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March 26, 2024

Judgment entered in favor of Plaintiff (Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc). against Defendant (Dirk D. Obbink)


In early June 2021 Hobby Lobby Inc, owned by craft store mogul, David Green,  filed a Civil Complaint for fraud against former professor Dirk Obbink.  According to Civil Docket No. 21-CV-3113, the craft conglomerate alleged that as many as 32 items that it had purchased between 2010 and 2013 from the Oxford professor, to be featured in the Museum of the Bible (MOTB), were not his to sell.  

Instead, the papyrus fragments the scholar sold them via Private Sale agreements had been stolen from Egyptian Exploration Society's collection.  The textual artefacts  were identified as having come from the Grenfell and Hunt excavations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at the site of Oxyrhynchus and were removed from the EES collection while Obbink still had access to the Sackler Library of the University of Oxford.

During the period of Obbink's commercial relationship with the MOTB philanthropists he served as the General Editor of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri for the EES (until August 2016).  He was also a renowned Lecturer in Papyrology and Greek Literature in the Faculty of Classics at Oxford.  That position ended in a fall from grace in February 2021 just as his life as a part time dealer began to unravel.  

The seven Hobby Lobby-purchase transactions were itemised as:

    Purchase #1 - February 6, 2010: Papyri fragments for $80,000 
    Purchase #2 - February 15, 2011: Papyri fragments and other antiquities for                $500,000
    Purchase #3 - July 22, 2010: Papyri fragments and other antiquities for $350,000 
    Purchase #4 - November 20, 2010: Papyri fragments and other antiquities for            $2,400,000
    Purchase #5 - July 20, 2011: Papyri fragments and other antiquities for                       $1,345,500 
    Purchase #6 - March 7, 2012: Papyri fragments and other antiquities for $609,600
    Purchase #7 - February 5, 2013: Papyri fragments and other antiquities for                 $1,810,000

Obbink had represented to Hobby Lobby that the 32 items he was selling all came from private collectors. 

In September 2023 Hobby Lobby asked the Magistrate Judge, overseeing the case at the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York to grant their request to transfer their fraud and breach of contract case to the US District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma, where the company is headquartered. On October 5, 2023, their request was granted and on October 17th an amended complaint against Obbink was filed with the court in Oklahoma City which was served on the scholar on 4 November 2023. 

Throughout the proceedings, Obbink has failed to appear, plead, or otherwise respond to the unfolding US-based court case, and on January 29, 2024 Hobby Lobby filed a motion seeking a Clerk's Entry of Default.  As a result, on March 11, 2024 Senior Judge of the United States District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma, David L. Russell entered a motion for Default Judgment in favour of Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., awarding them the eye popping sum of $7,085,100.00, with prejudgment interest from February 5, 2013, at the rate of 6% per annum. 

Yet despite this scandal of Biblical proportions, Dirk Obbink was last seen on his houseboat, self-destructively ignoring the US and UK legal drama swirling around him. 

To recap the last eight years. 

In the Spring 2016 the Egyptian Exploration Society realised that the much rumoured "First Century Mark" papyrus that had been the subject of so much speculation was in fact their own papyrus fragment (P.Oxy. 5345).

By August 2016 the EES decided to not re-appoint Obbink as the General Editor of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri primarily because of unsatisfactory discharge of his editorial duties, but also because of concerns, which he did not allay, about his "alleged involvement" in the marketing of ancient texts, especially the controversial Sappho and Gospel of Mark fragments.  

By December 2017, according to court documents, Obbink had admitted to Hobby Lobby that he had “mistakenly” sold the Gospel Fragments in Purchase #7 (for  $1,810,000) and that they were, in fact, owned by his employer, the Egyptian Exploration Society.

By January 2018 the Museum of the Bible formally severed ties with the Oxford-based scholar. 


On 16 April 2019 Obbink's UK-based antiquities sale's enterprise, Castle Folio Limited was dissolved.

By June 2019 the Egyptian Exploration Society took a harder stance against their former colleague and banned Obbink from any access to its collection pending his satisfactory clarification of the 2013 contract. 

On 2 March 2020 Obbink was "detained" briefly by officers from Thames Valley police on suspicion of theft and fraud. Unnamed at the time by the British authorities, he was released after questioning. 

By February 2021 Obbink no longer held his position as Lecturer in Papyrology and Greek Literature in the Faculty of Classics at Oxford University and had retreated to his houseboat where he was served in relation to the US court case. 

Yet, to date, and despite the ongoing investigation by the Thames Valley Police, Dirk Obbink has inexplicably still not been charged with any crime in the United Kingdom.


By:  Lynda Albertson

December 10, 2023

Acquittal and Mental Health Intervention: US Citizen Behind Israel Museum Vandalism Case

In an unusual court ruling, the Jerusalem Magistrate's Court has acquitted forty-year-old Stephen Edward Porth, the American citizen from California who made headlines on October 5, 2023, for shattering two ancient artefacts at the Israel Museum.

Porth, who had traveled from the United States, was detained by museum security personnel and later police after intentionally knocking over a 201-211 CE Roman marble statue of a Griffon and a marble head of the goddess Athena from the Roman period. Both artefacts were housed in the classical archaeology section of the National Museum, showcasing statues from the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods.

Security cameras captured footage of the incident, revealing Porth, clad in religiously conservative clothing, shouting, "You can’t have idols; it’s in the second commandment," a reference to the Book of Exodus in the Bible. Attempting to flee, he was apprehended by security guards and subsequently taken into custody by the police.

During his interrogation, Porth confessed to the acts of vandalism, and is stated to have expressed no remorse. He asserted that the statues contradicted his religious faith, deeming them "statues of idolatry, contrary to the laws of the Torah." The estimated damage totalled $1 million.

Intaking Perth to court, prosecutors allege the vandal acted cunningly and premeditatedly, choosing closing time to minimise the crowd. While police believed he intended to target more sculptures, his actions generated enough noise for museum staff to intervene.  Porth's lawyer, Nick Kaufman, countered the claims of religious fanaticism, attributing his client's actions to a mental disorder he referred to as Jerusalem syndrome, a disorder, characterised by disorientation induced by the religious magnetism of Jerusalem, which is said to lead foreign pilgrims to believe they are figures from the Bible.

Ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, Porth's identity was initially withheld due to a gag order in October when the incident was first reported. Held in custody for failing to meet bail requirements, his recent acquittal by the Jerusalem Magistrate's Court is an unexpected turn. 

Instead of a prison sentence, Porth has been diverted to involuntary hospitalization for four years—a duration mirroring the maximum prison sentence for the attributed offense.  His case raises intricate questions about the intersection of religious convictions, mental health considerations, and the legal consequences of destructive actions, prompting reflection on the appropriate societal response to such incidents.


September 3, 2021

Norwegian police seize artefacts from the Martin Schøyen collection


Weekly Norwegian newspaper Morgenbladet has reported that members of the Norwegian Economic Crimes Unit, working in coordination with the Økokrim police, confiscated approximately 100 antiquities from the extensive collection of Martin Schøyen which Iraqi authorities believe were illicitly removed from their country.  

