In the last issue of the Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists, Michael Freeman publishes an article on the provenance of some papyri purchased by Duke University in the early 1970s and includes significant archival materials shedding light on the converging interests of looters and dealers in Egypt, and experts (papyrologists and conservators) in Europe and the United States. At the centre of this specific case there are Anton Fackelmann, restorer and dealer based in Austria, and William H. Willis, the classicist who brought papyrology to Duke. Readers of this blog and Stolen Fragments know both names; the publication of Freeman’s article gives me the opportunity to comment further on the historical period in which the two men operated.

In my talks and in an article published in 2021, I explain that history matters and that of papyrology can be broadly divided in three phases: the age of discovery (ab. 1798–1952), the “post-colonial” phase (ab.1952–2010) and the post-2011 phase, in which we live. The stories that Freeman’s article describes happened in the second, “post-colonial” period. The denomination “post-colonial” does not mean that after the revolution of 1952 colonialism disappeared from Egypt, but rather that after decades of fights, the country was finally able to end the British mandate; in that same period, colonialism started being questioned not only by intellectuals but also by international institutions and organizations. On 14th December 1960, the General Assembly of the UN passed the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples (Resolution 1514 XV). It stated, among other things, that “[t]he subjection of peoples to alien subjugation, domination and exploitation constitutes a denial of fundamental human rights, is contrary to the Charter of the United Nations and is an impediment to the promotion of world peace and co-operation” and that “[a]ll peoples have the right to self-determination; by virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.” In other words, there was shared agreement that colonialism was a source of injustice and oppression, and it harmed people’s economic, social, political, and cultural development.

One might say that all these United Nations resolutions remained principles rather than enacted policies, but I would answer that it has been our shared responsibility to make them work on the ground – which is why I will never stop denouncing the sustained breach of these principles, and of national and international laws, by academics under the pretense of saving cultural heritage artifacts.

Anyway, despite the cultural climate change and the passing of various UNESCO conventions to foster new approaches to cultural heritage preservation to overcome colonialism, universities collections continued buying papyri illegally sourced from Egypt until very recently, as I explain in Stolen Fragments. The documents published by Freeman provide further, disturbing examples. For instance it reports a letter written by Fackelmann to Willis on 18 March 1969, where the conservator states that while he was in Egypt to restore papyri at the Egyptian Museum earlier that year, he was surveying the antiquities market to see what was on offer. Little if anything was available, he added, but then he traveled to the Faiyum and had some luck. “I bought a mummy cartonnage (a chest) from a mummy looter,” he writes “which turned out to be a surprise after the dissolution. 16 pieces of fragments with Greek script, all from the Ptolemaic period, have come to light.” (M. Freeman, “The Fackelmann Papyri at Duke University”, BASP 62 (2025), p. 258, English translation and German original).

Fackelmann might have embellished or tweaked his account to make his merchandise more appealing to Willis; nevertheless, a biography published by his son in 2015 provides similar accounts of his trips, describes how he sourced papyri and cartonnage in Egypt, the circle of academics frequenting his household, and his methods to extract papyri from mummy cartonnage, using a repurposed, broken washing machine. This extraordinary tool was immortalized in the 1974 first edition of the so-called Archilochus of Cologne, a papyrus bearing previously unknown verses of the poet kept in the University of Cologne collection. The editors dedicated their article to Anton Fackelmann, explaining that the papyrus had been obtained through Fackelmann’s washing machine (R. Merkelbach and M. L. West. “Ein Archilochos-Papyrus.” Zeitschrift Für Papyrologie Und Epigraphik 14 (1974), p. 97: “In Fackelmanns Waschmaschine aus Mumienkartonnage herausgekocht”; see also Freeman’s article, esp. p. 251).

In the 1969 letter abstracts published by Freeman, Fackelmann does not hide to have bought cartonnage pieces from a Mumienplünderer (mummy looter), which means in open contravention of the Egyptian laws regulating excavations and the antiquities trade at the time (Law n. 215 of 31 October 1951 on the protection of antiquities and following regulations of 1952). We have a conservator and a papyrologist openly dealing with material illicitly excavated, illegally sold and bought, and then smuggled out of Egypt. Those fragments, Freeman explains, were then sold to Duke and other institutions in Europe and in the U.S., and are still at Duke and other universities.

Freeman’s article is an example of an important task that we are called to perform in the third phase of the history of papyrology (post-2011). As academics educated and working in the countries which have benefitted from colonial exploitation to this very day, we have the duty to open the archives and tell the stories of how papyri and other Egyptian artefacts entered our collections. And then to reflect on how to do better.