Loot: The Battle over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: antiquities service, zodiac ceiling, looted antiquities, British Museum, Marion True, Zahi Hawass (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. After covering Hollywood's cutting-edge directors (Rebels on the Backlot), former New York Times correspondent Waxman embarks on a grand tour of some of the world's finest museums—the Met, the Louvre, the British Museum, the Getty—and the countries from which some of their most famous antiquities were illicitly taken. Skillfully blending history and reportage, Waxman traces the stories of treasures like the Elgin Marbles, then jumps into the debate over whether they should be restored to their countries of origin. She finds no easy answers: while acknowledging the dubious means by which European and American museums acquired many antiquities, she concedes that the governments clamoring for their return don't always have adequate plans for their maintenance. (Turkey compelled the Met to hand over the famous Lydian Hoard, only to have its masterpiece stolen.) Waxman's account is animated by interviews with museum curators, accused smugglers and government officials, putting a human spin on the complex cultural politics before arriving at a middle ground that strives for international collaboration in preserving a broad, global heritage. 8-page color insert, 20 b&w photos. (Nov. 1)
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From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Roger Atwood Early this year, officials at the Metropolitan Museum of Art trussed up one of the prizes of its collection, an ancient vase known as the Euphronios krater, and sent it back to Italy. Italian authorities had presented evidence that the piece had been looted from a tomb near Rome less than a year before the Met paid $1 million for it in 1972. Faced with the prospect of a lawsuit and a ban on receiving any future loans from Italian museums, the Met, writes former Washington Post and New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman, "stalled, stonewalled, and would not be swayed -- until it was forced to do so." Seeing great institutions humbled like this might give satisfaction to some, but what is served by such returns of art? If they're meant as a statement against looting, how does shifting a pot from New York to Rome advance that interest? These are the underlying questions of Waxman's absorbing and well-researched Loot. Although her views are often unnervingly one-sided (her sympathies lean toward letting museums keep their contested holdings), she gives all actors in this bitterly antagonistic drama a hearing and writes with flair and an earnest sense of inquiry. Waxman recounts the story of Lord Elgin and his marbles and exposes lesser known but egregious cases of 19th-century pillage, such as the removal of three heads from a mural depicting the life of Egyptian pharaoh Amenophis III. Someone simply cut them from an out-of-the-way tomb in the Valley of the Kings; blank squares now indicate where the pharaoh's visages once appeared. "It is shocking. Imagine the Mona Lisa's face cut out of her canvas with a kitchen knife," writes Waxman, who was led to the scene by a guide with a flashlight. The faces are now in the Louvre, labeled simply, "From the tomb of Amenophis III" with no explanation of their pillaged past. Waxman wants the Louvre and other museums to be more upfront with the public about the unethical or illegal origin of their treasures, even if they don't return them. Pillaged artifacts become part of the landscape in their adopted country, and not always in a good way. She offers an engrossing history of the removal of ancient Egyptian obelisks to cities all over Europe, where they were erected as imperial trophies in traffic circles and plazas, including St. Peter's Square in Rome. Waxman's argument that "Western museums remain essential custodians of the past" wears thin when she conflates imperial looting of the Elgin variety with the modern phenomenon of commercial grave-robbing. They both involve antiquities, but, I found myself asking, what do they have in common? The former usually followed conquest and was seen as a matter of national aggrandizement for European powers (think of Napoleon stuffing the Louvre with Italian booty), while the latter has a straightforward profit motive and occurs in violation of well-established national and international laws that did not exist before the modern era. One can be excused, or at least explained in its historical context; the other is obliterating ancient sites right now and implicates all of us. Some big collecting museums still keep the door open to acquiring pillaged goods. The Met, as Waxman points out, "remains one of the few major museums that continues to collect antiquities that lack a clear provenance." Other institutions, including the British Museum and even the Getty, whose journey from chop shop of looted artifacts to chastised good citizen is well-told by Waxman, have stopped acquiring antiquities that lack a documented chain of ownership because that usually means they are plundered from ancient sites. Waxman also neglects to point out that the wanton trade in undocumented antiquities encourages forgery. Since there is no record of where and when looted artifacts are found, museums and the public can be duped by fakes. This is the subject of Unholy Business, Nina Burleigh's bracing account of the case of the James Ossuary, an ancient limestone box that turned up in Jerusalem in 2002 with an inscription reading "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus." It caused a global sensation and was exhibited in the Royal Ontario Museum before Israeli authorities revealed that it was a hoax. The box was real -- prominent Jews in the time of Jesus often preserved family bones in such containers -- but the inscription was a modern forgery, probably created in the same rooftop workshop in Tel Aviv that produced another momentarily famous relic now almost universally believed to be a fake: the Jehoash Tablet, which supposedly attested to the existence of the First Temple of Jerusalem. The ossuary shook the world because it would have offered the first material evidence of Jesus Christ. It posed a theological quandary for Catholics, who believe Mary was a lifelong virgin and that she could not, therefore, have borne Jesus any siblings. Some evangelicals were almost poignantly willing to believe in any artifact, no matter how suspect, that seemed to offer literal corroboration of the Bible. Burleigh skillfully navigates the theological dilemmas that attended the "discovery" of the ossuary and the forensic evidence that finally sank it. She leads readers through the murky world of Holy Land relic-looting, forgery and smuggling and delves deep into the mix of vanity and delusion that leads people to buy fakes. One collector, upon learning he had bought an expensive forgery, insisted to her that "I do have what they call a nose, a feel, whatever it is. . . . An object actually vibrates to me sometimes." As the Met found out with its krater, a beautiful object can betray even the most sensitive nose.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Times Books (October 28, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805086536
• ISBN-13: 978-0805086539
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #92,906 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Impeccably Researched Analysis of a Controversial Issue, November 18, 2008

By	S. McGee (New York, NY) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Whose art is it, anyway?