This seizure comes following a request for assistance by the Republic of Iraq in October 2019 asking both the Ministry of Culture and the Økokrim authorities for assistance regarding 762 artefacts, including 654 incantation bowls with inscriptions written in Jewish Aramaic, the language of late antique Mesopotamia’s Jews, known to be part of the Martin Schøyen collection and which were purportedly exported from Jordan in 1988.

Among other artefacts, Schøyen's manuscripts collection in Oslo, which also warrants attention, has been reported to consist of "7597 items, of which 1052 papyri and ostraka from Ptolemaic to Arabic age"  as well as hundreds of controversial cuneiform tablets from Iraq which were in circulation in London during the 1990s. 

Many of the objects in the Schøyen collection were purchased through the now-deceased Jordanian dealer Ghassan Tamim Al-Rihani.  Commenting on why not all of the 762 contested artefacts objects were confiscated,  Maria Bache Dahl, acting public prosecutor at Økokrim stated:

"We have information that indicates that a number of the wanted objects are outside Norway."


In the past, suspect Iraqi objects in circulation in the ancient art market attributed to sales conducted by the Al Rihani family frequently made their way into the Martin Schøyen collection.  These objects were purportedly all exported from Jordan to the United Kingdom on the basis of a single Jordanian export license, dated 19 September 1988.  Research conducted by some provenance researchers believe this document to possibly be inauthentic.  

Even if the export document is legitimate, as has been attested, even by some Jordanian authorities, it only serves to authorize the export of material from Jordan.  The 1988 document does not serve as the original legal authority for the licit export of material originating in other countries, including Iraq.  It should be noted that other artefacts, purportedly as vaguely attributed to this invoice, also ended up with the Green Collection and the family's sponsored Museum of the Bible in Washington DC.  These were also subject of restitution claims by the Republic of Iraq in the United States. 


A certified translation of the Jordanian export document, made by an obscure copy shop and dated 12 October 1992, four years after the Arabic document was issued states as follows:

The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan
Ministry of Culture & Natural Heritage
Department of Antiquities
Amman- Jordan

No. 12/1/2034
Date: 19/9/1988

Mr. Ghassan Tameem Al Rihani
An ex-authorized Antiquity Merchant
P.O. Box 9763
Amman/Jordan

I would like to inform you about the approval of the Public Department of Antiquities to transfer the ownership of 2000 (Two thousand) various pottery utensils and 50 (fifty) various stone pieces as shown in the attached pictures, to your daughter May Ghassan Rihani currently residing in London and hereby giving you an exit permit to take them out of the country. 
Truly Yours

Director General
Public Department of Antiquities.

In a previous UK inquiry, when questioned about the legitimacy of a grouping of his incantation bowls loaned to UCL in London, Schøyen noted that he had not kept any of the importation papers or a series of poor quality photos associated with his sales purchase.  This “plausible denial” is a technique ARCA frequently records with regularity among dealers and or collectors of ancient art without substantiative legitimate provenance.  The individual in question affirms that they had the documentation or they saw the documentation at one time in the past, but in the subsequent years, said documents, were they to be export licenses, bills of sale, ownership letters or shipping documents failed to be retained with the object in question. 

In the transcript of an Al Jazeera documentary,  Iraqi authorities, via a confidential informant, believe Al Rihani received Iraqi artefacts smuggled out of North Iraq sometime around 1991, shipped through intermediaries from Amman Airport to Al Rihani in London.

Exhibit MS 2340 - The Schoyen collection. This cuneiform tablet is the oldest Sumerian record of musical writing and dates to 2600 BCE. 
The tablet is the description of 23 types of harps

Due to the broad wording of the original 1988 invoice, Ghassan Al Rihani may have simply reused the export document repeatedly, to substantiate additional illicit material in circulation in London and elsewhere.  Hundreds of artefacts that passed through this family's hands were then purchased by Martin Schøyen directly, some of which have been sold onward and were not retained by Schøyen in the long term. 

For those that want to learn more about the controversies of this collection, I suggest reading scholars Christopher Prescott and Josephine Munch Rasmussen 2020 article ‘Exploring the “Cozy Cabal of Academics, Dealers and Collectors.”  Another excellent reference is the Biography of P.Oxy. 15.1780 by Roberta Mazza of the University of Manchester from Volume 52 of the Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists. 

In the meanwhile, one might want to look more cautiously at the provenance of eighty pieces Schøyen consigned to Bloomsbury Auctions for their July 2020 auction "The History of Western Script: A Selection from The Schøyen Collection" and to two earlier sales including the 60 manuscripts, among them papyri sold via Sotheby's Western Manuscripts S/O auction on 10 July 2012, & Christie's, The History of Western Script: Important Antiquities and Manuscripts from the Schøyen Collection, auction on 10 July 2019.

By:  Lynda Albertson

----------
Al-Dustour, Mahmoud Krishan. 2017. ‘تجار التحف الشرقية يلوحون بإغلاق متاجرهم’., 23 October 2017. https://www.addustour.com/articles/980442?s=0df1c0136afbefb74a385ea7f4d4f464.

Balter, Michael. 2007a. ‘University Suppresses Report on Provenance of Iraqi Antiquities’. Science 318 (5850): 554–55. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.318.5850.554.

———. 2007b. ‘University Suppresses Report on Provenance of Iraqi Antiquities’. SAFE/Saving Antiquities for Everyone (blog). 4 November 2007. http://savingantiquities.org/university-suppresses-report-on-provenance-of-iraqi-antiquities/.

George, Andrew R. 2007. ‘The civilizing of Ea-Enkidu : an unusual tablet of the Babylonian Gilgameš epic’. Revue d’assyriologie et d’archeologie orientale Vol. 101 (1): 59–80.

George, Andrew R., and Miguel Civil. 2011. Cuneiform Royal Inscriptions and Related Texts in the Schøyen Collection. Cornell University Studies in Assyriology and Sumerology, v. 17. Bethesda, Md: CDL Press.

Hall, Richard. 2019. ‘Inside the Hunt for Iraq’s Looted Treasures’. The Independent. 10 July 2019. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/iraq-archaeology-museum-antiquities-looting-a8996676.html.

Helle, Birk Tjeldflaat. ‘Norsk Mangemillionær Nekter å Gi Oldtidsskatter Til Irak’. www.dn.no, 28 October 2019. https://www.dn.no/kultur/martin-schoyen/irak/kunst/norsk-mangemillionar-nekter-a-gi-oldtidsskatter-til-irak/2-1-693930.

Henze, Matthias, ed. 2011. Hazon Gabriel: New Readings of the Gabriel Revelation. Society of Biblical Literature. Early Judaism and Its Literature, no. 29. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature.

Klawans, Jonathan. 2019. Heresy, Forgery, Novelty: Condemning, Denying, and Asserting Innovation in Ancient Judaism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Mazza, Roberta. ‘Papyri, Ethics, and Economics: A Biography of P.Oxy. 15.1780 (P 39)’. The Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 52 (2015): 113–42.

Mellgren, Doug. 2002. ‘Manuscript Collector Thrills to Discoveries’. Los Angeles Times, 22 September 2002. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-sep-22-adfg-collect-story.html.

