattengale works.  Despite throwing Obbink under the bus, Pattengale gives the reader no information on whether or not he or Carroll pressed the Oxford scholar for any documentation on the objects' legitimacy for sale before he and Carroll brought the offer forward to the Greens and Hobby Lobby. 

Buyer's Remorse? 

The evangelical Green family's private collection of biblical artifacts is known to have been gathered and purchased, in staggering quantities, over a ten year period, many brokered through purchases arranged by Scott Carroll, in anticipation of the opening of the family-sponsored $800 million, eight-story, Museum of the Bible.  Brimming with objects gifted to the Washington DC museum by their deep-pocketed benefactors, this family-sponsored museum opened its doors, just two blocks south of the National Mall, in November 2017.

Since then, many of the objects and texts purchased by the Greens, and in some cases donated on to the museum, have caused reputational damage to DC's youngest museum, as well as to the Green family themselves and their zealous buyer. So many purchases were made during the Greens antiquities shopping sprees that at times the museum's upper level directors appeared to be somewhat in the dark about when, and what, had been purchased, and from whom.   

As aggressive buyers who at times have been portrayed as being unfamiliar with, or obtuse to ethical collecting practices, the Greens and the Museum of the Bible have not commented publicly on their own involvement leading up to the sale of the EES fragments. It is not known (publically) if the Greens or anyone connected to the sales and ownership transactions queried Obbink at any point to produce documentation demonstrating how the scholar came to acquire the manuscripts, or when, and under what circumstances, the artifacts had left the source country.

What is known is that after agreeing to the Obbink's conditions and proceeding with the invoiced transaction.  The museum waited from 2013 until June 2019 to get cold feet and only transmitted the sale's details to worried scholars, confirming that something was afoot with this purchase, a full year after the Egyptian Exploration Society had identified the Mark fragment as their own. 

This lack of transparency is not the Museum's first, or only time that their collection's acquisition and disclosure details leave a lot of unanswered questions and have proven problematic for the Greens' reputation.  In their drive to acquire, the family has not only purchased stolen artifacts, tied to multiple transactions, but they have also been snookered into buying forgeries which later proved to be too good to be true.  

With the transmission of this controversial purchase agreement and other documents sent to Dr. Brent Nongbri's and published in his June 2019 blog post, Obbink's statements regarding what happened during the his MOTB meetings can now, once and for all, be concluded as false. This plus the continued scholarly outcry from Roberta Mazza, Josephine Dru, Candida Moss, Brent Nongbri, Ariel Sabar, David Bradnick, and a host of other concerned scholars, perhaps served to impetus to the EES to initiate a thorough, internal investigation into what else, in addition to these fragments, might be missing from within their collection while under Obbink's supervision.

That inquiry, facilitated by information and photographs provided by the Museum of the Bible staff, has served to confirm that the MOTB purchased 13 EES fragments stolen from their collection.  Likewise, their investigation has revealed that key file records, including some catalogue cards and photographs relating to the missing fragments (twelve on papyrus and one on parchment) were also methodically removed, likely to cover the tracks of the thief or thieves involved.

For the moment it has been determined that eleven of these fragments were sold directly by Obbink to Hobby Lobby Inc., in two batches in 2010 which were then donated to the Museum of the Bible for the museum's collection.  The other two fragments identified as missing from the EES collection came into the MOTB's hands via Khader M. Baidun & Sons who operate Art-Levant Antiquities of Israel.  Baidun was one of five antiquity dealers in East Jerusalem, arrested in Israel in 2017 in connection to a large smuggling scandal involving antiquities purchased by Hobby Lobby.

Yet whomever removed the artifacts from the Egypt Exploration Society and tampered with the find records, in furtherance of the theft and subsequent sales, was evidently unaware that the EES still had a small ace up their sleeve.  Archival records stored in another area of the society enabled EES staff to identify several missing texts. With this iron-clad evidence, the Society then worked with the MOTB to developed a mutually beneficial agreement which would allow research on the stolen fragments by scholars under the auspices of the MOTB, who would publish their findings in the Oxyrhynchus Papyri series, in exchange for the museum's Board of Trustees acceptance of the Society's claim to ownership and the museum's voluntary forfeiture of the contested pieces.

Hashing out this agreement may explain the nearly one year delay between the time EES issued a statement that the fragment of Mark P.Oxy. LXXXIII 5345 was theirs and the time in which Michael Holmes, Director of the Museum of the Bible's Scholars Initiative, released information on the sale's process to worried scholars. 

