Category Archives: Provenance

Prices and provenance of papyri recently sold or for sale

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Collectors, who keep buying despite my many warnings, alerted me on the appearance of few papyri for sale.

A Coptic fragment, mislabeled as “Greek”, was auctioned in France last Sunday (picture below). Despite the absence of any reliable provenance, those who followed the sale reported that it went from 40 to over 800 euros.

Screenshot of lot 419 Coptic from the online catalogue of Métayer-Mermoz Maison de Ventes aux Enchères

The same circle of collectors report that one can still buy two papyri of the Byzantine period published in 1986 by Roger S. Bagnall (SB 18 13740 = TM 36298; and SB 18 13741 = TM 36283), on offer through the online shop of Hixenbaugh Ancient Art New York. Their price is apparently 30 times that paid for the Coptic scrap. The fragments’ provenance reads “Formerly with Dikran Kelekian, Paris, 1950s; subsequently in a New York private collection, acquired in 1983”.

Dikran G. Kelekian (1868–1951) was a renowned art collector and dealer, who opened galleries in New York, Paris and Cairo with his brothers (for a summary of his bio see here and here). The New York business passed to his son, Charles Dikran Kelekian, who died in 1982. In 1984, Harvard Art Museums accessioned a Coptic miniature codex bearing the Gospel of the Lots of Mary, coming as a gift from “Mrs Beatrice Kelekian, in memory of her late husband Charles Dikran Kelekian”. Dates and names related with the two Byzantine fragments and the Harvard codex seem to point at a same source, the Kelekian estate, but without documents this remains uncertain and of course uncertain is also where the papyri had been found in Egypt and how they came in the possession of Mr Kelekian.

The Harvard codex was published by AnneMarie Luijendijk in 2014 (Forbidden Oracles? The Gospel of the Lots of Mary).

If you wish to buy ancient papyri, consider donating them to a university papyrus collection or other institution in your country or in Egypt, before or after your death: your life is shorter than that of papyri, and you can’t trust your heirs, believe it or not those fragments can go wasted…

Anton Fackelmann and the formation of the papyrus collection at Duke University

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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.

The Unsettling Story of the Brothers Poem Papyrus

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On January 22, I had the pleasure to give a lecture at the Weston Library in Oxford for the Friends of the Bodleian about the fate of one of the papyri at the centre of my recent book, Stolen Fragments: Black Markets, Bad Faith, and the Illicit Trade in Ancient Artefacts.

The lecture is now available on YouTube, and I’d be happy to answer any questions you might have here, using the comments below. As you will discover watching the video, there is a disturbing twist in the post-book story of the New Sappho largest and most important fragment, the only extant copy of the so-called Brothers Poem…

Destination unknown: The dispersion of the Euphrates papyri through the market

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Readers of this blog and my book know that I am not a techy professor but I like old fashioned social media (“boomer!” my nephews say…), and so, while everyone was busy following the millionaire sale of an unprovenanced Samaritan inscription through Sotheby’s, I discovered by chance that some very well-known papyri most probably from Syria went on auction through Drouot. One of the buyers made his acquisitions known through his Facebook account.

The papyri were first brought to light in a French publication by Jean Gascou and Denis Feissel in the late 1980s and their origin had always remained mysterious. But now, thanks to the public auction catalogue, we learn that they were in the possession of a Mr Alain Grenier (together with an impressive number of other antiquities). Wikipedia has one Alain Grenier (1930–2022) with a career as a French diplomat; he was in Damascus first in 1964–1968 and then as ambassador from January 1986 to June 1989. Did he acquire the manuscripts during one of these terms? Probably, but we don’t know for sure.

We are left with a series of questions on how the papyri reached France – I would guess in a diplomatic suitcase, but it is just a guess. The discussion with one of the buyers, with whom I shared my concerns, involved the usual arguments. The papyri have been published and studied – they have generated an impressive bibliography, he said – and I agreed, but imagine if we had the archaeological context too, I added. They are safe – the new owner of five of them claims. But their story shows that they are in fact not so safe, was my answer. Soon or later there will be heirs – like those who went to Drouot with the Euphrates papyri – who don’t understand the importance of what came in their hands and will put them in danger, through dispersion via the market or other disrespectful acts. (It came to my mind the Egyptian funerary portrait offered by Art Ancient at Frieze London, which at some point was hanging on the wall of a kitchen, nearby a stove. Imagine…you can check the photo at page 109 of the online catalogue). And above all: were the papyri legally or illegally bought and imported to France?