‘Newman Numismatic Portal at Washington University in St. Louis | Comprehensive Research & Reference for U.S. Coinage’. n.d. Accessed 23 May 2020a. https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/advancedsearch?page=2&fullsearchterm=Kovacs.

‘Newman Numismatic Portal at Washington University in St. Louis | Comprehensive Research & Reference for U.S. Coinage’. ———. n.d. Accessed 23 May 2020b. https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/advancedsearch?page=2&fullsearchterm=Kovacs.

Morgenbladet. ‘Økokrim med stor aksjon mot norsk samler’. Accessed 3 September 2021. https://www.morgenbladet.no/kultur/2021/09/03/okokrim-med-stor-aksjon-mot-norsk-samler/.

Prescott, Christopher, and Josephine Munch Rasmussen. 2020. ‘Exploring the “Cozy Cabal of Academics, Dealers and Collectors” through the Schøyen Collection’. Heritage, Special Issue: Art and Antiquities Crime, 2020 (February): 68–97.

Rutz, Matthew, and Morag M. Kersel, eds. 2014. Archaeologies of Text: Archaeology, Technology and Ethics. Joukowsky Institute Publication 6. Oxford: Oxbow Books.

‘The Schoyen Collection’. n.d. The Schoyen Collection. Accessed 25 May 2020. https://www.schoyencollection.com.

Thrope, Samuel. ‘What Should Be Done with the Magic Bowls of Jewish Babylonia?’ Aeon Essays, 24 May 2016. https://aeon.co/essays/what-should-be-done-with-the-magic-bowls-of-jewish-babylonia.

jouserjo. n.d. ‘خبير الآثار الأردني تميم الريحاني ل”جلنار”: والدي كان أهم خبير آثار في العالم وشهاداته معتمدة في أمريكا وبريطانيا وسويسرا | | جلنار الإخباري’. Accessed 26 May 2020. http://www.jlnarj.com/?p=14272.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_v2a6ec-eM0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bInrjYazaLo

February 25, 2021

The art of loss: Mourning "Charley Hill" the intrepid undercover agent who recovered Edvard Munch's "The Scream"


It's hard to write a second In Memoriam 
in less than one year for someone who spent a goodly part of their life dedicated to the recovery of stolen art. 

In the first days after Charles Hill's death, on Saturday, February 20th, words completely eluded me.  Trying to think of what I could write or should write, and knowing a man's successes are not a sum of his career, I also thought to his family trying to cope with his unexpected loss.  These are the people who knew Charley, not as a respected Detective Chief Inspector or private investigator, but by the more important titles he held: Father and Husband. 

In writing this goodbye, I mulled over some of the conversations Charley and I had over the years, most of which occurred in letters that often made me laugh out loud for their wit and sarcasm, doled out in equal measure.   More rarely, when our paths would cross in Rome or in England, I was fortunate enough to listen to his soft-spoken quips about art as currency in the underworld, about clan funerals in Tullamore, County Offaly, or his work with the Historic Houses Association. 

I remember one conversation seven years ago almost to the day when Charley was doing what Charley loved, chasing a pair of picturesque Venetian scenes by the 18th-century Italian painter Francesco Lazzaro Guardi.  These two landscape paintings depicting Venice, really bothered him, as they are the last of eighteen artworks stolen by Dublin gangster Martin Cahill's gang during a 1986 burglary at Russborough House, that remain missing. 

Back in 1993 Hill had already worked on the multicountry investigation that recovered Goya’s Doña Antonia Zárate, Gabriel Metsu’s Man Writing a Letter, Antione Vestier’s Portrait of the Princesse de Lamballe and Johannes Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid, taken from the same stately Irish home.  Although the Vermeer pleased Charley the most, perhaps because it was one of just two Vermeers in private collections, (the second is owned by Queen Elizabeth II), it was the two Guardi paintings that remained outstanding that prevented him from closing the Russborough House case with satisfaction.  For the paintings already recovered, Hill had posed as a dapper, if not dubious, art dealer claiming to have Arab buyers lined up to purchase the stolen paintings.  To bring them home, he met with the underworld accomplices alone in a multi-storey car park at the Antwerp airport.

But back to our conversation in 2014.  For more than a year Charley had been following up on every vexing lead, no matter how improbably proposed, trying to get the two stolen Guardi paintings back.  He wanted to keep a promise he had made to Lady Beit eighteen years earlier when they had met and discussed his work on the recovery of Russborough's artworks. In our conversation he described his hunt for the paintings and his relationship with one of his more frustrating Irish informants unabashedly, saying "we're a bit like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and I'm the short, fat fox trotter on the donkey, but with all of the best lines."  

Hill understood that many of the leads he was given, and the promises being made, were akin to tilting at fabled windmills.  Despite this, he felt driven to see each through, tackling each misadventure and subsequent disappointment with sardonic humour, saying it only takes one solid piece of evidence.  In many ways it was this perseverance, coupled with earthy wit and optimism that all puzzles could eventually be solved, that kept him tenaciously plodding forward, where others might have given up. 


Retiring from the Metropolitan Police in London in 1997 Hill could have sat back and enjoyed the fact that his name will forever be remembered for the recovery of Pieter Brueghel's Elder's Christus en de overspelige vrouw stolen from the Courtauld Gallery in 1982 and the recovery of Edvard Munch's Der Schrei der Natur, more commonly known as The Scream, stolen from the Nasjonal Museet in Oslo during the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer.  


He could have relaxed in a pub, over a blended scotch telling the story of how he was laid out on the ground and handcuffed alongside the criminals when he was unable to get a signal to his German counterparts, during the recovery of a hoard of paintings and statues stolen in Moravia and Bohemia that included Lucas Cranach's The Old Fool from the National Gallery in Prague.  But instead, after the Marquess of Bath received a ransom demand, Charley continued post-retirement chasing up leads on the missing Riposo durante la fuga in Egitto by Tiziano Vecellio,  better known as Titian.  That work had been stolen in January 1995 from the grand rooms of the Elizabethan manor Longleat.

After seven years and a succession of false leads, one lead on the 16th century Renaissance painting Rest on the Flight into Egypt paid off. To bring the painting home required coordinating a lot of moving parts, the last of which involved Charley going to a simple bus stop in Richmond, south-west London where he was to find the Titian undamaged, stashed without its frame and wrapped in brown parcel paper, plinked inside a nondescript, red, white, and blue plastic shopping bag. 


But aside from these victories, are the many works that remained outside Hill's reach.  Art objects in which he never lost hope of being recovered. The most famous of these being the 13 works of art stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston on March 18, 1990.

A Fulbright Scholar in his early years before joining Scotland Yard, Hill had studied history at Trinity College, Dublin, most likely where is knowledge of Ireland and the Irish began.  He then went on to attend King’s College in London, where he read Theology and at one point considered becoming a member of the Anglican clergy.  

Perhaps this is why Charley was good at talking with the local clergy and members of their flock, both righteous and sinner.  For Hill, the lost and stolen icons and religiously significant objects of worship deserved to come home as much as the better-known paintings.  Doggedly, he never gave up on searching for a cross stolen from the Church of San Giuseppe in Piazza Armerina in Sicily, the missing pages from the Aleppo Codex, the oldest Hebrew Bible, or Italy's most famous painting, Caravaggio’s Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence.