EES has listed the stolen fragments to be returned by the Museum of the Bible as: 

Genesis 5:  P.Oxy. inv. 39 5B.119/C(4-7)b.  [PAP.000121]
Genesis 17:  P.Oxy. inv. 20 3B.30/F(5-7)b.   [PAP.000463]
Exodus 20-21:  P.Oxy. inv. 102/171(e).   [PAP.000446]
Exodus 30.18-19:  P.Oxy. inv. 105/149(a).   [PAP.000388]
Deuteronomy:  P.Oxy. inv. 93/Dec. 23/M.1.   [PAP.000427]
Psalms 9.23-26:   P.Oxy. inv. 8 1B.188/D(1-3)a.   [PAP.000122]
Sayings of Jesus:  P.Oxy. inv. 16 2B.48/C(a).   [PAP.000377]
Romans 3:  <related to P.Oxy. inv. 101/72(a)>.   [PAP.000467]
Romans 9-10:  P.Oxy. inv. 29 4B.46/G(4-6)a.   [PAP.000425 one part]
1 Corinthians 7-10:  P.Oxy. inv. 106/116(d) + 106/116(c).   [PAP.000120 three small fragments]
Quotation of Hebrews:  P.Oxy. inv. 105/188(c).   [PAP.000378]
Scriptural homily:  P.Oxy. inv. 3 1B.78/B(1-3)a.   [PAP.000395]
(parchment) Acts of Paul:  P.Oxy. inv. 8 1B.192/G(2)b.   [MS.000514]

Shaaban Abdel-Gawad - Head of the Egyptian Department of Repatriation Image Credit: Egyptian Department of Repatriation, Ministry of Antiquities-Arab Republic of Egypt

Last week the controversially purchased, ancient gold mummiform coffin, inscribed in the name of Nedjemankh, was formally restituted to the Arab Republic of Egypt.  The plundered late Ptolemaic era antiquity had been purchased by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art for €3.5m in 2017, following protracted negotiations with Paris-based art dealer Christophe Kunicki, and his partner Richard Semper.  The restitution was made after it came to light that the sellers had purportedly supplied their buyers with fabricated ownership records and falsified export documents attesting to the object's legitimacy.  Documents, it should be said, which the museum's buyers accepted, despite marked incongruencies and factual errors.

Last winter, with sufficient tangible evidence that the delicate cartonnage coffin had been smuggled out of Egypt recently, HSI New York and the D.A.’s Office sought, obtained, and executed a search warrant at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where they seized the antiquity pending the outcome of their completed investigation.  The New York warrant was issued on the basis that under the State's criminal law, barring the expiration of the statute of limitations, or application of the laches doctrine, the Metropolitan Museum of Art could not have obtained clear title unless the present-day possessor's title could be traced to someone with whom the original owner, in this case Egypt, had voluntarily entrusted the art.

The seizure was executed at The Met on February 15, 2019, and concluded one chapter in a lengthy and ongoing investigation, conducted jointly with law enforcement and heritage partners in the United States, Egypt, Germany, and France.  On the US side, the investigation was coordinated via the New York District Attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr., and overseen by New York Assistant D.A. Matthew Bogdanos, Senior Trial Counsel and Chief of the Antiquities Trafficking Unit.  Working on the case for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (HSI) were Special Agents Brent Easter and Robert Mancene.  The Government of the Arab Republic of Egypt for its part, provided evidence in the case and petitioned for the antiquity's return.

Left: U.S. Homeland Security Investigations special-agent-in-charge Peter Fitzhugh. Center Left: Egyptian Minister of Foreign Affairs Hassan Shoukry. Center: Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. Center Right: Assistant District Attorney Matthew Bogdanos. Right: Antiquities Trafficking Analyst, Apsara Iyer. Image Credit NYDA's Office

While the seizure of a prestigious golden coffin, purchased by the largest art museum in the United States, may have shocked the general public, it is not the first time that the Metropolitan Museum of Art has run afoul in its purchase of high-value tainted objects for their collection that were later determined to have been stolen or looted.  Presented with credible and demonstrable evidence that the Egyptian coffin had been recently smuggled out of Egypt, in contravention of the country's cultural heritage laws, the museum quickly moved to cooperate with law enforcement, cutting short its successful exhibition of the Egyptian mummiform coffin and relinquishing their centerpiece artefact to the authorities for restitution.  Daniel Weiss, the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, apologised to Egypt and indicated the museum had been the victim of fraud and an unwitting participant in the illegal trade of antiquities.

