Posted on: March 30, 2015 by Alexander Herman
With an end of March deadline looming, the UK government and the British Museum have at last responded to UNESCO’s request to enter into mediation with Greece regarding the future treatment of the Elgin (or Parthenon) Marbles. The request was made on 9 August 2013 at the behest of Greece (both the UK and Greece are members […]
Posted on: March 10, 2015 by Alexander Herman
Yesterday, an ‘early day motion‘ was presented before the UK Parliament by MP Andrew George calling on Britain to engage in a ‘gracious act’ and reunite the sculptures at the British Museum (aka the Elgin Marbles) with those kept in Athens’s purpose-built Acropolis Museum, ‘in the shadow of the monument to which they belong’. More specifically, the motion calls […]
Posted on: March 9, 2015 by Ruth Redmond-Cooper
There has been a slew of media coverage in the UK and elsewhere on the reported destruction by agents of the Islamic State (ISIS) of the unequalled archaeological site of Nimrud in Iraq. While many of the reliefs, wall paintings and a number of the mythical winged bull gatekeepers are kept out of harm’s way […]
Posted on: December 24, 2014 by Nina M. Neuhaus
The Swiss Customs Authorities at the Basel Airport discovered the 47cm tall statue in an inconspicuous parcel that was sent from the UK to a private individual in Switzerland. They immediately informed the Specialised Body for the International Transfer of Cultural Property at the Swiss Federal Office of Culture (‘Specialised Body’) of their discovery. The […]
Posted on: December 16, 2014 by Alexander Herman
Much has been made in the last while about the loan of the Ilissus statue from the British Museum to the Hermitage in Putin’s St Petersburg. But relatively little coverage has been given to a number of loans from 21 Greek museums for a series of shows across North America over the next year. The exhibition The Greeks […]
Posted on: December 11, 2014 by Alexander Herman
It was a front page story in The Times of London last Friday. It was on the front page of the New York Times the next day. But generally, how has the reaction been to the trustees of the British Museum loaning the statue of river god Ilissus to the Hermitage in St Petersburg? To say the least, it caught […]
Posted on: December 10, 2014 by Nina M. Neuhaus
Have you ever wondered what archaeologists think about illegal excavations and looting – and how best to tackle them? Well I did and so I asked Kathryn R. Morgan, a staff member at the University of Chicago’s Neubauer Expedition to Zincirli and the University of Pennsylvania’s Gordion project. Kathryn is a Ph.D. student at the […]
Posted on: November 19, 2014 by Alexander Herman
The US Congress will soon be entertaining a Bill, proposed last Thursday, that seeks to offer protection for endangered Syrian cultural objects and that would set up a Coordinator for International Cultural Property Protection (what American cultural heritage lawyer Rick St. Hilaire calls a cultural property protection “czar”). These are of course welcome developments. The protection […]
Posted on: November 14, 2014 by Alexander Herman
Northampton Borough Council, which had earlier this year sold at auction a rare Egyptian statue in its collection for £15.76 million, has been dealt another blow. The 4,000-year-old statue of Sekhemka, an Egyptian Old Kingdom artefact thought to represent a court official and high priest, had originally been bestowed by the Marquess of Northampton sometime […]
Posted on: November 11, 2014 by Alexander Herman
Much has been said in the media of late about the Greek claim to the Elgin Marbles. But last week came a response from the director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor. It was written up in The Times on Friday 7 November, but is sadly unavailable online to non-subsribers. In response to the claims made […]