The Oratory of San Lorenzo, in Palermo, missing its
“Nativity” by Caravaggio

In describing his work with thieves, fraudsters, art criminals, and informants Hill told people that he took a page from the lesson book of anti-mafia crusader Judge Giovanni Falcone and his questioning of Cosa Nostra pentiti [mafia informants].  The pair were at dinner together in London when Falcone, referring to his negotiating said "When I tell someone I'll do something, I do it." The phrase was one Hill took to heart saying was good advice on how to deal with all kinds and conditions of men and women.
As I reminisce on this, I try and remind myself that with every passing, a person leaves behind something to be remembered by and to draw comfort from. Sometimes it is a pair of tortoiseshell spectacles, a Donegal tweed jacket made of Irish lowland wool, or saved letters read and reread.  I will think of Charley every time I see the fruit of his labours hanging back where they rightfully belong. Where these works of art can be enjoyed by this generation and many generations after.  

Charley leaves behind his wife Caroline, his three children Elizabeth, Christ and Susannah, and histwo grandchildren, Georgia and Olivia. 

NB:  His friends called him Charley, never Charles and certainly not Charlie.  

By:  Lynda Albertson


The two missing Russborough House paintings of 18th Century Venice by Francesco Lazzaro Guardi,  that Charley Hill was chasing. 




January 31, 2021

Sometimes restitution is a little like putting lipstick on a pig

Left: Steve Green and the Controversial Coptic Galatians fragment
first offered on eBay in 2012 by Yakup Ekşioğlu.
Right: Douglas Latchford and the two plinths with the broken feet of ancient sandstone statues looted from the Prasat Chen temple complex in Koh Ker

Last week we have seen two eye-popping notices of "voluntary" restitution of  ancient artefacts and papyri framents believed to have been plundered from their respective countries of origin.

In one instance, an article by Tom Mashberg, written for the New York Times on January 29th reported that Julia Ellen Latchford Copleston a/k/a Nawapan Kriangsak, has agreed to relinquish a total of 125 artefacts to Cambodia which had been acquired by her father, controversial antiquities dealer Douglas A.J. Latchford, a/k/a “Pakpong Kriangsak.”  Prior to his death, Latchford's handling of suspect material from Cambodia, Thailand and India resulted in the US government filing a 26-page indictment via the Department of Justice's U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York on 27 November 2019.  This case, unfortunately, concluded in advance of any possible legal ruling against the Thailand-based dealer, who died on 2 August 2020 before the bulk of the evidence gathered in the federal case against him could be heard in court. 

The second announcement, delivered two days earlier by Steve Green, Chairman of the Museum of the Bible, was more discreetly posted on the museum's website and highlighted the return of a number of questionable acquisitions which have been discussed with some regularity on  ARCA's blog as well as in greater detail on Faces & Voices, a specialist blog by Papyrologist and ancient historian Roberta Mazza.  Mazza has more articles about the Green's acquisitions than I can link to, so I recommend our readership take some time exploring them all but perhaps starting here with one where she questions (again) the ever-changing provenance story surrounding the P.Sapph.Obbink fragment purportedly sold through a private sale treaty by Christie’s.  

In Green's press announcement, he states that as of 7 January 2021, the Washington DC-based museum had transferred control of the fine art storage facility that housed the 5,000 Egyptian items to the U.S. government as part of "a voluntary administrative process."   Unfortunately, the philanthropic founder of the museum has said very little about whether or not his museum will be more forthcoming about exactly whom the museum paid when purchasing the 8,106 clay objects with suspect or no provenance from the Republic of Iraq or the approximately 5,000 papyri fragments and accompanying mummy cartonnage which also came with suspect or no provenance from the Arab Republic of Egypt.  All we know is that these objects are now, finally, going home.  And while that is a great success for the countries they were taken from, it tells us practically nil about the men who engaged in their sale and profited from these same countries' exploitation.  

At the end of their announcement, the Museum of the Bible's Chairman stated that going forward they would continue to look for ways to "partner with The Iraq Museum, The Coptic Museum, and other institutions, to provide assistance with preserving and celebrating the rich cultural histories of those countries and many others."  I truly doubt, given the circumstances, that the Egyptian government will be taking Mr. Green up on this proposal. 

Museum of the Bible Press Release
Screenshot Date:27 January 2021

And so the litigation in these matters, at least as it relates to Iraq and Egypt, appear to be drawing to a close.  

With the flourish of pens in the plump fingers of lawyers, these carefully-timed, and responsibility-for-wrong-doing-absent restitutions by members of the wealthy Houses of Latchford and Green are released to the public without the impediment of contradiction.   Sanitised proclamations which imply good deeds done under trying circumstances, but which impart little about the actual motivations of their delayed generosity.  

Most of us, who have been closely following these events can speculate as to the pressure points behind the disputants' seemingly magnanimous handovers and come away with our own conclusions, but our speculation will never give us their complete stories.  It is reasonable to assume that these individuals, and/or their museum, were motivated, in whole or in part, by a desire to put an end to a publically embarrassing chapter to their respective family's cultural heritage acquisition histories, but their decisions should not be read as merely repentant.  

In relinquishing these artefacts to Cambodia, Egypt and Iraq, the Latchfords and Greens seek to mitigate the damages, financial and reputational, that these scandals have caused them.  And with that in mind, their decisions can not simply be seen in a vacuum of attempting to right past wrongs. They are assuredly more strategic than what is within the purview of the public domain. 

Seen through this narrow lens, these very public announcements of voluntary restitution, published in newspapers with large readership or on museum's websites, serve only to cosmetically cover, not correct, the public blemishes their respective criminal investigations have brought to light over the last ten years.  Actions which, when explored more deeply, can be seen as not only embarrassing, or ethically negligent, but potentially criminal, brought about by the direct involvement of staff and family members who should have, or definitely did know, better.  

Despite these joyous restitutions, we cannot ascertain what catalyst, in each of these drawn-out processes of ensuring restorative justice, brought Mr Green and Ms. Copleston to the restitution table.  Usually, in situations like this, written agreements between the parties make it unlikely that anyone will be at legal liberty to openly discuss the negotiations between the aggrieved parties.  In the MotB case, that includes the unspoken details behind the more than three years of back and forth discussions that the museum itself has admitted took place prior to the culmination of this week's announcement. 

Likewise, by bequeathing his 1,000-year-old Khmer Dynasty collection to his daughter, Douglas Latchford left his offspring with more than just $50 million worth of valuable ancient art.   He left her holding a hand grenade with a pulled pin that she doggedly continued to hold some five months after her father's death.  For no matter how magnanimous Copleston's repatriation gestures to Cambodia may seem in print, her waiting this long to relinquish the sculptures begs its own questions as to motivating factors. 

Why would a lawyer such as herself, who by her own statement in the New York Times defensively admitted that her father "started his collection in a very different era" not have advised her ailing father, who was facing prosecution on his death bed, to clear the family name, if not his own, by simply returning the artefacts to Cambodia himself while he was still living?  Or why,  since Latchford's death, has Copleston, not distanced herself from suspicion by voluntarily doing so immediately after any wills for her father were read?

