And what's wrong with that?

Peter Tompa, a lawyer lobbying on behalf of American coin dealers, enthuses over the coin collection of Eric Newman, an elderly authority in the hobby. Apparently lamenting the old carefree days when coin collectors were largely unaware of the damage their hobby may encourage, Tompa ends with the wistful cry: "And what's wrong with that?"

Absolutely nothing wrong - coin collecting is a great hobby - so long as the collector of today can ensure that the coins he collects are not encouraging the ongoing mass destruction of archaeological evidence to provide them. I hope no sane collector would want to "gain learning about the past and appreciations of other cultures" by contributing to the obliteration of the evidence of those past cultures at the same time. A modern collector will be well aware that the destruction has increased exponentially since Newman's heyday and, spurred by his keen interest in history and his regard for the rest of society, a responsible modern collector will ensure his actions are not adding to the carnage of that fragile and finite resource.

Since Peter Tompa is a modern collector himself, I look forward to reading about his own method of ensuring that his acquisitions have not derived from recent devastation. And since he is also a lobbyist for the coin trade, no doubt he will be exhorting the dealers he represents to adopt a similar thoughtful approach - scrupulously examining the sources of their stock and keeping meticulous records of every item (perhaps along the lines of a publicly accessible registry to date-stamp them) so that other collectors can avoid buying fresh loot too.

After all, progress is not all bad. Modern technology has abetted looting but it has also increased our awareness of its appalling result. We can no longer claim the excuse of living in an isolated bubble; global information is now instantly at our fingertips. Any caring modern collector or dealer will be far more aware of the desperate need to conserve what remains of our archaeological heritage than people were a few decades ago. They can still experience the joys of collecting but they now know the dangers of their hobby and can aim to avoid them. And what's wrong with that?

Santa Maria found - but recently looted

The Independent reports that archaeologists have found what may be the remains of Christopher Columbus’s flagship the Santa Maria, wrecked off the coast of Haiti in 1492. The team, headed by Barry Clifford, have been surveying the site since 2003 but when they returned to it earlier this month, with the intention of definitively identifying a cannon and other surface artefacts that had been photographed back then, "all the key visible diagnostic objects including the cannon had been looted by illicit raiders".

If the artefacts are still around, they are likely to be in a hidden collection of bits and bobs somewhere, utterly decontextualised and unrecognised for what they really are. Worse still, the wreck has been deprived of objects that may have helped to definitively identify it. Yet "treasure hunters" are urged to carry on looting by one blogger on the warped premise that "It's your history too!".

(Image: 1892 replica)

Trip to the Horniman Museum

London is incredibly rich in museums and while tourists make a beeline to the more famous ones, some of the lesser known exhibitions get overlooked. The Horniman Museum and Gardens, founded by Frederick Horniman in 1901 and tucked away in Forest Hill, is an eccentric place, very much in the antiquarian "cabinet of curiosities" tradition. Some might call it "delightfully" eccentric though I found its unstructured Victorian eclecticism slightly giddy at times. At any rate, it certainly has a decided charm and it is well worth visiting.

Included in a large gallery with Benin bronze plaques, Haitian voodoo items and other assorted objects, are a few display cases filled with artefacts from Egypt. Ancient Egypt has never been one of my favourite interests but I took one or two photos of some of the artefacts and I am posting a tiny selection here. My apologies for my awful photography!

Crash course on flying in the face of logic

Following the serious debates about conservation issues can be a bit humdrum sometimes so now and then I take a quick glance at a certain metal detecting blog for a truly bizarre perspective. It seldom fails to disappoint and a recent post about "Treasure Hunting" (2 May 2014) was a gem of twisted logic. After the usual bitter rant against archaeologists and other people who criticise the more destructive members of his hobby, the blogger attempts to justify his cavalier attitude to archaeology by appealing to fellow detectorists with this ...

"It’s YOUR history too! More people own metal detectors than dabble in archaeology as a pastime….so don’t let the tail wag the dog!"

Hmm, that priceless thought is pretty much akin to saying ...

It’s YOUR hospital too! More people pop pills than follow medicine as a profession ... so don’t let a few doctors supervise the health service instead of thousands of patients!

Or perhaps ...

