http://www.centredaily.com/mld/centredaily/news/nation/14024323.htm
"Zahi Hawass, Egypt's top man in charge of antiquities, has asked the St. Louis Art Museum to return a 3,200 year-old mummy mask the museum purchased in 1998, which it believed was brought out of Egypt in 1952. Hawass insists that it was looted from storage near the archaeological site in the early 1990s. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City is reluctantly returning to Italy the so-called Euphronios krater, a Greek vessel it purchased in 1972. The vase, one of the most beautiful of its type, had been only recently dug up and spirited out of the country when acquired, a history the museum has long denied. Peru is demanding that Yale University return an entire collection of antiquities excavated at Machu Picchu in 1912 that it insists was deposited at Yale only as a loan. New York City antiquities dealer Frederick Schultz is in jail for conspiring to buy looted Egyptian antiquities. The curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, th very proper Marion True, is on trial in Italy for conspiring to acquire illegally exported classical antiquities for the museum.
What's going on is that the entire world of buying and selling antiquities has been turned upside down.
The strict standards written in 1970 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization on the illicit transfer of cultural property are being newly enforced by the countries where the objects originate. Loose rules have been set aside, and those who continue to operate by them are getting caught in a trap.
At bottom is the question: Who owns culture?"
"Zahi Hawass, Egypt's top man in charge of antiquities, has asked the St. Louis Art Museum to return a 3,200 year-old mummy mask the museum purchased in 1998, which it believed was brought out of Egypt in 1952. Hawass insists that it was looted from storage near the archaeological site in the early 1990s. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City is reluctantly returning to Italy the so-called Euphronios krater, a Greek vessel it purchased in 1972. The vase, one of the most beautiful of its type, had been only recently dug up and spirited out of the country when acquired, a history the museum has long denied. Peru is demanding that Yale University return an entire collection of antiquities excavated at Machu Picchu in 1912 that it insists was deposited at Yale only as a loan. New York City antiquities dealer Frederick Schultz is in jail for conspiring to buy looted Egyptian antiquities. The curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, th very proper Marion True, is on trial in Italy for conspiring to acquire illegally exported classical antiquities for the museum.
What's going on is that the entire world of buying and selling antiquities has been turned upside down.
The strict standards written in 1970 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization on the illicit transfer of cultural property are being newly enforced by the countries where the objects originate. Loose rules have been set aside, and those who continue to operate by them are getting caught in a trap.
At bottom is the question: Who owns culture?"
See the above article, with interviews, for the full story.
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