Patrimony Strikes Again
Now that the Italians have managed to raid the Metropolitan Museum of Art under Mussolini's patrimony laws, who's going to be next? How about Saudi Arabia? If you think that's far-fetched, feature what happened earlier this month, when federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers leaned on a Florida man and forced him to surrender to the Saudis a trove of medieval Islamic coins he'd found in the Red Sea and saved and was preparing to preserve.
The coins, weighing a total of 132 pounds, were removed from a shipwreck in the Red Sea when the unidentified Florida man discovered them during a recreational dive. The coins most likely belonged to thirteenth century pilgrims sailing to or from Islamic holy sites on the Arabian Peninsula. ICE agents at some point received a tip that someone was asking questions on Internet message boards about how to preserve and sell such coins. Agents launched an investigation, tracking the subject on the Web before identifying themselves as law enforcement and extracting surrender of the coins under threat of legal action.
The private collector was trying to dig up information on how best to conserve his finds in preparation for finding a willing buyer. In other words, the activities of this individual illuminate that a private market for antiquities provides incentives to care for those antiquities. The big fear now shouldn't be whether other private individuals will join in the trade of antiquities such as these coins, but rather whether the government has provided a disincentive to preserve valuable objects out of fear that doing so might draw the unwanted gaze of cultural enforcers.
Why is the American government using money it extracts from American taxpayers to enforce other countries' misguided cultural patrimony laws? In this case, authorities say they were spurred into action in part by an alert the Saudis sent out over Interpol. But even absent Interpol "Red Notices," America voluntarily enforces import bans on cultural property from countries that request bilateral agreements under the Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, a treaty perpetrated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
Under the Convention, America has at various times restricted the import of Canada's Inuit cultural patrimony, Peru's pre-Columbian archaeological and ethnological material, Malian artifacts, and antiquities from Cyprus. America's import restrictions also help enforce the Mussolini-era Italian law that riled New York last month. The law allowing for import restrictions only went on the books in 1983, more than a decade after the Euphronios krater came to the Met, which is how the bowl was able to come to New York.
Yet it is not at all obvious that our government is doing anyone any favors. Some of the most important artifacts to emerge from Peru are textiles, which Peruvian museums have a decidedly mixed record of conserving properly. These columns have documented Italy's problems preserving its patrimony. And while the Floridian in the Saudi coin case might one day have sold them to a wealthy individual who could have lent them to a museum for public viewing, wherever they end up in the Kingdom now, the female half of Saudi Arabia's population won't be able to drive to see them.
"These coins are treasured artifacts that reflect the cultural heritage of humanity as well as Saudi Arabia's unique history as an ancient trade center and as the birthplace of Islam," the Saudi ambassador to America, Prince Turki al Faisal, said upon the objects' return. So much so that the Kingdom had allowed the coins to lie in the corrosive salt waters of the Red Sea for centuries. A private individual finally rescued them from the ocean floor and likely would have conserved them if the American government hadn't intervened. That somehow seems better for humanity than returning the coins to a corrupt state that hadn't even realized until recently that they existed.