One of the papyri sold, screenshot from Drouot’s website with the results of the auction

The Ilves papyri and their eBay Turkish origins

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About ten years ago, when I started looking at the Green papyrus collection, Rick Bonnie, an archaeologist based in Helsinki, became the more and more interested in a smaller and far less public collection of papyri and other manuscripts, the Finnish Ilves collection. Like Steve Green and his family, the owner of the Ilves collection established connections with scholars willing to research his manuscripts but unlike the Greens he wanted to remain anonymous – Ilves is a fantasy name (obviously, the experts who accepted to work for him know the man’s name and address, but the rest of us is left speculating over the mysterious label). Bonnie and I soon realized that the Ilves and Green collections had much in common, as they were both sourcing papyri from Turkish dealers operating through eBay and other means.

While Bonnie did not reach “Mr Ilves” in person, he became acquainted with his eBay identity. As papyrologists working for Ilves were fully aware that the collector had acquired some of his papyri through eBay sellers and published some of them in academic journals with details about their shady sources, Bonnie was able to cross-check eBay open access information and identified the Finnish account “cde789” as belonging to Mr Ilves. eBay allowed searching data that customers leave open access, so Bonnie analysed the transactions made by “cde789” as buyer: from 2003 to 2019, the collector made at least 463 acquisitions. (The same account was also mentioned in an open access article by Bob Kraft).

As Bonnie explains in a recent book chapter summarizing his finds, Mr Ilves mostly acquired from three eBay sellers: “mjgreyfarr”, “minnos2004” and “ebuyerrrrr”. The first account is linked with the sale of noted American dealer Bruce Ferrini’s manuscripts, following his financial troubles, while the other two are the eBay interfaces of two Turkish dealers who have sold (and possibly are still selling) hundreds papyrus fragments and other antiquities from Egypt and elsewhere since at least the early 2000s. Ebuyerrrrr (= Yakup Ekşioğlu) is particularly well known as I reported him to eBay and also to the Art and Antiques Unit of Metropolitan London Police back in 2016 and that made him upset. Among other things, Ekşioğlu sold hundreds of unprovenanced/illegal items to the Green collection, most notably the 26 New Sappho fragments belonging to the same ancient roll as the Brothers Poem Sappho papyrus. He is closely associated with the protagonists of the thefts and trading of the Egypt Exploration Society papyri discovered in 2019, as I will explain in my forthcoming book where the identity of the business behind minnos2004 will also be revealed.

You might wonder why I am telling this story, since it is well known and published already. I am repeating all this because one of the most prestigious series in papyrology, “Papyrologica Bruxellensia” printed by renown academic publisher Peeters, has accepted to host the publication of a catalog of 20 papyri from the Ilves collection, which were exhibited in August 2020 at the National Archives of Finland. The editors of the volume explain in the acquisition history section (pp. 9-10) that the “catalog comprises the manuscripts from the Ilves collection that, according to the present owner of the collection, were purchased from an antiquities dealer  in London in the late 1940s  by the grandfather of the owner, who was apparently introduced to the dealer by  Sir M. E. L. Mallowan, a professor at the University of London.” They think that Mr Ilves’ word suffices to prove that the papyri “would have arrived in  Finland before the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property ( effective 1972; ratified by Finland 1999).” But is the word of a collector who has bought hundreds papyrus fragments from eBay accounts operating illegally from Turkey enough for papyrologists to state that they have performed a careful provenance research ahead of study and publication, as required by current academic professional policies? Does due diligence just mean listening and believing what a collector with this profile tells when pressed about provenance? Or are there reliable and authentic documents showing that the husband of Agatha Christie (I suppose M. E. L. Mallowan is that Mallowan) and the grandfather of Mr Ilves were friends and visited dealers in London back in the days, and those freshly published 20 have that origin? When I’ll see those documents, I will publicly change my mind on the possible legal source of the just published papyri. Until then I will continue thinking that those 20 papyri more probably have the same origin of those that Coptologist Ivan Miroshnikov published years ago: they came from shady Turkish sellers without documentation of any sorts. I am waiting to be proven wrong.