At the hand-over ceremony, New York District Attorney Cyrus Roberts Vance Jr., issued a statement indicating that the gilded antiquity is "just one of hundreds of antiquities stolen by the same multi-national trafficking ring."  As of now, prosecutors have not announced charges against any of the actors they have identified in the smuggling case and the investigation is still ongoing.

Yet the story of this grand jury investigation into antiquities traffickers began long before the prestigious golden coffin found its way into the Egyptian Collection at the largest art museum in the United States. 

Information now cleared for disclosure through officials at New York's DA's office demonstrates that their office's Antiquities Trafficking U\nit began conducting an exhaustive international investigation into an illicit trafficking ring as early as 2013, following up on leads tied to individuals known to be working in the Middle East and Europe.  The focus of the investigation in New York centered on the movement of stolen and looted artifacts which transited into or through its jurisdiction, i.e., specifically New York County.

Material seized or relinquished voluntarily to the authorities during the course of this operation came from a variety of known and undisclosed sources. As a result of this evidence and investigation the New York DA's office has been able to successfully illustrate critical connections to, and between several suspects who, it is alleged, willingly facilitated the smuggling of antiquities, from Middle Eastern source countries for a share of the illegal profits.  It should be noted that while antiquities are looted from archaeological sites across the world, incidences of theft in areas of armed conflict are frequently more prevalent due to the lack of security, as was the case with this antiquity in Egypt.

Evidence related to this investigation included digital records of email correspondence which served to establish connections between suspected looters trading freely with middlemen smugglers and corrupt art dealers transacting in illicit material.  As part of the cache of evidence the DA's office also obtained financial transaction records and export documents along with photographs and videos, some of which show dirty and damaged antiquities, shortly after their immediate discovery.

Some of these photographs depict antiquities scattered on the ground. Other showed objects wrapped in newspapers, or lying on the floor in dimly lit rooms or hiding places.  Six of these images, attached to emails exchanged between suspects involved in the smuggling conspiracy, would prove integral to the coffin's restitution and were already evidence in the case long before the mummiform coffin, inscribed in the name of Nedjemankh arrived at the Met.

These photos were exchanged directly or indirectly between an initial looting suspect, a suspect in Germany and the Paris dealer the gilded coffin was shopped to.  Four of the images showed the priceless object in a newly looted state, still dirt-encrusted and laid out on top of a blanket.

Why do looters take incriminating photographs of freshly looted antiquities? 

In the underbelly of the illicit art market, authenticity brings a higher premium  than legitimacy.   Antiquities dating back a thousand years, broken into pieces, or still encrusted in soil, demonstrating the tell-tale signs of having been freshly unearthed, can be golden to a looter and enticing to the would-be unscrupulous buyer.  Antiquities depicted in such a sullied state demonstrate graphically that the object being flogged won't (usually) have an incriminating photo elsewhere, tucked away in some national ministry or museum archive.

Nor will a photo of a freshly looted antiquity raise any eyebrows during the standard sale vetting procedures which require stolen property checks with art loss databases which will have no record of the previously unknown object.  This allows those who trade in illicit antiquities to fabricate a back story that an object has been tucked away for decades in a private collection, effectively whitening the object's collection history so that it can more easily be sold on the ancient art market, at least in countries with less restrictive laws regarding the timeline of the and the rights of the unknowing good faith purchaser.

Most importantly photographic imagery of looted objects serves as visual proof to the buyer that what the seller is trying to peddle is likely to be (but not always) authentic.   And in the age of data plans and cell phones, looters are now known to snap videos of objects, even while they still rest in situ.  Passing recordings between one another, videos such as the one ARCA has archived below, serve as a record of the early stages of a looter's discovery.  Images such as these can demonstrate an  antiquity's authenticity and first steps of passage, even before it is extracted from a find site.


Start dirty but end clean (at least in appearance)...

In reconstructing the events surrounding the illegal exportation of the Egyptian mummiform coffin, researchers first had to try and trace a likely find spot for the object.  The elaborately decorated surface of the mummiform coffin depicts scenes and inscriptions, painted in thick gesso relief, to guide Nedjemankh on his journey from death to eternal life as a transfigured spirit.  Nedjemankh, was a high-ranking priest of an ancient ram-god Heryshaf, or Hershef, (Egyptian Ḥry-š=f) whose ancient cult was centered in Herakleopolis Magna, now Ihnasiyyah al-Madinah.  This location sits on the west bank of the Nile near Beni Suef, approximately 115 km south of Cairo and 120 km north of the Minya region.

