Reviewer Nick Gardner Interviews Papyrologist Roberta Mazza, Author of Stolen Fragments: Black Markets, Bad Faith, and the Illicit Trade in Ancient Artefacts
“Antiquities, including ancient manuscripts like papyri, have been systematically transferred to the West to the benefit of specific academic institutions, like libraries and museums, and the scholars who had access to them. This has been a form of injustice towards generations of people who have been deprived of their own cultural heritage.’’ –Roberta Mazza
Today’s interview offers a disheartening peek into history, though not the “story” side of how history is written and preserved in book form as we’re so used to discussing here in Foreword This Week. Instead, Roberta Mazza’s Stolen Fragments covers the seamy side of how the physical relics of history are handled. What makes her story compelling is her pedigree: she’s a professor of papyrology, a former museum curator, and a fierce defender of scholarship. In other words, she knows how ancient artifacts should and shouldn’t be treated, and she’s made it a life mission to call out the fraudsters.
Roberta talks of two camps: one that’s made up of truth-seeking historians who look at artifacts “as sources to reconstruct the past,” and another group more concerned with relics as collectors items, with or without historical authentication. This second group is made up of dealers and collectors who fancy the relics as merchandise to buy and sell. If an item has a documented history—telling where it was found, by whom, whether its purchase was legal, and if the authorities in the country of origin approved the sale—these dealers are thrilled but only because the value of the object increases dramatically. If, on the other hand, it was looted or smuggled or otherwise mishandled, they are all too happy to look the other way, make their shady cash, and then plead ignorance should they get caught.
But here’s just one of the deadly consequences of that insincere, “I know nothing, see no evil” attitude: many of the artifacts currently coming out of the Middle East were looted by the Islamic State (ISIS) and sold to fund terrorist activities.
Nick Gardner reviewed Stolen Fragments for the University Press Foresight in Foreword’s September/October issue and jumped at the opportunity to connect with Roberta for a chat. Here’s a link to the other great UPress projects from that feature; and don’t forget to sign up for your free digital subscription to the only review journal devoted to independently published books.
Roberta, thanks for being willing to answer these questions about Stolen Fragments. I certainly learned a lot from this book, not only about papyrology, but about the people who study it and both the healthy and unhealthy relationships people have with ancient texts. As someone with little-to-no prior understanding of your field of expertise, I found this book surprisingly approachable. The “jargon” is not overbearing and always explained. And you were able to stick to the story without losing focus on massive chunks of description or exposition. Can you comment on the process of writing this book for the uninitiated? What decisions did you and your editor have to make to ensure this book was approachable to such a wide readership?
I am really glad that you found the book approachable even in the sections where I explain technical issues, and what papyrologists normally do. By writing this book, I wanted to achieve two main goals. I wanted it to be a compelling read, so that readers would be hooked by the story and follow it from beginning to end, but I also wanted to convey arguments on the trade in ancient manuscripts, on the way we collect and publish them, and all the problematic aspects that the general public hardly knows. As I explain, the criminal activities that sometimes bring ancient artefacts into our libraries, museums, or even private homes will never stop unless we learn and respect the nature of such objects, their long and complex stories and fragilities.
It wasn’t easy to find a balance between these two aims—good story and cogent arguments—but I had a fantastic editor who helped me find my voice and a balance. The main narrative revolves around the creation of the Green collection and how I became entangled with it, but through it I wanted to explain why collecting antiquities—including biblical and classical manuscripts—has gone so wrong from the late Victorian period onwards. Besides the role of unscrupulous dealers, auction houses, and online platforms, I wanted to show how academics have been central in the perpetuation of unethical and even illegal sourcing of ancient manuscripts.
While this particular story focuses on the Green family, you do give the reader some explanations about why ethical treatment of these artefacts (ensuring provenance, etc.) is important. But I wonder if you could go into more detail on the ethical treatment of these artefacts? One thing you bring up briefly a few times is the treatment of the workers who unearth these artefacts. What other issues do you see in your field and how do you handle them?