The doing and undoing of papyrus collections: The sale of P.Oxy. XIV 1767

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Auction season is in full swing and while waiting for the Crosby-Schøyen Codex to go on sale for a projected stellar price, a more affordable offer of a deaccessioned Egypt Exploration Fund distribution papyrus is available at Forum Auctions.

The papyrus, P.Oxy. XIV 1767 in technical terminology, was given to Ampleforth Abbey Library in York, but the institution at some point sold it through the market – I don’t know exactly when and how but surely it was offered by London Sotheby’s on December 7, 2010. Those were the glorious days when the Green family appeared on the collecting scene throwing money anywhere the words “Bible” and “Christian” were mentioned. Sotheby’s curators tried the Christian connection in this case too, as you can gather from the catalogue entry, but despite the effort the papyrus sold for just £6000. To give you comparative prices, consider that four years later five papyri, distributed back in the days by the Egypt Exploration Fund to the Pacific School of Religion/Badè Museum, were privately sold through a bookseller at a much higher price, ca. $150,000, and none of them were of Christian content. (I covered part of this disgraceful story in 2016). In 2020 the same papyri were again on offer, even more discretely directly to booksellers, at an undisclosed price by someone named “Alan”. (If you’re curious, my book will be out this September with more details on this and other stories).

All these ex-Egypt Exploration Fund distribution papyri are licit, meaning that they were exported with licenses from Egypt when it was legal and their title of ownership passed through different institutions and people legally. But what about the ethical aspects of these dealings? A lot has been said and written about this: deaccessions of the society’s papyri and other antiquities defeat the gift mandate to be good custodians, and academics should not be involved at all in this kind of business, as explained in various professional association policies and hopefully in university ethical statements too.

And what about the traders? Dealers and auction houses, individually and as members of professional associations, could do certainly better. For instance, they could finally start producing catalogues with full and documented provenance of what they sell. They can also encourage conversations between sellers, collectors and institutions, so that objects might find a loving and caring home, as library and museum associations recommend too.

But looking at what is still happening after a decade of campaigning, I do wonder if there is any interest to improve practices. Not to mention legislations.

For more on these issues I suggest the following open access readings, with further bibliography:

Alice Stevenson, Scattered Finds: Archaeology, Egyptology and Museums, London: UCL 2019.

Roberta Mazza, Papyri, Ethics, and Economics: A Biography of P.Oxy. 15.1780 (𝔓39), Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 52 (2015), 113-142.

Brent Nongbri, “The Ethics of Publication: Papyrology,” Bryn Mawr Classical Review 25 May 2022, https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2022/2022.05.25/

Usama Gad, “Decolonizing the Troubled Archive of Papyri and Papyrology in a Global Digital Age: A View from Contemporary Egypt,” in Garrick V. Allen, Usama Gad, Kelsie Rodenbiker, Anthony Royle, and Jill Unkel (eds.), The Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri at Ninety: Literature, Papyrology, Ethics, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2022.

Frustration Week

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Dear readers I should say this has been a week of social media and e-commerce failures. Having all been invited by the Museum of the Bible to join the @AskACurator ‏ day on Wednesday on Twitter, I thought to send a number of questions about provenance and guess what? Not a single one was answered. Others went unanswered too, but I have been asking since 2014, after all I felt I had to be treated with some respect. Even Mr Ask A Curator had a say…

https://twitter.com/AskACurator/status/908707260217663488

 

Anyway, I brought my frustration to eBay and it went even worse. Two papyrus fragments appeared on sale from a German account, evangelist75, an interesting chap who according to his feedback report has sold quite a number of antiquities of all sorts, including other “interesting old Coptic papyrus sheets”, as he calls and sometimes misspells them. For once I give mine and my colleagues’ expertise: those just sold, one for £ 48.93 and the other for £ 77.75, are fakes (although the papyrus sheets might be genuine or faked better than the texts: hard to say). Actually they are hilarious fakes considering the Facebook comments when my friend Alin Suciu posted the links.