As regards both of these restitutions I would ask these individuals why, with these grand gestures of reconciliation, did neither party turn over the purchase and sale records for these objects.  Something which would truly make reparations as doing so would allow illicit trafficking researchers and law enforcement investigators to trace and return other pieces of history handled by the individuals responsible for engaging in these two unseemly debacles. 

Instead, like with Green's own statement, we get no real responsibility-taking, only precisely worded announcements with appealing attestations which colour their actions as generous acts of voluntary cultural diplomacy.  This despite the fact that there is so much more they could do, aside from simply cutting their losses by relinquishing material. 

In resignation, I understand that decisions like these, come about as the result of complex cultural arbitration.  And I understand that in such circumstances, the party holding the stronger deck of cards in the dispute, might (still) agree to a more palatable dispute resolution outside the courtroom. One which allows the parties involved to avoid a lengthy, expensive, and in some cases, reputationally damaging legal case, but which also assures an alternatively beneficial outcome for all sides. 

And as much as I want to be privy to these closed conversations, it is important to remind myself that Alternative Dispute Resolutions, known as ADRs in cultural property disputes, often carry with them an adherence to mutually agreed-upon confidentiality regarding the agreements signed off on, even when these types of agreements don't "feel" satisfying to those of us not sitting at the negotiating table. 

As someone who works on the identification of illicit antiquities, I want to see individuals, believed to have behaved criminally, brought to justice.  But I must also understand that these types of quieter negotiations do offer aggrieved parties an opportunity for a speedier and less costly resolution than drawn-out, complex, multi-year litigation which of themselves can be more beneficial to harvest countries such as Egypt and Iraq.   Fighting for restitution in the US court system isn't cheap and the costs can be a financial impediment to some foreign governments who haven't the financial means to represent their interests for years on end, or when the application of legal norms to relevant facts, might fail to deliver any justice at all to them as the aggrieved party. 

Another driving factor to remember in these types of agreements, in contrast to legal proceedings, is that out of court settlements enable the parties involved to, on the surface at least, legally protect their reputations. When cases go to court there is normally a winner and a loser.  And with those court decisions, comes very public case records which can serve to outline, in embarrassing red marker detail, the actions of individuals perceived as culpable, or serve as precedent-setting decisions in future illicit trafficking court cases. 

Lastly, as legislation in the art and cultural heritage field is not fully harmonized, there is always the potential risk that the expensive and protracted court case might not achieve a viable cost-benefit outcome.  Like in legal disputes where the value of the returned artefact is less than the country's legal costs in pursuing the case in foreign courts.  Or, as would have been the case in the Museum of the Bible dispute, or the case against Douglas Latchford, where the sheer number of artefacts being contested, if examined individually and concretised in the court's record, might have resulted in fewer objects going home, or greater exposure of the involved parties to subsequent litigation for their perceived roles in further uncovered, questionable transactions.

So, in the end, I have to accept announcements like those made last week which bring objects home but offer no real retribution against those who behaved badly.  This leaves me, and others who have closely followed these cases, asking:

  • Where are the admissions of fault?  
  • Where are the acknowledgements of harm having been done? 
  • Where are the answers we keep asking as to who sold what, to whom, and when?
I close this overly long rant by saying that when I first learned about these upcoming restitutions and read the press releases, I immediately thought that their announcements reminded me of a rhetorical expression from the 1887 compendium of proverbs called The Salt-Cellars by Charles H. Spurgeon, who once wrote:

“A hog in a silk waistcoat is still a hog.” 

And while I am overjoyed that so many artefacts will finally make their way back to where they rightfully belong, I am in no way fooled that these gestures were magnanimous and selfless, or that in Egypt at least, Ma’at, the goddess of truth and justice, would believe that justice has been well and truly served. 

By:  Lynda Albertson

May 19, 2020

Prosecutors file a civil forfeiture complaint for the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet which they say was looted from Iraq.

The Gilgamesh dream tablet, Iraq, c. 1600 BCE
while on display at Museum of the Bible

“Strange things have been spoken, why does your heart speak strangely? The dream was marvelous but the terror was great; we must treasure the dream whatever the terror.”  ― The Epic of Gilgamesh, N.K. Sanders translation. 
Authorities in the United States have filed a civil forfeiture complaint for a 1600 BCE cuneiform tablet featuring a dream sequence from the Epic of Gilgamesh. Acting as the Plaintiff in the case, the US authorities brought an action in rem for the tablet pursuant to 19 U.S.C. § 1595a(c)(1)(A).  Under this section, US law authorizes the forfeiture of any "merchandise" that is "introduced or attempted to be introduced into the United States contrary to law." In this case, that's when it is believed that the property was stolen in a foreign country and imported into the United States illegally.  

In the complaint, Special Agent John Paul Labbat with the United States Department of Homeland Security, Homeland Security Investigations, cited that the object was stolen Iraqi property introduced into the United States contrary to 18 U.S.C. § 2314, the stolen property act.  This act serves as an independent basis for the forfeiture of any stolen property that moves in interstate or foreign commerce and which is utilized whether the object in question was stolen overseas or inside the United States.

The ancient clay object, originally part of a larger six-column tablet, contains seventy-four lines of Middle Babylonian cuneiform text, and is known to be one of only thirty known surviving fragments from the Epic of Gilgamesh created during the old and middle Babylonian periods.  Written almost 4,000 years ago, the Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the oldest known literary works in the world. The earliest parts of the poem were first discovered in the ruins of the library of the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal, in Nineveh, Iraq in 1853. 

Based upon the facts as set out in the Verified Complaint in Rem, on July 30, 2014, Hobby Lobby wired $1,674,000 to an unnamed auction house as payment for the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet, having purchased the artifact for donation or display at the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC.  This was the same year that the company's fundamentalist president, Steve Green, persuaded the United States Supreme Court that it deserved a religious exemption from a federal requirement under which employers in the country are made to provide their workers with access to contraceptives.  It is also the same month that the Egyptian Exploration Society gave Dirk Obbink an ultimatum: cut ties with the Green family or lose his editorship of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, several fragments of which are now part of a separate ongoing investigation into another illegal sale in the United Kingdom.

Three months earlier, in April 2014 Manchester-based papyrologist Roberta Mazza had already published a blog post after visiting the Green's exhibition Verbum Domini II in Rome, Italy.  There, Professor Mazza recognized that another ill-advised Green purchase, a papyrus fragment of the Coptic codex of Galatians 2:2-4, 5-6, was one which had earlier been identified by Brice Jones and Dorothy L. King as having passed through the hands of a middleman trafficker on eBay, a gentleman going by the pseudonym Ebuyerrrrr, Yasasgroup, and later Mixantik.  As the investigations into the Green's buying habits progressed, Mazza, would be integral in determining that the Turkish middleman was Yakup Ekşioğlu, a name kept discreetly amongst researchers while investigations were undergoing.

Not long after the payment for the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet was finalized, the firm affiliated with the sale shipped the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet to their New York branch and then arranged for one of their representatives to hand-carry the tablet to Hobby Lobby in Oklahoma City, in order to avoid incurring a New York sales tax. The cuneiform tablet was subsequently transferred to the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC, where it drew concerns with one of the Museum's curators, in the lead up to the museum's grand opening. This unnamed curator queried the parties involved in the object's history post-sale, looking for evidence that would establish the artifact's legitimacy; an act of due diligence that should have been done by the prospective buyer before the tablet was purchased, and not after.  Those involved were anything but helpful.

