$22,000 In Artwork Goes Missing in Mail

Broadside Online (Dane Styler)
Thanks very much to Noreen Doyle for emailing me the link to this article. Hair raising.

It’s not every day one loses twenty grand in the mail; but two weeks ago, the George Mason University police filed a late entry in their report blotter, ambiguously citing “Lost University Property” at the value of $22,000. That lost property turns out to be artwork on loan to the university from the Royal-Athena Gallery of New York.

This artwork is in fact two small artifact remnants from ancient history: an Egyptian hollow gold scarab from the 16th Dynasty, Ptolemaic period (c. 664-30 B.C.E.) appraised at $5,500, and a Coptic reticulated bone plaque of a gazelle Near Eastern in origin (c. 6-7 century C.E.) appraised at $16,500.

The artifacts are only two of an entire collection of ancient art and other artifacts from ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt and the Near East on long-term loan, collecting dust in secure storage for the last five years. Carol Mattusch, Mason’s Mathy professor of art history, explained that the previous Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences gathered the collection with the intents of creating a new antiquity museum at Mason – a plan that never came to fruition.

“We don’t have a secured gallery, or any gallery, to display these historic works, even when we have galleries showing contemporary works on campus,” Mattusch added. Instead, students were unaware of this entire history of art under their very noses, as, bit by bit, the collection dwindles. Mattusch said that sometimes the owner of the loaned artwork requests for certain items to be returned to its New York gallery. That is the case for the two missing artifacts.

The responsibility of returning the artwork falls on Mattusch. So last October she went to the UPS store on Burke Centre Parkway, near her home in Clifton, to mail the gold scarab and the gazelle plaque back to their owner – but the package never made it to New York. The only existing paper trail is that the UPS database shows that the package was initially scanned and received at the mailing store, and then shipped to its local warehouse.

See the above page for the rest of the story. There's a photograph on the page of the Coptic gazelle plaque, which is lovely.