So the buyers have been cheated, which I really enjoy since these papyri would have never been acquired by responsible collectors. Mr evangelist75 has in fact told me via the eBay chat: “I have purchased from an antique dealer in Germany about 20 years ago and comes from nord Egyptian area. ” Maybe he had been cheated too? Who knows…

In the light of previous experiences, I did not bother this time to fill the eBay form for irregularities, since all those I sent have remained unanswered so far. I went straight to Twitter and talked to eBay through their @AskeBay account. This is what I got back (click on the link here below and you’ll see all the conversation):

Isn’t it amazing? Those fancy people in the Silicon Valley know how get by in this world. They earn tons of money and pretend us all to make their job of monitoring FOR FREE!!! If I were not the lady I am, I would pass at this point to Italian body language. But never mind, after all it is Sunday and frustration week will be ended soon.

The eBay experience

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It is a while that I am chasing my Turkish friend Mixantik-Ebuyerrrr, who is selling his papyrus fragments and other merchandise via eBay since 2008. Although he likes to call himself Robert, we actually know that this is not his real name; soon or later we will delve into his interesting story. But never mind, today I’d like to talk about the e-commerce platform through which Robert and others can freely and easily offer their manuscripts and other antiquities for sale in a very convenient way. Convenient for buyers, sellers and above all for those who own the platform in question: eBay is listed 310 in the 2017 Fortune list of the 500 world leading companies. It is hard to quantify the overall amount of antiquities (licit and illicit, genuine and fake) which are exchanged through the platform, but to give you an idea of the size and profit margins, today there are 1,531 Egyptian antiquities and 3,974 antique (sic) manuscripts on sale through the UK platform, only to mention objects at the centre of my interest.

So let us consider the case of a responsible collector looking for papyri on eBay. Among the fragments recently on sale there have been two offered by luck_button, a user active since 26 September 2003 and based, as my friend Robert, in Turkey. As you can see from the screenshot above and checking the link (papyrus 1, papyrus 2), the seller specifies with a bizarre sense of pride that there is no provenance or document on any of the two. I do not want to give my expertise on the scraps, so I am afraid but I won’t tell you anything about their date, writing, if they are genuine, etc. I am just concentrating on matters of legality and ethics, which should come first.

Turkey has ratified the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property of 1970 in 1981 and as a consequence has put very strict legislation in place for the protection of its cultural heritage. The main law for the protection of antiquities was issued in 1983; antiquities are ownership of the State, their commerce is illegal and penalties are harsh. It is fresh news that a British tourist trying to bring back ancient coins, which he found while snorkelling, is now detained in Turkey. In our case, however, the papyrus fragments are not from Turkey, but are originally from Egypt; their legal status could seem ambiguous. Nevertheless, since Mr luck_button is openly stating that they are unprovenanced and there are no documents on the acquisition history of the fragments, what is happening has high probability to be illegal and the fragments look like illicit fragments in transit through Turkey. Moreover, the seller candidly explains that he sends the merchandise through the standard Turkish post, as he has clearly done so far on the basis of his trade-history: what about customs duties? In a world where nations seem to have the less and less resources to control borders, it has become quite simple to send things around without any systematic check on the contents of packages. Never mind issues of conservation etc.

So in the light of this far from reassuring picture, a responsible collector would certainly avoid buying the fragments and would try, instead, to contact eBay in order to alert them on the situation. Here problems start. Any item on sale could be reported through a form that you should fill according to some pre-existent, standard criteria. In fact, none of them really fit to antiquities. Anyway, I made an experiment filling the form as best as I could few days ago. Nothing has happened and in the meanwhile the fragments have been sold to two anonymous irresponsible collectors: one for 512 and the other for 141 dollars.

e-Bay policies on the sale of antiquities varies from one country to another, in view of the different legislation regulating the market and approaches towards cultural heritage protection. For instance, eBay Germany policy openly forbids the selling of antiquities without accompanying documents regarding their acquisition history . The policy of eBay US seems less restrictive, or at least not so explicit, and gives some specific guidelines only regarding Native American cultural heritage. As for the UK, to my knowledge the only attempt made to regulate the nature of the antiquities sold on eBay concerns exclusively UK archaeological finds. This seems a narrow minded, nation-focussed approach for a country with a rich legal (and illegal) patrimony of antiquities originating from other countries on its territory, as a result of its imperial past, and a thriving antiquities market more in general.