It’s YOUR atmosphere too! More people travel by air than take up aeronautical training ... so don’t let a couple of pilots fly a plane instead of the dozens of passengers!

I dare say metal detecting - if carried out responsibly and in moderation - is an enjoyable hobby. But to present it as an everyman crusade against government monopoly - and cloak it as an altruistic method of "saving history" by sheer force of numbers - is not only self-deluding, it is as warped as a crash landing.

Man vs. Bull - Trying to shed light on a Roman lamp

Scenes depicted on ancient lamps are sometimes hard to pin down. What may have been blatantly obvious to people living almost two thousand years ago may not be quite so clear to people living today. The motif on the discus of a fairly common pottery lamp made in the Roman province of North Africa (Africa Proconsularis) during the 3rd century AD is a case in point. The motif depicts a muscular man, head turned to the viewer and grappling a bull, holding one of its horns with his left hand. I was fairly confident that the scene represented Hercules and his capture of the Cretan Bull (one of his rather daunting Twelve Labours). Although I could not discern any of his attributes (club or lionskin), these are also sometimes omitted in other Roman representations of him and the composition bore a strong resemblance to ancient figures, reliefs and mosaics of the episode.

Roman ivory figure of Hercules capturing the Cretan Bull, British Museum 1814,0704.1652. (www.KornbluthPhoto.com)









Hercules (Herakles to the Greeks but since this is North Africa, his Roman name seems more appropriate) was never one of my favourite heroes - he was a bit bi-polar and had decided 'anger management' issues - but at least he only captured the bull. Another divine figure popular among 3rd-century Romans, the god Mithras, slew his bull - which I always thought was a trifle harsh.

But perhaps it isn't Hercules ...

A similar composition appears on another Roman lamp from North Africa in the Carthage National Museum, illustrated by Jean Deneauve (Lampes de Carthage, Paris 1969, pl.LXXVI, 827). Although Deneauve identifies the animal as a horse, I believe this too is actually intended as a bull. However, the man here is most definitely clothed and doesn't look at all Herculean.

Moreover, there is another (first generation?) version of the first lamp I mentioned that includes a group of objects in the upper left of the discus scene. These appear to be a rectangular shield (scutum) in front of a spear (pilum). I wonder if the motif does not depict a mythological scene at all but instead shows an arena entertainment, a bull being subdued by a venator or bestiarius.

Yet another Roman lamp from North Africa clearly depicts a venatio involving a bull.

Roman floor mosaic depicting a venatio, from Zliten, Libya, about the 2nd century AD. Note the shield in the foreground.








Any comments shedding light on these lamps would be welcome.

(With thanks to Guy Cloetens and Skander Sayadi, and to Hervé Dejean for permission to use an illustration from his Lampes Antiques à travers les Ages: Le Corpus, Editions Archeo-Numis, 2012, pl.111.)

University Challenged: What standard is Mercer setting its students?

"Hathor lamp"

On an online coin forum in September last year, someone living in Libya posted an image of a purportedly ancient pottery lamp he had been offered. The lamp was a very common and very well-known fake, depicting a face normally identified as Hathor on its upper surface and made in Egypt for the tourist market. Although the poster was dubious of the lamp's authenticity, he had noted another example described as "from the Hellenistic Ptolemaic period (300-100 BC)" on a university website and wondered if his doubts were therefore unjustified. After all, you can trust a university right?

The website belonged to Mercer University, a private institution based in Macon, Georgia, in the southern United States - so not quite Ivy League or Oxbridge but nevertheless ranked "in the top 10% of all colleges and universities in North America". While their example of a "Hathor lamp" was clearly as fake as all the others, even the best university can make a mistake - so no big deal?

Sadly, a closer look at the website quickly reveals a more worrying picture. The "Hathor lamp" is one of four lamps in an exhibition bizarrely entitled "Sex and Violence in the Ancient World: Gender, Sexuality, and Warfare from 2000 BC - 400 AD", displayed from April 2012. All four of the four lamps are not only very likely to be fakes; three of them are basic tourist-grade fakes that should not fool anyone over the age of twelve. So far, so bad.

