Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony's Antiquities Collection

There's a photo below, taken from Vogue Living 2006, of the couple's home with some of their antiquities collection.
In the interview Anthony spoke of his love of collecting. (More photos here and here and here - as an aside, I love the house ...)

 

This post is dedicated to David Gill and Looting Matters.

Calling 'Bull' on the Save a Torah Foundation

In the early summer of 2008 there was a great deal of discussion on the Iraq Crisis List about a Torah that Rabbi Menachem Youlus of Save a Torah had claimed to have smuggled out of Mosul in March 2007 with the help of the 82nd Airborne. The link to the original story that sparked the debate is now dead, but a version is here.

If you now click onto the Save a Torah  website, there is an interesting statement about a Maryland investigation. That's because the Washington Post and the New York Times pointed out that it was almost impossible for various Torah scrolls he sold to have been from concentration camps, as Menachem Youlus claimed.

The truth about the origins of the Iraqi Torah got lost in a discussion of where the Iraqi Jewish Archive should end up - I think it should not go back to Baghdad. I did however get in touch with various government agencies, including the NCIS at Fort Bragg, where the 82nd Airborne are based, and ask for alleged smuggling by our servicemen be looked into.

As far as anyone has been able to work out, although some of the 82nd Airborne were in Baiji in early March 2007, none were in a combat situation Youlus described in Mosul. Baiji is on the Baghdad - Mosul road, but some distance away. Servicemen in combat also tend to be too busy fighting to dig holes and loot cultural heritage - that's what the US Army was doing when Baghdad Museum was ransacked by Iraqi looters in 2003.

The Torah supposedly smuggled out of Iraq was 're-housed' in Temple Isaiah, a synagogue in Fulton, Maryland. I can't tell much from their web site photo of their Torahs - here - but since Youlus is a book dealer as well as a rabbi, I assume he at least sold them an old Iraqi Torah that he'd picked up somewhere.

Youlus and Save a Torah's tales of smuggling Torahs out of Iraqi - 'rescuing' them - seem to be as delusional as his claims of having sold Torahs 'rescued' from Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz. And pure fiction.

Philip II burried at Vergina?

Alexander the Great's Father, Philip II, Greece Tomb | Archeology Paper, Philip III, Eurydice, Cleopatra | LiveScience

I read their recent academic paper, and it's very interesting.

But if you want to know my views, you'll have to come to a conference in Copenhagen next year ...

For Loaning the Elgin Marbles to Greece

I've been chatting to people about how one could loan the Parthenon sculptures Lord Elgin was given by the Ottoman Sultan to Athens.

Until now it has all been theoretical as it's always quickly pointed out that the British Museum does not loan iconic works - and they put this in writing to the then Greek Minister of Culture Venizelos under the MacGregor regime. It's the same answer he's given the Egyptians over the Rosetta Stone.

But we also just discovered that Neil MacGreggor* agreed to lend the equally iconic Cyrus Cylinder to Iran - and broke the news to the press once it had arrived there.

Iran is a country that stones women for adultery (defined as sex outside marriage - so even when one is single it's a crime). Iran is not where the Cylinder was found. Iran is a country building a damn that will flood the Tomb of the same Cyrus, first Achaemenid king. Iran is a country that persecutes people, particularly Jews, in a way that goes completely contrary to the laws passed by Cyrus and inscribed on the Cylinder. The Iranian government recently organised a contest for the best cartoon denying the Holocaust. Cyrus had let the Jews return to Israel after the Babylonian Captivity - Iran regularly threatens to bomb / nuke Israel. That's putting aside that the UK closed the Iranian embassy in London a long time ago for assorted bad acts including shooting a policewoman and sponsoring terrorism. The BM also has close relations with Sudan, another dubious state (Darfur massacres, etc) as does at least one Trustee.

Greece may not be perfect, but it's none of those things.

If we can lend the Cyrus Cylinder to Iran, I don't see how we can refuse to lend the Elgin Marbles to Athens.

I love seeing them in London, but I would also love to see the different sections together. A loan of a few years wouldn't do any harm.

Years ago I met Stelios EasyJet and jokingly asked if he'd sponsor shipping them to Athens. It was said in jest, so we can't hold him to it - but I'm pretty sure we can find plenty of Greek citizens and companies who'd chip in and it wouldn't be a problem raising the funds even in this economic climate when the government is having to cut costs. I rang a Greek friend, and he's made a pledge if the BM agrees to a loan.

William St Clair agreed to be on a committee to organise an exchange when we chatted about it.

The Cyrus loan is fresh news, and I have not thought out the details fully yet (this is a quick Blackberry post), but ...

I'd suggest either a five year loan or two three year loans from London to Athens (for example the pediments and metopes for three years then the frieze for three).

And the Greeks would lend London a series of exhibitions for up to a year each of important / iconic works; for example, the finds from Vergina, the exhibition on painted sculpture with the original sculptures as well as casts, and similar material.

I'd be very interested to hear thoughts and ideas - oh, and pledges would be good too.

(* = his surname is spelled a variety of way on the BM web site, which also claimed falsely that the Greek government had never asked for a loan)

"Allianoi does not exist"

This has to be one of the strangest stories - the Turkish Environment Minister is claiming Allianoi did not exist ... I know there is at least one ancient source mentioning the town in the Roman period, and if you look back at my old posts and the article I wrote about it in Minerva, there is a heck of a lot of archaeological remains there.

The only comparison I can think of is Marathon. For years the Greeks said it was in one spot; then they decided to build an Olympic rowing lake there, and announced that it was no longer the site of the Battle of Marathon, and that the battle had taken place elsewhere.

There is one difference - Marathon had only a few archaeological remains at the site, Allianoi is a huge site with an enormous amount of well preserved ruins, many of which still have roofs.

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=saving-an-ancient-city-that-doesnt-exist-2010-09-01

http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/news-220734-100-environment-minister-takes-on-pop-star-over-dam-controversy.html

The Medici Conspiracy and David Gill's Looting Matters

I've written a couple of blog posts about Peter Watson's The Medici Conspiracy, and I'll be posting more soonish. It's a fascinating book, and since I know some of the people in it, and interned in the Antiquities department at Sotheby's in the summer of 1994, I can say that although I might quibble over minor points here and there ... it's pretty much on the money.

One of the minor characters in the book is a looter-smuggler named Nicolas Koutoulakis - he's important enough to have featured in the 'flow chart' of looting used by the tombolari supervisors (and if I'm making this sound like a corporation, that's because it was a highly organized business).

That's why I find it shocking that the Met still has an object labelled as given "in memory of Nicolas and Mireille Koutoulakis" - it's the Minoan Larnax pictured here (Met details here).

I discovered this thanks to a post on David Gill's blog Looting Matters: A Minoan larnax in New York 
I don't always agree with Gill on everything, but he's doing an amazing job following up the leads from the events covered in The Medici Conspiracy. The book I read ended in 2006 (I assumed that the paperback was updated), but Gill's blog is almost a sort of sequel or update to the book.