As an academic who feels responsible of the objects I study, I had been able in the past to get in contact directly with the eBay policy office and they usually act quickly when some bids are flagged as potentially illegal. But it is clear that more proactive and structural measures should be put in place to tackle the problem.

The reality is that everything seems allowed because too many collectors/dealers, as the two who purchased the papyri at the centre of this post, do not respect the laws and ethics underpinning such exchanges (before you even start with a pointless counter-argument, I am afraid to say that no, darling, eventual ignorance of the laws does not excuse them). Moreover, eBay policies enforcement seems inefficient at best, and police active control is also low, even more so in the UK where the Art and Antiques Unit seems to be under threat of closure. Despite all the rhetoric on heritage preservation, and the amount of public money put in various programs, the truth is that this kind of everyday unregulated and unethical (when not illegal) market is slowly killing our cultural heritage in the open and apparently with the consent of everyone implied in the transactions.

Bibliography note:

I learnt a lot from reading J. Anglim Kreder, J. Nintrup, “Antiquity meets the modern age: eBay’s potential criminal liability for counterfeit and stolen international antiquity sale” Journal of Law, Technology & the Internet 5 (2014) 143–178 and N. Brodie, “The Internet Market in Antiquities” in F. Desmarais ed. Countering Illicit Traffic in Cultural Goods: The Global Challenge of Protecting the World’s Heritage Paris: ICOM 2015.

 

Making the Mummies Talk (without Palmolive soap!)

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Checking potential samples for the project with Alice Stevenson (Petrie Museum-UCL) and Kathryn Piquette (UCL)

Checking potential samples for the project with Alice Stevenson (Petrie Museum-UCL) and Kathryn Piquette (UCL) at the Petrie Museum, London.

As the readers of my blog know, I have been following the amazing adventures of Scott Carroll, former director of the Green collection and now partner of Ancient Asset Investments, and his friends dissolving Ptolemaic and early Roman mummy masks in Palmolive soap with the strange idea to retrieve New Testament manuscripts, but in fact finding some administrative Ptolemaic documents and Greek literary fragments as a result of their washing up. We will possibly have more precise information about what was inside the artefacts when the first volume of the Green papyri will be published, with the hope to receive also explanations on the methods employed for the dismounting, and on the provenance of the masks and cartonnage, especially after we learnt that Iraq clay tablets from the Green collection have been seized and are under investigation by the federal authorities.

As it often happens in research, some good came as a result of what happened. Public concern raised by the Palmolive Indiana Jones YouTube exploits has pulled together a multidisciplinary team of specialists lead by Melissa Terras (UCL) and Mike Toth (R.B. Toth Associates), including myself among others, that has received funds from Arcadia Foundation to investigate how special imaging techniques, such as multispectral technology, can lead to the establishment of non invasive methods for reading papyri encapsulated in mummy masks and other cartonnage objects. We named the project Making the Mummies Talk.

Sorting out cartonnage samples at the Petrie Museum

Sorting out cartonnage samples at the Petrie Museum

The work of the team has just begun. There are a number of challenges we are facing, ranging from conservation issues to the little information available so far on the compositions of ancient inks and how they respond to the different imaging techniques we are going to apply. But we are convinced that the project will be a decisive step forward into finding ways not only to avoid the destruction of ancient artefacts in the future, but also to gather data on their material features and freely share them for study. Classicists and other specialists have tended too often to focus only on the texts written on ancient papyri and other materials, overlooking other key aspects of ancient manuscripts, such as the quality of the papyrus employed, ink compositions and other means involved in their production, and their multiple lives as books or documents first, and later as recycled materials for the fabrication of something different.

This project will also allow us to evaluate what impacts past conservation techniques used in museums and libraries, or by dealers, had on the objects under study. While working with Mike Toth at the John Rylands Library, for example, we obtained some interesting information on the tax receipt on the back of the so-called Last Supper Rylands amulet: besides the text of the receipt otherwise unreadable, multispectral imaging brought to light traces of cell-tape unfortunately employed in the past on the papyrus surface, the effects of which were, however, invisible to the naked eye.