The way we handle antiquities has a lot to do with values and ethics of the historical periods and societies we live in. In the course of my research, I realised that most people in Europe and North America don’t really know how public and private collections have been created. Many are still convinced that the West saved artefacts, including manuscripts, that in the hands of “the others” would have gone lost or not properly curated and understood. There is still this idea that “we” know better and have the duty and right to save antiquities for posterity. This attitude is a by-product of racial theories developed in the course of the nineteenth century, which argued that some human groups are better than others by nature, and for this reason are entitled to rule over the others.
The first generations of Victorian explorers, like Flinders Petrie, for example, were strong supporters of these theories and treated their Egyptian workforce as an indistinct mass of subalterns who needed to be kept in check. Even when they developed affection for some of their workers, it was always an asymmetric relationship where Europeans carried civilization to a mass of “savages.” Although things have certainly changed, I believe that this superiority complex, or creeping racism if you prefer, is hard to die. For instance, still to this day the International Association of Papyrologists does not recognize Egyptian Arabic as one of its congress languages; it seems a secondary issue but in fact it is not. It is a symptom of the incapacity to take responsibility for having embraced wrong ideologies that shaped our practices. When a group of us asked for this to change back in 2016, there was push back.
Another problem is the role of academic publications in the process of vetting antiquities of undocumented or even illegal artefacts. Hiding behind the excuse that “scholarship comes first,” colleagues have continued publishing unprovenanced and even illegally sourced papyri. Overall, I believe that we need to recognize the violence through which many antiquities collections have been formed and thrived, and find ways to restore justice towards the objects and the people who were unrightfully deprived of them.
I imagine it’s difficult writing a book like Stolen Fragments because, while on one hand it is meant to incriminate certain parties, you are also, I’m sure, opening yourself up to potential legal issues. Can you talk about what steps you took to ensure your own safety while writing? Did you consult lawyers? Did you leave things out? Did you have to delay publication, etc.?
I am not incriminating anyone—that is the job of the police and the legal systems we have in place. I am reporting a documented history, which is very much what I do for a living as an ancient historian; on the basis of a critical analysis of facts, I draw some conclusions on what has gone wrong and how to change things for the better—which again is what intellectuals do. Of course, I have taken some legal and other advises, like many writers normally do.
In the book I write about legal investigations, many of which have come to an end; for instance, those which led to the seizures and repatriation of hundred thousands of Iraqi cuneiform materials, and the civil cases brought by Hobby Lobby, respectively, against Christie’s for the sale of the Dream of Gilgamesh Tablet, and against Dirk Obbink for the sale of the papyri which turned out to come from the Egypt Exploration Society’s collection. While in the United Kingdom there is still an ongoing investigation on this particular theft, the United States Western District Court of Oklahoma has condemned Obbink—who failed to appear to court or defend himself—to refund the money he received for the sale of those fragments and other antiquities.
I left out those details that weren’t useful to the main narrative or were told to me in confidence. Again, I think this is pretty standard in writing this sort of story.
Writing and publishing are difficult enough, but you also had to conduct a very thorough investigation, one which put your person at risk. Can you talk about your resolve to see this story through? Was there a point where you almost gave up?
I started investigating because I was outraged. In my opinion, what was happening was first and foremost a story of power abuse. First, there were academics refusing to disclose the source of papyri they were studying and publishing, and many colleagues were excusing them simply because of the prestige of their scholarship and university affiliations. Then, there was Hobby Lobby treating the Green collection as if it was business; academics working for them signed non-disclosure agreements and I received emails from colleagues where I was basically told to stop asking questions because the Green lawyers certainly knew what they were doing.
Finally, there was the antiquities trade. The way it is regulated (well, under regulated) nationally and internationally creates the ideal situation for the black market to flourish. Asking questions to Christie’s curators or eBay sellers and employees brought me basically nowhere. My only way to contribute to solving the violence perpetrated against the objects and their rightful owners was to write about all this.
As for the threats, yes, I was worried on some occasions, but I also realised that the threats came from a bizarre crowd of not so brilliant crooks, to put it mildly. It struck me that for a long time a bunch of odd characters—including some academics—were able to get away with the handling of unprovenanced papyri and other antiquities. And many of these characters, as I document in the book, are still in business, which is scary in its own way. It means that we are not addressing the problem very effectively.