This likely explains one of the reasons why the cuneiform tablet, once on display on the 4th floor of the DC museum in the History of the Bibles Galleries, was displayed with no provenance information whatsoever.

On 24 September 2019, the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet was seized as part of this civil investigation.  As the complaint released demonstrates, the importance of export documentation, for potential owners and dealers, or the lack thereof is a useful tool for researchers, law enforcement, and customs agents who monitor and prevent the trafficking of cultural property, none of which was remotely in keeping with this particular object.

But where was the Dream Tablet before? 

As background to the case, the US document cites that the tablet was first seen by an unnamed antiquities dealer in 2001 on the floor of a London apartment belonging to antiquities dealer Ghassan Rihani originally from Irbid in northern Jordan.

Prior to Rihani's death as well as after, a substantial portion of his "collection" of Iraqi objects began appearing on the London ancient art market. Many were believed to have been illicitly exported out of Iraq during the Gulf War following the 2003 invasion of Iraq and then recycled as being part of the not well documented Rihani family collection, something his son has denied in an interview with the New York Times.

By March/April 2003 the same dealer returned to London with a cuneiform expert and again viewed the tablet, this time with members of Rihani's family.  It is at this visit, where the dealer agreed to purchase the cuneiform table along with other items for a total of $50,530.  These items were subsequently mailed back to the United States and sold onward to two other dealers in ancient art for $50,000 along with a preliminary translation of the inscription.

By March 2007, false provenance documents had been created which omitted any mention of Rihani or the United Kingdom transaction.  Instead, the would-be provenance documentation proclaimed that the tablet had been purchased at a 1981 Butterfield & Butterfield auction in San Francisco, listed as LOT 1503.  All of which was blatantly untrue, as was the claim that the tablet had been deaccessioned from a small museum.

The cuneiform table would eventually make its way into the hands of Michael Sharpe, who published the object in his Rare & Antiquated Books catalog, where the object's constructed pedigree took a back seat to it's highlighted importance.



Like many cases before it, the multiple transactions surrounding the sales of the stolen Gilgamesh Dream Tablet reflects the inadequacy of the due diligence performed by intermediary dealers, the auction house, and the Green family themselves.  A simple check of the Butterfield & Butterfield auction records would have noted that LOT 1503 does not match the description of a terracotta cuneiform tablet from Iraq.  That alone should have given someone reason to pause.

At best, all of these dealers' behavior, the auction house's behavior and the collector's continued nonchalant attitude towards the object agreed to he purchase should be characterized as negligent. At worst, it shows the complicity of market actors, including those anonymously helping law enforcement post-facto, in prioritizing profits and plausible deniability as a masquerade for stewardship and collecting ethics.

As a result of this case, never shy Hobby Lobby has deflected its own ethical responsibilities towards due diligence by filing suit against Christie's, alleging fraud and breach of warranty in connection with the private treaty sale allegedly after the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet's provenance failed to stack up. This move confirms the auction powerhouse as the intermediary auction house, unnamed in the civil forfeiture complaint. That case has been listed as Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. v. Christie's Inc. (1:20-cv-02239) to be heard in the Eastern District of New York and names Georgie Aitken, Head of the Antiquities Department at Christie's in London from 2009-2016 and Margaret Ford, the Senior Director, International Head of Group, Books and Science at Christie's.

In closing, it is interesting to note that in the past Christie's has voiced a willingness to work closely with law enforcement agencies and ministries of culture to resolve issues when suspect antiquities passing through their organization, but reading the emails detailed in the civil forfeiture complaint for this cuneiform tablet show acting employees of the firm being anything but that. Instead, Christie's appears to have been trying to extract itself from the difficult situation it found itself in, having failed to so their advance homework prior to accepting the object for consignment or at any point up to the final sale.

Yet guarding our past for the future, is also going to be a tough sell for the Oklahoma-based retailer/donor.  In 2017 Hobby Lobby was fined $3 million after federal authorities alleged that the firm bought thousands of historical artifacts that were smuggled out of Iraq.  In 2019 the Museum of the Bible deaccessioned and restituted a number of stolen EES papyrus fragments removed illegally from the Oxyrhynchus Papyri housed at the Sackler Library in Oxford and in 2020 the museum relinquished 11,500 antiquities to the Iraqi and Egyptian governments, which had been acquired with a lack reliable provenance, or ownership histories.

Then there is that Galatians fragment Dr. Mazza has been asking about for years now, as well as many other pieces, have been tied back to Dr. Dirk Obbink and his private antiquities enterprises. 

At the time of the last restitution Mr. Green stated:

“One area where I fell short was not appreciating the importance of the provenance of the items I purchased.” 

One would question just how many legal entanglements it will take before Mr. Green starts to acknowledge that he is a significant contributor to the problem and not merely an innocent victim.  His failure to have engaged in serious due diligence of the artifacts he has purchased has already caused the Museum of the Bible to suffer by their own hands.  Likewise, due diligence of looted antiquities, especially those that could be from conflict-based countries, must be meaningful and not superficially plausible, in the furtherance of a sale's commission.  Partially-documented histories in an object's collection background, do not necessarily always point to fresh looting or illegal export but when an antiquity's background looks murky, as is the case with this important cuneiform tablet, the art market and wealthy donor collectors need to step up their game, by no longer participating in the laundering and by allowing researchers access to past sales details so that wrongs can be righted.

By:  Lynda Albertson

April 25, 2020

Saturday, April 25, 2020 - ,,,,, No comments

Christ Church loans and other Dirk Obbink answered and unanswered questions.


In an article in today's UK Times, the London newspaper reported that a review of Christ Church college's annual reports indicate that there was an equity-sharing arrangement with Dr. Dirk Obbink for £434,000 in 2018 in order for the professor to purchase a property. 

Agreements of this type are not unusual per se and are even written into the Statutes of Christ Church Oxford:

5. Equity sharing arrangements for Official Students, Officers and other persons employed by the House 

(a) Subject to such provisions (if any) as may from time to time be contained in the By-laws but without prejudice to the powers of investment contained in clause 2 of this Statute the Governing Body may enter into equity sharing arrangements with an OfficialStudent, Officer mentioned in Statute XVI.  1 or other person employed by the House who does not reside in the House.
 

(b) Subject as aforesaid, the Governing Body may dispose of any interest in a property acquired under an equity sharing arrangement to any co-beneficiary of the trust of land on such terms as it thinks fit.
 

(c) For the purposes of sub-clauses (a) and (b) of this clause, an equity sharing arrangement is an arrangement to purchase property jointly with an Official Student, Officer or other person employed by the House and with family members of such persons is a constituent college of the University of Oxford.

Awkward timing and unfinished business

While The Times didn't give an exact date of the execution of this financial arrangement with Obbink, we know that by 4 June 2018, in a statement issued by the Egyptian Exploration Society that they had questioned Dr. Obbink about the sale of P.Oxy. 5345, the so-called First Century Mark fragment.  The EES has repeatedly affirmed that this papyrus fragment has never been for sale and was allegedly sold without their consent or knowledge along with other fragments determined to be missing from the collection held at Oxford University’s Sackler Library, all of which made their way into the collections at the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC.