In accordance with Egyptian funerary tradition of the period, the gold coffin and its now lost mummified occupant would have likely been placed in a sealed tomb, either within a burial niche or an outer sarcophagus.  Burial places for the elite that served Herakleopolis Magna during the period from the Old to Middle Kingdoms tended to be large rock-cut tombs created in the distant east bank sites of Sheikh Said and Deir el-Bersha, in the Minya Governorate in Upper Egypt.

Both of these areas have been subject to antiquities plunder, sometimes even by violent means.  As late as 2016 two guards, A'srāwy Kāmel Jād and Ali Khalaf Shāker, patrolling the tombs of Deir el-Bersha were killed when unknown assailants opened fire at them while at the site to loot archaeological material.  But in the case of the mummiform coffin, the looting seems to have taken place earlier, likely during the Arab Spring of 2011, in the midst of Egypt's political upheaval and the revolutionary period which toppled former president Muhammad Hosni El Sayed Mubarak.

This evidence serves to contradict the manufactured export documentation produced by the coffin's launderers.  Works of fiction in their own right, and with striking inaccuracies and contradictions that should have been identified during the museum's due diligence process, the white-washed export documents fraudulently claimed that the sarcophagus once belonged to the Cairo merchant Habib Tawadros who purportedly sold the gilded coffin to a "Mme. Chatz" in Switzerland.

After passing from Egypt the investigation revealed that the coffin spent some time under the control of a known middleman operating in the United Arab Emirates, where the coffin was shipped after leaving Egypt and spent some time before moving on to Germany.  The coffin was then shipped from the UAE to Germany where it underwent restoration before ultimately passing on to Paris where it was viewed in person on December 2016 for consideration by Diana Craig Patch, the Lila Acheson Wallace Curator in Charge of the Department of Egyptian Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Image Credit: Ministry of Antiquities-Arab Republic of Egypt

Despite a thorough paper trail which details precisely whose hands the object passed through, there is little information, that can been revealed to the public at this time, which identifies the specific shipment methodology the smugglers used to enable the object's the illegal transboundary movements and to circumvent the objects identification when crossing various borders on its journey from the source country of Egypt through to its final European 'destination, the upscale ancient art market of Paris.

The UAE-based suspect alleged to have been involved in this transaction was already well known to illicit trafficking researchers, as the gilded coffin was not the first plundered antiquity with fraudulent documentation the middleman dealer has been connected with.  In 2008 the Iranian trader, based in Sharjah, exported a limestone head of the Assyrian king Sargon II, declaring that the object was originally from Turkey. In 2010, US Customs inspected a package transiting through Newark International Airport which the dealer had shipped sent via FedEx. That package contained five ancient Egyptian objects dating from 343 B.C., or the Late Period, to 2081 B.C., during the Middle Kingdom on route to Holyland Numismatics in the US.   Again, in this case, the dealer had listed the country of manufacture as Turkey.  In 2011, he also exported a statue thought to represent either the goddess Demeter or her daughter Persephone, of the type only produced in Cyrenaica, ancient Libya. As with each of the previous cases, each time the dealer fraudulently issued misdeclarations, he listed the country of origin as Turkey, for objects originating from war torn countries in the Middle East though it remains unclear as to why he chose to do.

This Sharjah suspect in turn shipped the coffin on to two suspects in Germany who facilitated details of the transaction with Paris-based art dealer Christophe Kunicki, and his partner Richard Semper while the object underwent cleaning and restoration.

Thoughts on the museum's level of due diligence

In examining the provenance of the coffin, it is discouraging to note that the export documentation alone, should have given everyone who handled the object and its subsequent purchase pause, that is if they were acting in good faith and are innocent of any level of collusion.  At no point did anyone, the Sharjah dealer, the Germany-based conservator and intermediaries, Christophe Kunicki, Richard Semper, Curator Diana Patch or anyone else in the administration at the Metropolitan Museum of Art seriously question why the variously supplied export certificates, and their French and German translations, listed the issuing authority as "the Arab Republic of Egypt" and not as the "United Arab Republic".

From February 21, 1958 until the September 28, 1961 coup d’état, Egypt and Syria were a sovereign, if short lived, union known officially as the "United Arab Republic". All license applications, shipper's export declarations or export permissions would have referred to the country during this time period as the United Arab Republic (the U.A.R.) and would likely also have specified the regional territory it referred to, ergo, the United Arab Republic - the Southern (Egypt) region or the Northern (Syria) Region, whichever would have been applicable to the article being shipped.  Furthermore Egypt retained the name "United Arab Republic" even after Syria's departure from the union, using it as its official name through 1971.

