Palestinian PM Makes Claim for Dead Sea Scrolls

The Toronto Star has a nice piece on the demand by the Palestinian Authority to cancel an exhibition of Dead Sea Scrolls.  Palestinian officials claim the objects were stolen by Israel from Palestinian territories.  It is an indication of the increasingly prominent role antiquities are playing in national politics and notions of national heritage and even past wrongdoing.  The calls share similarities with other nations who have urged repatriation of objects, from Scotland to Peru and others.  Hamdan Taha, the director-general of the archaeological department of the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, "The exhibition would entail exhibiting or displaying artifacts removed from the Palestinian territories . . .  I think it is important that Canadian institutions would be responsible and act in accordance with Canada's obligations." 

The Royal Ontario Museum will host a six-month long exhibit of the scrolls, operated in conjunction with the Israel Antiquities Authority.  The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of about 900 manuscripts, dating to 70 AD.  The caves in which the scrolls were found were located near Qumran (see map below), in what is now the Palestinian West Bank. From the piece in the Toronto Star:

Beginning in 1947, and for nearly a decade, experts from the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem, the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, and the École biblique et archéologique française excavated the caves and salvaged the scrolls, only a few of which were found whole. The rest were scattered into thousands of fragments.

Written mainly in Hebrew, and partly in Aramaic and Greek, the scrolls include about 200 copies of portions of the Jewish Bible.

At first, the scrolls were housed in the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem, which was under Jordanian control at the time.

After the 1967 Six Day War, however, Israel unilaterally absorbed the eastern sections of the city, an act most Western nations – including Canada – regard as illegal under international law. The Israelis removed the scrolls from East Jerusalem and took them to the western city, where they remain.

According to Shor at the Israel Antiquities Authority, portions of the scrolls frequently have been put on display in other countries – including the United States, Britain, Switzerland, Germany, and Australia – over the past 10 years or so.

This raises the question, should nations use these antiquities as instruments of foreign policy?  Will the end result be more difficulty in holding international loans and travelling exhibitions?



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Damage to Heritage in Gaza

Lauren Gelfond Feldinger has a report in the Art Newspaper to damage to Gaza's cultural sites:

JERUSALEM. After a 3,500-year history of invasions, the latest war on the beleaguered coastal strip of Gaza has once again put historic sites at risk.

The fragile ceasefire in force at the time of writing has allowed some information to emerge about the fate of Gaza’s cultural heritage. Gaza’s only museum, a private antiquities museum run by Gazan contractor and collector Jawdat Khoudary, was badly damaged during Israel’s 22 days of air and land strikes. The glass doors and windows have been shattered and the roof and walls have been damaged. Roman and Byzantine pottery, Islamic bronze objects and many amphorae have been destroyed, initially during shooting 20m to 200m away, and later because of nearby shelling, with one direct hit to the museum’s conference hall, Mr Khoudary said. Amphorae, clay and ceramic vessels with two looped handles, were created in Gaza and the region during the fourth to seventh centuries for holding wine, olive oil and food and trading perishable commodities.

Meanwhile, anxieties are growing about the fate of the city’s antiquities. “I am very concerned: the entire Gaza Strip is an archaeological site,” Palestinian archaeologist Professor Moain Sadeq said.

Professor Sadeq founded the Palestinian Antiquities Department of Gaza in 1994, and is currently a visiting lecturer at the University of Toronto while in contact daily with Gaza. “Historical sites and buildings in Gaza are adjacent to urban areas, so any location that was hit as a target also put the nearby historical sites and buildings in danger,” he said. Major sites where damage is expected because of heavy fighting in adjacent areas include: Tell es-Sakan, an early Bronze Age settlement that is the largest and oldest walled Canaanite city in the local region, and the oldest Egyptian fortified site outside of Egypt; Tel el-Ajull, an important middle and late Bronze period city that was an important trade hub between ancient Egypt and the Levant; and the remains of Anthedon, a Hellenist port. The Byzantine church of Jabalya was also near heavy fighting, and was the site of partial damage by Israeli tanks during an incursion in 2005. Al-Zeitoun residential quarter in Gaza’s Old City, a medieval historic district, has also been largely destroyed, Professor Sadeq added.