According to the EES statement, when questioned Obbink acknowledged having shown P.Oxy. 5345 to Scott Carroll, at the time affiliated with the MotB and the Green Collection's point person for purchases, as well as to Oxford students in his college rooms but had "insisted that he had never said the papyrus was for sale, and that while he did receive some payments from the Green Collection for advice on other matters, he did not accept any payment for or towards purchase of this text."

How this equity arrangement with Christ Church will be effected by Obbink's legal troubles, if at all remain to be seen.   

One also has to wonder what the impact will be, if any, of Obbink's legal entanglements on the publicly funded research grant he obtained through the UK's Research and Innovation (UKRI) on Living Virtually: Creating and Interfacing Digital Surrogates of Textual Data Embedded (Hidden) in Cultural Heritage Artefacts.  Funded from May 2019 through April 2022 for £845,579 Dr. Obbink is listed as the project's Principal Investigator.

One thing the Times article did clear up is that it was Professor Obbink's legal team, and not Christ Church College, who contacted The Oxford Blue newspaper and threatened legal action for them having named the professor in reporting his arrest on 2 March 2020.  That contact has resulted in the student newspaper amending their original article, which is now back online.

April 18, 2020

Saturday, April 18, 2020 - ,,,,, 1 comment

Censorship by the Oxford University or by Dirk Obbink's law team?

On 16 April Lois Helsop at The Oxford Blue broke the news of that Thames Valley police had arrested American papyrologist Dr. Dirk Obbink, an associate professor in papyrology and Greek literature at Oxford University, on 2 March 2020.  ARCA, as well as prominent news outlets, picked up on this news notice, and in our case, linked back to Helsop's original article and directed our readers also to earlier ARCA postings (see this running thread) of this professor and the buying and selling of ancient texts.   

Professor Obbink has been the focus of much journalistic attention regarding the unauthorised sale of papyrus from the Oxyrhynchus collection, which is owned by the Egypt Exploration Society (EES) and housed at Oxford's Sackler Library, pieces of which were discovered to have been purchased by the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC. 

Today that Oxford Blue article has been removed.  Replaced by a brief statement which reads:
"This article is currently not available while The Oxford Blue takes counsel on legal threats it has received. The factual accuracy of this article is not contested by any party."
One has to ask, whose lawyer's rattled the young newspaper's cage?  Was it Oxford University's or Dr. Obbink's? While official guidance over whether arrested suspects’ names should be published ahead of charge is mixed, it is poor form to intimidate journalists for reporting facts on a high profile case, knowing a student newspaper doesn't have the funds to fight a litigious battle.  Luckily, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, a service that preserves web pages, has a copy of the original story archived, at least for now, or until they too receive a lawyerly take down request. 

Archived news articles are indispensable research resources as they can help reconstruct events, even the distasteful ones, which are necessary for historical and comparative research.  Often they are the last trace we have before knowledge is locked away in private nondisclosure settlements, or worse, when reporting is removed to avoid threats, legal and otherwise.

Here's to a universal access to all knowledge and if you have not already PDFed this webpage to memorialise the material for your own research, then now might be a good time, especially if you are following the interrelated cases of ethical behaviour in the museum and academic worlds as closely as we are.

April 16, 2020

Dirk Obbink arrested on suspicion of ancient papyrus theft


It has now been made public, by the Oxford Blue that American papyrologist Dr. Dirk Obbink, an associate professor in papyrology and Greek literature at Oxford University, was taken into custody on 2 March 2020 by the Thames Valley police on suspicion of theft and fraud.  His arrest last month came in direct response to a formal complaint filed on 12 November 2019 involving the theft of papyrus fragments from the Oxyrhynchus collection, owned by the Egypt Exploration Society (EES), and housed at Oxford's Sackler Library.  

To date some 120 pieces have been identified as having been removed without permission from Oxford University premises.  Thirteen of these fragments eventually found their way to the United States where they were purchased by the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC.  


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]

Obbink 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.  His appointment at Oxford combined a variety of responsibilities, includes a Tutorship at Christ Church, where he lectured on a wide range of classical material and at one point included the direction of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project and its related Imaging Papyri Project which gave him complete access to the society's collection. 


Suspended from duties at Oxford in October 2019 pending further inquiry, Obbink has only issued one public statement, for his part, denying any wrongdoing.  In that public statement, Obbink stated: 


March 28, 2020

The Museum of The Bible's Chairman's letter leaves many unanswered questions


Issued on 26 March 2010 and uploaded quietly to the Museum of the Bible website here

Statement on Past Acquisitions Published: Mar 26, 2020 

Museum of the Bible’s Chairman of the Board, Steve Green, makes the following statement on past acquisitions: 

In 2009, when I began acquiring biblical manuscripts and artifacts for what would ultimately form the collection at Museum of the Bible, I knew little about the world of collecting. It is well known that I trusted the wrong people to guide me, and unwittingly dealt with unscrupulous dealers in those early years. One area where I fell short was not appreciating the importance of the provenance of the items I purchased. 

When I purchased items in those early years, dealers would make representations about an item’s provenance, which the consultants I employed would say was sufficient. As I came to understand taking a dealer at his or her word was not good enough, I cut ties with those consultants. When I engaged with new advisors, I acquired a better understanding of the importance of verifying provenance and we developed a rigorous acquisitions policy that would help avoid repeating those early mistakes. 

For the past several years, the many dedicated curators at Museum of the Bible have quietly and painstakingly researched the provenance of the many thousands of items in the collection. That work continues. 
While this research was proceeding, beginning in late 2017, we also engaged with officials in several countries, including Egypt and Iraq, to open a dialog regarding items that likely originated from those countries at some point, but for which there was insufficient reliable provenance information. Those discussions have been fruitful, and continue to this day. 

I long ago made the decision that when our research revealed another party had a better claim to an item, I would do the right thing and deliver such items to that party. We have already proactively made several such returns. 

Today, I am announcing that we have identified approximately 5,000 papyri fragments and 6,500 clay objects with insufficient provenance that we are working to deliver to officials in Egypt and Iraq respectively. As discussions with officials in Egypt and Iraq continued, we also engaged with officials in the U.S. government to determine the best way procedurally and logistically to make the deliveries, and are appreciative of their assistance. We are working to finalize the deliveries in the near future. We also hope to finalize agreements with organizations in Egypt and Iraq that will allow for us to provide technical assistance, and support the ongoing study and preservation of their important cultural property. 

These early mistakes resulted in Museum of the Bible receiving a great deal of criticism over the years. The criticism resulting from my mistakes was justified. My goal was always to protect, preserve, study, and share cultural property with the world. That goal has not changed, but after some early missteps, I made the decision many years ago that, moving forward, I would only acquire items with reliable, documented provenance. Furthermore, if I learn of other items in the collection for which another person or entity has a better claim, I will continue to do the right thing with those items. 