That is the question at the heart of this carefully-crafted and insightful analysis of the ongoing battle of the ownership of antiquities from Greek, Egyptian and other ancient societies. Sharon Waxman has done an admirable job of covering the key personalities and issues, never allowing herself to be distracted and accomplishing the impossible -- taking a passionate view of the importance of these objects to art and history without losing sight that their is no simple answer to that fundamental question of their ownership.

Waxman profiles both sides of the debate, the activists and government officials in countries such as Egypt, Turkey and Italy who are lobbying for the return of everything from the Elgin Marbles (hacked off the Acropolis some two centuries ago) to unique Etruscan artifacts likely looted and smuggled overseas within the last decade. There are no heroes in this saga. Museum directors continue to duck the question of how some of the objects on display ended up in their galleries and argue that their collections form part of the broader "human heritage" that only institutions in giant Western cities from New York to Berlin can adequately care for and display. On the other side are those pressing for the return of these objects so that they can be displayed as part of the heritage of the country where they were created and, millennia later, rediscovered.

But... What happens when objects are repatriated? Waxman takes the reader to the site of nearly-empty museums in Luxor, Egypt and Antalya, Turkey, filled with precious objects but devoid of local visitors. (Even the son of Zahi Hawass, Egypt's antiquities honcho and chief agitator for the return of the Rosetta Stone, among other items, is more interested in Islam and the country's more immediate and, to many, relevant history than he is in the idolatrous Pharoahs and the temples to Horus or Hathor that they left behind them.) She also tells of one Turkish archaeologist who is facing trial for the theft of priceless gold objects from the "Lydian Hoard", finally returned by New York's Met to Turkey amidst great fanfare about a decade ago. Is returning the objects to countries where they can't be protected, cared for or displayed the right strategy, especially if those objects really have no connection to the society inhabiting the country today? (Today's Turks, for instance, aren't descended from the Greek, Phrygian, Lydian, Lycian or other societies that once inhabited their nation; they arrived from further east centuries later.) But, just as the reader becomes sympathetic to the arguments of museum curators, Waxman switches gears to show the ruthlessness with which the latter built their collections and the intellectual arrogance of their arguments. Nor, as she shows in connection with the Elgin Marbles, have they alwasy cared for their objects in their care.

Ultimately, there are no easy answers and Waxman wisely avoids the trap of joining one camp or the other. In the final few pages, she advocates a new paradigm that may prove utopian but at least offers those of us who may be tempted to join the public debate a more reasonable middle way.

The only flaw in this ambitious but thorough and lively overview of the ongoing battle is Waxman's failure to address, except in passing, the role of private collectors in the antiquities trade. Public collections have gradually adopted a much more restrictive approach to purchasing antiquities that don't have a clear provenance or history, and are at least engaging in this debate with the countries of origin. But private collectors have tended to be less scrupulous and, by their nature, their activities are less visible. Waxman notes that the high prices these collectors are still willing to pay for black market objects are likely to encourage archaelogical looting; it would have been valuable and interesting to have explored this with some of these collectors or their art advisors.

Anyone interested in learning more about this looting should turn to the work co-written by Peter Watson & Cecilia TodeschiniThe Medici Conspiracy: The Illicit Journey of Looted Antiquities-- From Italy's Tomb Raiders to the World's Greatest Museums If you're more interested in the debate over how the past is represented and who owns it, The Future of the Past by Alexander Stille is excellent and beautifully written.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Balanced and Informative--and a Great Read, November 22, 2008

By	Glenn Kessler "jbaugust" (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Sharon Waxman has written a remarkable book. With skill and insight, she takes the reader inside the world's great museums and through the sordid antiquities market. She poses difficult questions and uncovers uncomfortable truths, but without rancor and with a reporter's attention to nuance. "Loot" also never lags as it hopscotches from Europe to the Middle East to the United States. I couldn't put it down--and I certainly will never look at the Louvre or the Met the same way again.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars museum issues 101, May 22, 2009

By	D. Woollard - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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I wanted to love this book but ended up merely liking it. For those without a basic knowledge of the arguments in the museum acquisition and antiquities world this is a good basic book outlining many of the key issues. Waxman is at her best when drawing character sketches. At times she seemed to be fumbling for a point to the whole book and her end conclusions don't seem to be informed much by any of her experiences. It felt like a series of newspaper pieces, well-researched, accurate but devoid of the sort of passion and intensity that keeps a book like this entertaining for the reader.