P.Ryl.Greek Add. 1166 back: the lighter stripes visible especially on the left half of the papyrus match with cell tape that was found in an envelope with the papyrus.

P.Ryl.Greek Add. 1166 back: the lighter stripes visible especially on the left half of the papyrus match with cell tape that was found in an envelope with the papyrus. Images were taken before conservation.

 

Thinking about Buying a Papyrus Online? Think Twice!

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Best real shopping? Bologna's city centre, no doubt...

Best real shopping? Bologna’s city centre, no doubt! Leave the computer at home and join me this summer…

I have been doing some experiments with online shopping for antiquities recently. I must admit I do not like buying online. I love real, solid, heavy shopping in a selected number of places, where I like to go in person for the ritual and the chatting with retailers and customers. I dislike Amazon and co. cardboard; I prefer nice, handmade packaging. Yes, I am one of those women you see happily carrying shopping bags on the street: old fashioned, I know.

Anyway, I had to try the online thrill in order to understand how it works for a paper I am giving at the annual ARCA conference in Amelia soon. I thought I would give you some ideas about what I found, and a taste of the paper, in case you are not lucky enough to be in Amelia in June, which is a pity for you, I must say, because that is one of the loveliest towns in Umbria.

About one month ago Alin Suciu (Göttingen) sent Jenny Cromwell (Copenhagen) and me a link to the online catalogue for the sale of a Coptic papyrus by Auctionata, one of the many auction houses now operating on the web. Basically Auctionata works like traditional auction houses, but bidding takes place exclusively online. The firm seems big, and covers many types of objects, from antiquities to watches, paintings and other collectibles. They have two main offices, one in Berlin the other in New York, but also agents in other countries.

So on the one hand I asked Jenny Cromwell to give me a quick opinion on the fragment versus the online catalogue description due to her expertise on the monastic material, and on the other I started a conversation via email with the auction house.

I reproduce here the image and the catalogue description both still available through the sale result webpage (the piece was sold for € 1,200 on 20 April):

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“The present piece is a letter, written on papyrus, originating from Western Thebes, ancient Egypt, dating to the 6th century AD. The papyrus letter is written in Coptic, the latest native form of the language of Egypt. Four lines can be read in contiguous writing in Sahidic, a dialect of the Coptic. On the edges further text lines remain. Therefore, it can be assumed that there used to be at least one more line above and below the present text. The text mentions Phoibamon (sic), a monk and founder of a monastery, who used to live in the monastery above the ruins of the Hatshepsut Temple in Deir el-Bahari (Western Thebes).

The letter is in a very well-preserved condition, considering its age. The main parts of the letter are missing, however, the parts that do remain are very well preserved. The papyrus displays frayed parts and it is partially folded. The corners are strongly frayed. Little fragments within the centre piece of the papyrus are missing. The original edge is only preserved on the left rim, however, strongly frayed. The letter is laid down on a beige textile matte in a dark green wooden frame with gold painted inner frame. The dimensions of the letter are 11.6 x 3 cm (width x height). The total dimensions, including the frame, are 15.3 x 20.8 cm.”

 These are Jenny’s quick notes and comments:

“Beginning of four lines of text, with trace of another line at the top. End of last line preserves epistolary formulae (‘do the [love’ > ‘please’), suggesting this is a letter, which is preceded by at least four lines of text (only a trace of the first survives), including, e.g. the date to the beginning of the month Paremhotep, mention ‘of God on behalf of (?) Mena .[…]’.

The name Phoibammon survives at the beginning of line 4. However, there is nothing to support this as the monastery of Apa Phoibammon at Deir el-Bahri – there is too much lost text between this name and Mena at the end of the previous line. These could be two men.

Also, the description is erroneous in stating that Phoibammon was a monk and founder of a monastery: the monastery of Apa Phoibammon was founded by Apa Abraham, bishop of Hermonthis, at the end of the 6th century / beginning of the 7th. As such, a 6th century date is unlikely, if connected with Thebes. There is nothing here to support a Theban provenance (unless it was actually found there) — the tenuous mention of Phoibammon is insufficient.”