I understand established museums, universities, and other institutions have evolved over the years and developed sound protocols for dealing with cultural property with insufficient provenance. I intend to continue to learn from the collective efforts and wisdom of those institutions, and support every person and organization possessing such items to continue their research into the provenance of their items. 

Steve Green Chairman of the Board Museum of the Bible

Takeaways:

This letter and these restitutions do not adequately address the negligence of the museum's management or the indiscretions of its philanthropists.  Nor do statements like these erase the indelible blemish on the museum's founding history.

Green claims to have unwittingly dealt with unscrupulous dealers without appreciating the importance of the provenance of the items he purchased. Does he want us to believe that HAD he appreciated the importance of provenance he would have walked away from the many once-in-a-lifetime pieces dangled before him?

Green explains that the consultants he employed were overly trusting of dealers, which is why he made mistakes and why he "cut ties" with those consultants. Emphasis on the word cut ties.  Fired? Let go? Contract not renewed? Swept under the rug? Who and When? What does "cut ties" mean exactly?

When he relates only his own story of events, it seems more like he is trying to control the narrative than do anything to actually make amends.

If we look back in the history of this scandal, it took Green an exceedingly long time to "cut ties" and when he did, we didn't see a great deal of improvement in the museum's operational model, purchasing due diligence, or its transparency.

January 3-5, 2011 is when US Customs inspected Five Federal Express antiquities-filled packages shipped bearing air waybills:


  • No. 7286 2809 6729 from the UAE Dealer to the “[President] or [Executive Assistant]” at Hobby Lobby's Mardel’s address.
  • No. 7286 2809 6751 from the UAE Dealer to the “[President] or [Executive Assistant]” at Hobby Lobby’s principle address. 
  • No. 7286 2809 7162 from the UAE Dealer to the “[President] or [Executive Assistant]” at Hobby Lobby's Crafts, Etc!’s address. 
  • No. 7286 2809 7173 from the UAE Dealer to the “[President] or [Executive Assistant]” at Hobby Lobby's Mardel’s address. 
  • No. 7286 2809 7162 from the UAE Dealer to the “[President] or [Executive Assistant]” at Hobby Lobby's Crafts, Etc!’s address. 

But despite this embarrassing faux pas, by May 16, 2011 Hobby Lobby was still sticking to their guns that the plundered material was rightfully theirs.  To substantiate that claim, they had their attorney file an administrative petition with the CBP seeking the return of their seized property, which one can assume by all the lawyer fees that would have entailed, that at least on paper, Hobby Lobby still felt their claim to the ancient objects, was legit. 

As spring turned eventually to autumn, on September 7, 2011 Hobby Lobby was still defending its honor, submitting a supplemental petition to the CBP trying to satisfy the governments concerns about the payment methodology used in the purchase of the antiquities contained in these shipments.

The Supplemental Petition stated that the reason the payments for the order were made through “separate wire transfers was that various original owners were to be paid directly.” This explanation however proves inconsistent with the fact that Israeli Dealer #3’s provenance statement covered almost the entire order and Israeli Dealer #3 was not one of the payees. It was also inconsistent with representations made to Hobby Lobby about listing Israeli Dealer #3 in the purchase agreement “because the invoice is from [Israeli Dealer #3’s] family and the collection is the [Israeli Dealer #3] family collection.”

Two days after the Supplemental Petition on the problematic shipment, on September 9, 2011, still-consulting "Director" of the Green Collection, Scott Carroll, was out destroying mummy masks at Baylor University with washing up liquid.

Nine months after the problematic shipment, on October 15, 2011, still-consulting Carroll took the last flight out of Heathrow bound for Israel to retrieve still more "unknown, significant Hebrew biblical manuscripts", where upon arrival he poured over 1100+ scrolls spanning 700 years, and spent the day looking at someone's private collection of papyrus.



Such were the Green's buying power that on November 27, 2011, and despite an open investigation into their previous purchases, Carroll set off yet again on another international buying trip.  A voyage which would take him from West Africa, to Istanbul, and then on to London, where in addition to making purchases, he met with people in Oxford, in all probability, Dirk Obbink, regarding the Green Scholar Initiative.




Three and a half months later, on March 12, 2012, Carroll, still consulting for the MoTB, is quoted in the Toledo Blade saying:

“I tell the Greens that I trust them to know where to put a store, and they need to trust me to stock the shelves,”
Carroll goes on further to add:
“We’ve been extremely careful to vet everything acquired and are fully aware of the issues and problems,” declaring “I work closely with international and national agencies reporting suspicious items that come our way.” 

The Greens eventually cut ties with Carroll only in May 2012, yet the continued to put their trust in Dirk Obbink, whom they had purchased from since 2009.  Despite terminating their relationship with Carroll, by January 17, 2013 the Museum, had arranged to purchase four early gospel papyrus fragments from the Oxford-based scholar via a private sales agreement.  These turned out to be stolen from the EES Oxyrhynchus collection.  By November 2019, a total of 13 stolen fragments from the EES collection had been identified as having been purchased by the Museum of the Bible through various buying channels. 

Given all that, the fact that Green's press release statement yesterday, relays that they did not get around to speaking with the source countries of the looted material until 2017 is not surprising.  In an earlier Wall Street journal article, also by Crow, the Museum of the Bible's Vice Chairman of the board Robert E. Cooley indicated that the museum's board itself only learned about the government’s six-year smuggling investigation involving Hobby Lobby when the craft company was close to signing the settlement... so again, the year 2017.

Green purportedly did not tell the museum's board sooner because he considered it a Hobby Lobby matter which brings into question Green's statement yesterday about having "acquired a better understanding of the importance of verifying provenance... we developed a rigorous acquisitions policy that would help avoid repeating those early mistakes."

So this more vigorous acquisitions policy applies to the problems in Green's private collection or to the objects from that collection he donated onward to the Museum?

That said, it was around 2017 that the Museum's board hired cultural-heritage lawyer, Thomas Kline, to vet the pieces remaining in the museum’s collection.  One question which remains is whether or not they hired anyone else besides one busy lawyer, who does not have manuscript provenance experience.  If not, then that might explain why it took an additional three years for this next, and I suspect not last, round of at a snail's pace restitutions.

The final interesting statement is Green's letter is his hope that Egypt and Iraq will allow the Museum of the Bible to provide technical assistance, and support the ongoing study and preservation of their important cultural property.

Having (possibly) worn out their welcome with the EES, and having hooked their dreams on folks like Carroll, Obbink and company, Green now hopes that the very source nations their purchases robbed will see their better late than never restitutions and a single carefully-worded, reputation management letter from the Museum's principle donor as a sincere and real attempt at righting several wrongs.

For me it doesn't even start. 

It should not have taken this many years for Mr. Green to own up to his and his buyers indiscretions. He may have been blindsided by his consultants in the beginning, but throughout this process he has been the one to control the narrative.

If he truly wants to earn my trust, and really make meaningful amends, he could start by addressing the degrees of his own culpability, both for his actions (wantonly and  heedlessly purchasing objects without any due diligence consideration) and his inaction, (to get ahead of this, to his refusal to answer researchers questions about where and from and in what time frame he or his consultants purchased suspect material) from 2009 to present.

For now I remain skeptical and as unconvinced as my venting yesterday further explains.

Lynda Albertson