While I don't fault the museum's staff for their innate lack of knowledge of geography and Middle Eastern political alliances, I do fault them for not having even tried to inform themselves given the enormous price tag of this purchase, let alone the possibility that they might (again) be facilitating looting by accepting fabricated documents so readily.  A simple, proactive cross check of history books, at any point during their due diligence process, would have alerted any of the non-colluding parties that something might be afoul with the coffin's exportation documents.  That one single cross-check could have prompted appropriate law enforcement authorities to act more quickly, and would have saved the Met considerable embarrassment, as well as acquisition cash. 

Likewise, as a member of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), one of the museum world’s most influential professional organizations, the Met is required to abide by AAMD acquisition guidelines.  These guidelines set standards by which member museums should go about conducting due diligence when acquiring archaeological material and ancient art.

Section III A of these guidelines specifically state:

A. Member museums should thoroughly research the ownership history of a Work prior to its acquisition, including making a rigorous effort to obtain accurate written documentation with respect to its history, including import and export documents. 

Left: Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. Center: Egyptian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sameh Hassan Shoukry. Right: U.S. Homeland Security Investigations special-agent-in-charge Peter Fitzhugh. Image Credit NYDA's Office

Lessons learned and food for future purchasing thought

A statement from the ICOM International Observatory on Illicit Traffic in Cultural Goods states:

“It is important that museums, libraries, archives and art dealers continue to be able to develop their collections. Nevertheless, they should ensure that their collections are built up in accordance with universally recognised moral principles. They must take precautions to ensure that they acquire or borrow only ethically acceptable items and reject items that might have been looted or illegally exported.”

Failure to have engaged in serious due diligence of this artifact caused the Metropolitan Museum of Art to suffer by their own hands.  Likewise, the eye-popping prices the museum continues to pay for suspect artifacts exacerbates the difficulties already faced by customs and law enforcement agencies in deterring the illegal trade of ancient art.

Going forward, it might be worthwhile for the Met to consider enforcing a standard which requires its staff to sign off on a document testifying that they have strongly adhered to the AAMD guidelines and ICOM's suggestions before signing any million dollar checks for acquisitions.  Failing to carry out their required duties, the museum would then have sufficient recourse for termination.

This lack of sympathy was echoed by Peter C. Fitzhugh, Special Agent in Charge of HSI New York during the coffin's restitution ceremony, who said: 

“The high profit business of smuggling and trafficking antiquities has been around for centuries....but it is the responsibility of a buyer to confirm the proper provenance of a piece of art or antiquity."

In conclusion, prosecutors have not (yet) announced charges against any antiquities traffickers. After seven years of investigation the coffin is at last on public display at the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization (NMEC) in the suburbs of Cairo until it shifts to the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), which is expected to open in 2020.  When it does, the GEM will be the largest museum dedicated to a single civilisation.  I can't think of a better place for Egyptians to learn about Nedjemankh, his life in ancient Egypt.

By:  Lynda Albertson

Screen Capture: 2015 - Scott Carroll Lecture

One time curator Jiri Frel, who helped build the J. Paul Getty Museum's collection, was pressured to resign in 1984 when people looked closely into his eyebrow-raising acquisition practices. 

While Frel's transgressions were many, one of the most damning was a tax manipulation scheme through which antiquities dealers sold ancient art to wealthy collectors who in turn agreed to donate the objects to the J. Paul Getty Museum.  Through Frel and associate arranged appraisals which greatly inflated the value of the antiquity, donors were compensated for their philanthropy with  hefty tax write-offs.

Fast forward thirty years later to 2015 and listen in at 25:01 minutes into this Scott Carroll video viewable on Vimeo. 

His talk is concluded with a few words from Dr. Marshall Foster, founder of the World History Institute.

Foster talked with those in attendance about purchasing historic artifacts and how doing so could be helpful to nonprofits.   He then introduces Todd Hillard, who is somewhere out of range of the video and explains that they have brochures for “Ancient Asset Investments,” Hillard's brokerage firm.  According to Hillard's bio the purpose of AAI is "to bring new life to rare artifacts by placing them with “guardians” who will care for them and share them with the world again in order to catalyze a global movement of artifact-drive academia."

Foster explains that donors can purchase "beautiful treasures," like the one being touched by the bare-handed audience in California and when the assessment of its worth comes in, the object's appraisal would be for a much higher value.  He elaborates further explaining that with this appraisal the individual would qualify for a tax write-off for their donation which usually will end up being "at least three times as much" as their original investment.   A second voice, off screen arbitrarily, without any object under consideration echoes the same statement saying "we can guarantee at least three times as much"(for the appraisal).