To sum up: the auction house’s expertise is based on a correct grasp on the contents of the fragment, but overstates the interpretation of the name Phoibammon, adding also incorrect information on the founding of the Monastery of Deir el-Bahri. Phoibammon and Menas are in fact two of the commonest male personal name in late antique Egypt. The dating is shaky at best: if it was based on a supposed provenance from the monastery in question, it is misleading because the monastery has a later foundation, as we have seen. As for palaeographical dating, this is a notoriously problematic field, especially for Coptic texts, and not a word is spent in the catalogue to clarify the basis for a supposed 6th century date. As Jenny has pointed out in a following conversation, the handwriting is elementary because the letter was written by an unskilled writer, and this makes it even more difficult to date.

Auctionata’s condition description is carefully crafted; it starts with a bold “The letter is in a very well-preserved condition, considering its age” but as curators and papyrologists know this is just a tiny scrappy fragment (11 x 3 cm); we have thousands and thousands of them stored in collections all over the world. Certainly this is an important piece of our past that must be preserved with care, but there is nothing special about it at all.

The way the auction house attempts to connect it with a famous Christian religious figure highlights how important the Christian manuscript market has become; not a new phenomenon, but certainly one that is increasing as the major enterprise of the Green family’s Museum of the Bible, and the new book and other enterprises of the Christian preacher Josh McDowell in the field of manuscript collecting (and mummy cartonnage dissolving…) demonstrate.

Let’s move on to report on my email conversation about provenance with Auctionata’s helpful and very kind personnel. The first answer to a direct question on the point was simply as follows:

“Lot 146 was part of the collection Bruno Wertz, a high class German private collection. All items of this collection have superb museum quality.”

I thanked them, and explained that what I was asking for was more precise information on documents proving that the papyrus left Egypt legally, or at least before 1972 (that a piece left Egypt before that date does not necessarily mean that it was legally exported, a point people tend easily to forget…). This was the prompt answer:

“We had the possibility to talk with our consignor regarding the documents and the provenance. Unfortunately I have to inform you that we do not have any documents. The Coptic Letter comes from the private collection of Bruno Wertz, who confirmed that the object was bought in the 1960s. Please be aware that we provide every single buyer with our Auctionata Guarantee for all items purchased through Auctionata. The Auctionata Guarantee will apply for a period of 25 years from time to (sic) handover of the purchased item.”

So I checked the guarantee available online; it covers the abovementioned period but provenance is not mentioned anywhere in the terms, or at least I was unable to find it. From the email it seemed that Mr Wertz had confirmed somewhere that he acquired the piece in the 1960s; therefore I asked for an affidavit from him or the present owner stating when and where the pieces were purchased. In fact it could be absolutely plausible that Mr Wertz legally bought a papyrus and other Egyptian antiquities (other pieces were in fact auctioned online recently) in the 1960s without taking care about provenance documents. I have talked with collectors and dealers in these months; as many academics, dealers and collectors too have started paying attention to provenance documents only recently, in most cases in absolute good faith, as a result of the increasing public awareness of the issues at stake, especially after the Unesco convention enforcement in 1972. Auctionata’s answer, however, was brief and depressing:

“We’ve contacted the consignor again, but unfortunately we won’t receive any documents about the provenance.”

The fact that no affidavit would be provided, and the only guarantee is that of Auctionata, which totally ignores the provenance aspect, does not look positive for a potential purchaser.

To conclude: Are you the one who bought the papyrus? Well I am sorry for you, but this was certainly not a good choice and investment.

You have a tiny and scrappy papyrus, written in a very bad handwriting, without a date, without the monk you thought to have and what is worse without documented provenance! If someone will claim the papyrus back one day or Egypt will ask for repatriation, the Auctionata guarantee will probably count for nothing, because provenance seems not to be mentioned among its clauses.

Honestly, far better to have invested those 1,200 euros in a holiday, a decent coat or bag, or – why not? – in a donation to a museum or a library, or else in finding a better papyrus in terms of conservation, contents and provenance, if you really wanted to hang one on the wall – which by the way you cannot do unless the glass is ultraviolet filtered and the room under constant humidity and temperature control. So why not go for a contemporary painting for your empty wall instead? I have a couple of names: nice stuff and a good investment too. Next time you have the impulse, just join me on my Saturday shopping trip and I’ll take control of the money; you won’t be disappointed…