Mo’ loot, mo’ troubles

Dec 13, 2007 Alun Life, The Past 2 Comments Bolton Council, Crime, David Gill, Ethics, Humour, Looting

Archae­o­porn has an entry illus­trat­ing one of the prob­lems with buy­ing illi­cit antiquit­ies. It turns out that not all crim­in­als are trust­worthy people. Take for instance the Seal of Yzbl, it’s a seal of Queen Jezebel as men­tioned in the Bible™. At least it is if you don’t look at it too closely. If you do, then all sorts of oddit­ies appear — that’s not a prob­lem it was found at… umm… oh dear.

Archae­o­porn also men­tions the Guen­nol Lion, which I haven’t because I know noth­ing about it. David Gill in con­trast knows as much about its find spot as any­one else.

David Gill has also talked about the Bolton Prin­cess recently. If you don’t know this story, Bolton Coun­cil had the oppor­tun­ity to buy a statue of the Amarna Prin­cess, a 3000+ year old statue from Egypt. There was no check on the proven­ance and the sellers wish to remain anonym­ous. This is par for the course in antiquit­ies sales so far. Noth­ing more would have been heard were it not for the fact that the same sellers tried to sell some wall reliefs to the Brit­ish Museum and some spelling mis­takes were spot­ted. An invest­ig­a­tion fol­lowed and a search revealed three more Amarna Prin­cesses which had been knocked up over a few weeks by a bloke in a shed.

It’s pos­sible the Bolton Armana Prin­cess is a fake.

David Gill has a sens­ible and grown-up reac­tion to the news. Me, I’m reminded of the K Found­a­tion and want to applaud. The case sug­gests that the sting was about art rather than money. The per­pet­rat­ors were described as liv­ing in “abject poverty.” If there were a scheme to ensure the proven­ance of arte­facts for sale then maybe this wouldn’t hap­pen. I’m sur­prised that reput­able col­lect­ors and auc­tion houses aren’t clam­our­ing for such a scheme.

— and an update before this post goes live —

I write quite a few posts in advance, and this is one of them, so I can include another Green­halgh for­gery thanks to the Cranky Pro­fessor. The Art Insti­tute of Chicago has a Green­halgh Gaugin. These things could become col­lect­ible. If you can fake proven­ances, then how many unproven­anced antiquit­ies on dis­play are fake?