Dr. Zahi Hawass, the incorrigible Grand Poobah of Egyptian Archaeology is in London this week saber rattling about getting the Rosetta Stone back. In a point/counterpoint interview on BBC radio, Dr. Hawass reminded Roy Clare (Chief Executive of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council) that a tiff with the Louvre in France led to French archaeologists being ejected from an ongoing dig in Egypt. The Louvre subsequently acquiesced to the demands of Hawass for return of five paintings that Egypt wanted repatriated. After bringing up that point, Dr. Hawass was suspiciously quick to deny that he was threatening the British Museum. While Mr. Clare argued the merit of culture and its objects as a global interest, the position of Egypt’s chief culture czar was simple, “It’s part of Egypt’s culture only.” And, they want it back.
Major artifacts like the Rosetta Stone or the Parthenon Sculptures are perhaps worth a little hostile rhetoric in the ageless battle over national symbols, but what do upcoming young nationalists cut their eye-teeth on? No aspiring young archaeologist or bureaucrat is going to get a word in edgewise in the main arena. Fortunately for them, there are lesser objects to focus on. In fact, “protecting” the most useless piece of broken pottery can turn an idealist into a zealot. A couple years ago, the Italian ministry of tourism ran an advertisement inviting tourists to visit the many archaeological sites in Italy. The ad showed a young man and woman holding a small broken piece of ancient pottery—all abeam at having found this object on the ground. The advertisement led to an uproar among archaeologists who felt it sent the wrong message. That message, presumably, was that tourists shouldn’t touch broken potsherds.
Having lived in Turkey and Greece, and traveled extensively in both countries, I can state without any doubt in my mind that there are more potsherds there than there are fish in the ocean. One can’t walk on any unpaved surface without seeing broken pottery. I’ve seen roadbeds in Turkey where the fill used to build up the road base itself was simply littered with ancient potsherds gathered and deposited by huge earth movers and crushed by a constant stream of cars, trucks and horse-carts. Some of the fragments are painted, some are incised, but God forbid any inquisitive individual should pick one up and look at it, much less put it in their pocket. The fact of the matter is that nobody in Turkey would pay the slightest attention to someone pickup up ancient potsherds, but the thought alone is enough to send some radical academics into a tizzy. It’s not the loss of context that is the issue, there isn’t any context to lose, it’s the prospect of losing complete and absolute control that raises the hackles of a cultural property nationalist.
It’s a lust for control that pits many young idealists against private collectors and the associated antiquities trade. They routinely claim that it’s only “illicit” antiquities that they oppose, but then define illicit as anything lacking their self-imposed standard of documentation. In effect, they have characterized the lion’s share of all privately owned antiquities as illicit—not through any law, nor compiled evidence, but through their myopic ideology. Consequently, while Zahi Hawass is in London charging that the Rosetta Stone was stolen from Egypt, a troop of Zahi Wannabees are busily vilifying collectors of some of the most innocuous objects ever created by man. Can it really be about context and loss of information? That’s a catchy sound bite, but looting is the smallest part of archaeological site destruction. Dams and bulldozers destroy far more archaeological material every year than the antiquities market has ever seen. Archaeologists themselves have been responsible for huge losses of data and material both during and after excavations. The challenge has never really been about context, it has always been about control. Everybody, it seems, wants to be a Zahi Hawass.
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