But it gets worse. The fake "Hathor Type" lamp was also included in an earlier exhibition (named "The Divine Image in Everyday Life: Religion in the Ancient Near East", displayed from November 2010 until January 2012) along with yet two more dodgy lamps. One of them is highly questionable; the other, a childishly crude fantasy of seven wick-holes topped by a menorah, is another well-known fake, this one recognisable as likely to have come from a certain notorious dealer in New York City and if anything even more outrageous than the lamps in the later display.

But hey, it's not all bad news. The owner of the collection seems to have struck lucky with four primitive "saucer" lamps and one Roman lamp in that exhibition; they appear to be authentic. I suppose the law of averages dictates that even the hapless collector can get it right occasionally (though what the four plain lamps have to do with the "Divine Image" is beyond me). So, out of a total of eleven lamps described as ancient, five may be real, two are extremely dubious and four are definitely utter rubbish. My expertise lies in ancient lamps and I won't comment on the other bits but my confidence in all of them being as described is not high.

I accept that it would be folly to trust the authenticity of items simply because they are being exhibited in a university. A degree in History typically has no bearing whatsoever on an ability to authenticate antiquities. But in this case, I can only shake my head in disbelief at the sheer gullibility of both the collector who loaned the blatantly fake lamps and the curator who accepted the loan for the exhibitions.

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Hosting exhibitions that make Mercer University a laughing stock is one thing but the debacle also raises another question. The collector, Dr. Yulssus Lynn Holmes, who "has published numerous scholarly papers on ancient History",  describes how his collection of antiquities was acquired. After seriously beginning his own assembly about 1973, he bought someone else's "collection of several hundred pieces" to expand it in 1984. He states that "I [...] continue to buy ancient artifacts in Israel and Egypt each time I visit there. I also buy a few things off of eBay whenever I can find artifacts that I think are good and will enhance the collection."

Despite his involvement in archaeology, I cannot find even the vaguest hint in the online prefaces of the exhibitions that Dr. Holmes is concerned about conserving the archaeological record and that he has taken steps to ensure that his active collecting does not encourage the looting that destroys it. Admittedly, with his track record, he is unlikely to cause it much harm but even he must chance upon the occasional genuine item by sheer happenstance now and then. Bearing in mind the dynamic nature of the collection, it is surprising that neither Dr. Holmes nor Dr. Eric Klingelhofer, the curator, saw fit to include a prominent reassurance that the acquisition of pieces displayed in the exhibitions conformed with the ethical attitudes typically expected of a university.

Mercer University "embraces the historic Baptist principles of intellectual and religious freedom". I wonder if that freedom includes the right to misrepresent a large proportion of tourist tat as antiquities and to ignore valid concerns about the origin of those pieces which may be authentic.

Collector asks FBI for help - but why the delay?

Peter Tompa, a lawyer in Washington DC, has drawn attention to an American news story about FBI agents "with a team of about 100 people" descending on the home of Dr Donald Miller, a 91-year-old man in central Indiana, to investigate his enormous collection. The eclectic assembly of pieces included "Native American artifacts and relics as well as items from the United States, China, Haiti, Australia, Russia, New Guinea, Italy, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, Greece, Peru and possibly several other countries".

Despite huge media hype making the FBI operation sound like a raid, I gather Dr Miller willingly invited the government to help him dispose of his vast collection and repatriate relevant items since he is old, lives alone and has no heirs. Peter Tompa asks "Couldn't the matter [have] been handled far more discretely?". Well, most law enforcement agencies are not known for acting discretely. All too often, they tend to treat almost every operation like a scene out of Die Hard. However, it should be noted that much of the team consisted of scholarly "archaeologists and anthropologists" to help catalogue the items, not all iron-jawed agents toting guns. An explanation of the large number of people involved in the operation may well be that the FBI thoughtfully wanted to process the items as quickly as possible so that they would soon be out of Dr Miller's way rather than prolonging any disruption.

I feel sorry for the elderly Dr Miller - but my sympathy is mixed with a question. Why has he left all this until he is 91 years old? Collecting entails responsibility. He clearly suspected parts of his collection might be unlawful or at least unethical. If he had dealt with this himself many years ago, this current situation could have been avoided. Now it has to be dealt with at the taxpayers' expense. At this point, we can only speculate on the reasons for the delay.