You keep quite a bit of personal distance from the narrative, especially in the first half of the book. Of course, it’s easy for a reader to search the web and find out more about you if they want. I’m wondering about this decision, though? Were there other drafts where the story revolved around your process of discovery more? Or did you always keep the focus on the crime and the criminals with little attention to the investigator herself?
I have been writing on these topics in my blog, in online magazines, and academic publications since 2014. Each one of these media requires a different voice, different tools, and languages. There were first book drafts more focused on my personal involvement in the main story of the formation of the Green collection and the thefts of papyri from Oxford. But this way of arranging the material—too much based on my own personal story—can perhaps work in my academic blog, but not in a book for a general audience. It made it very difficult for the reader to catch up with the many streams and ties of the investigation.
Therefore I decided to centre the narrative on the rise and fall of the Green collection. The editor’s suggestions in this respect were really crucial. Also, I wanted to show that while I certainly had a key role in the plot, this was very much a collective story, where other researchers, Green collection curators, journalists, and also the police of various countries had roles that I wanted to document as well.
One big takeaway from this book has to do with the relationship between modern people and our past. While your stance seeks to preserve historical artefacts and treat them ethically, thus preserving their authenticity or “truths,” others, like the Greens, seem more intent on using the “facts” for profit and to enforce their own version of history. Could you talk a bit more about the ethical treatment of papyri? What steps have been taken, should be taken to ensure that artefacts and historical objects are not only preserved correctly, but also obtained and perceived correctly. Also (and I know the book answers this to some degree) why is it important to track human history in this way?
I think that textual oriented disciplines haven’t been faithful to the artefacts they claim to care for. Papyrologists and other scholars have lived in a phantasy world where they have the conviction that publishing ancient texts or studying antiquities only has to do with reconstructing a sanitised past, and has no ties with the surrounding world. But this is hardly the case. In fact, I am convinced that the way we as a collective body of scholars have practised papyrology, and more broadly the classics, was very much aligned with politics and values of the Western governments that were occupied in the extraction of wealth from the rest of the world to their own benefit. Antiquities, including ancient manuscripts like papyri, have been systematically transferred to the West to the benefit of specific academic institutions, like libraries and museums, and the scholars who had access to them. This has been a form of injustice towards generations of people who have been deprived of their own cultural heritage.
This kind of attitude has also created long lasting threats to the objects we pretend to care for; when legislation became more tight, Western private and public collections went to the black market that sourced antiquities through looting, illegal diggings, and smuggling. Archaeological objects, and papyri fall in this category, are meaningful only if excavated properly; without their archaeological context, they lose any historical value. A papyrus with Sappho poems or a marble statue of Venus can still be beautiful testimony of the past, but without knowing from where they come from, they are just relics—we cannot understand much about the ancient people who owned them and their social environment.
By the end of Stolen Fragments, I think it’s obvious that you have a passion for the artefacts you work with and a reverence for their writers. That passion bleeds through to the point where I found myself wrapt while reading your book, a book about subjects I never imagined I would be interested in. I’d love to know what’s next for you? Another book? What kind of research?
I will go back to some basic papyrology—there are some papyri that are waiting to be published! But I am also playing with the idea of writing a book about “reparations.” There is a lot of noise about restitutions and repatriations, but I do believe that justice cannot be restored simply by giving back the objects. Reparations is a far more complex concept and endeavour, which should involve a collaboration between the perpetrators and those who have suffered not only from the loss of the artefacts, but also from the loss of the enjoyment of those artefacts. By taking control over the colonised production of knowledge and culture, colonial regimes have suppressed the possibility of alternative narratives, histories, and papyrologies, too—we tend to focus on what we have achieved, but the loss we created in the making is immense. We practise papyrology following a Western tradition rooted in the colonial imperial period, but I don’t think this is the best future path. There is a need to rethink and reshape papyrology like many other disciplines to make them more meaningful, more ethical: in short, far more interesting.
Nick Gardner