Archaeologists are expecting assessment of all of Gaza’s historical sites to be slow. As humanitarian assistance is the urgent priority, serious archaeological surveys of historic sites will be delayed. “I hope that Israel and the Palestinians will work to restore the sites. I am worried about Gaza sites that were excavated and are above the ground because I am sure during the military activity that some sites have been damaged,” Dr Yigal Yisrael, of the Israel Antiquities Authority Ashkelon region and Western Negev said.

Archaeology on Trial in Israel

And it is losing.  So notes Nina Burleigh in an Op-Ed in the LA Times:

Prosecutors have been hamstrung. A craftsman based in Cairo's Khan al Khalili souk told police he made some objects for the collector, but he wasn't inclined to testify and they cannot compel him to come to Israel. So prosecutors instead called a long list of archaeologists and epigraphers, experts in the minutia of ancient Christian and Jewish artifacts. These men and women, accustomed to working on dusty digs or answering questions from somnambulant students, were no match for nimble, expensive attorneys, among the best in Israel, working for the defense.

One by one, they either contradicted themselves on various scientific technicalities or had their conclusions ripped apart by the defense's expert witnesses. One veteran Israeli archaeologist, Meyer Ben Dov, was so disheartened by what was happening that he told me "archaeology is on trial" -- and it did not appear to be winning.

The case isn't over, but after the judge's comments last month, the American publisher Shanks issued a news release calling the James ossuary "vindicated," a claim religious bloggers have since disseminated worldwide.

Pictured here is the James Ossuary, the most notable object at issue in the trial.   Is it real or a modern forgery?  The Israeli Antiquities Authority thinks it is a fake. 

The difficulty in providing sufficient evidence is a foundational problem with heritage law.  The antiquities trade as it is currently structured is too focused on hiding the history of objects.  Even Lord Colin Renfrew, a passionate campaigner for a reformed antiquities trade noted recently:

I’m much in favour of collecting, so long as it doesn’t involve objects recently taken from the ground. In my opinion all too many collections are scandalous for this very reason. I don’t mind so much people buying antiquities looted a century ago, but not if the items in question entered the market post-1970 when the convention on the illegal trade in antiquities was signed.

Buying and selling established objects may still have violation national patrimony laws though.  Even collecting antiquities which surfaced pre-1970 produces powerful incentives for dealers and buyers to either fabricate a pre-1970 surface date, or even lead to very superficial investigation of an object's history.  The current legal framework does not guarantee an object's history is authentic or clean of looting, whether it occurred in 1970 or 1870. 

Burleigh is the author of the recent work "Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith, Greed and Forgery in The Holy Land."

Antiquities Looting in the West Bank

Karen Lange reports on the problem of antiquities looting in the West Bank for the December issue of National Geographic (via). Preventing looting of sites is a pressing problem everywhere, but these difficulties are more acute on the West Bank because of the ragged borders, dueling legal regimes of Israel and Palestine, and the lack of economic opportunity. Morag Kersel argues the demand for artifacts in Israel have helped fuel the demand for looting as well.

One Palestinian, Abu Mohrez, decried the damage done to Khirbet Tawas a Byzantine basilica "They wrecked the place, and it used to be beautiful." Lange reports:

With ruthless efficiency the looters dug beneath each foundation and into every well and cistern, searching for anything they could sell: Byzantine coins, clay lamps, glass bracelets. In the process they toppled columns and riddled the site with holes, erasing the outlines of walls and doorways—and the only surviving record of thousands of ancient lives.

The scene is a familiar one. Looters use backhoes, bulldozers and metal detectors to find coins and other metal objects. Graves are desecrated as well. How can these looters do such damage? One anonymous looter argues "We need to feed our families." The legal framework does not appear to be the problem. Palestinian law forbids looting, as well as the possession and trade of antiquities. As one might imagine, Israeli soldiers aren't a popular bunch in the Palestinian territories, and are unable to effectively police the ancient sites.

Once again there are a number of familiar culprits. The inability to police and guard sites, economic hardship, an antiquities trade which avoids detailed provenance, and a paucity of licitly excavated objects on the market.