The #Nok culture gave the world a glimpse of ancient Africa through their terracotta sculptures, which survived, buried in central #Nigeria, for 2,500 years. In return, we looted their sites and made a bunch of fakes, making it impossible to understand them. A thread.
Distinct and stylized, Nok sculptures came to the attention of Western art lovers at almost the same moment Nigeria banned their export. But that didn't stop the art market.
By the mid-'90s, two dealers employed 1,000 diggers to dig ancient sites, searching for Nok sculpture to sell. For more details, see: traffickingculture.org/encyclopedia/c…
If you're buying a Nok sculpture today, you can't fool yourself that it wasn't looted. Unless, of course, you've been fooled yourself, since there are lots of ridiculous fakes for sale.
Only $5k for this piece that the Barakat Gallery calls "characterful and charming" and I call "like someone dropped an Egg McMuffin."
If you want to drop $21,250 on eBay on something that's either fake or looted, well, you're in luck.
This thing comes with a lab report, so it can't be fake, right? Well, unless the lab report itself is also a forgery, which has been known to happen for Nok sculpture (e.g. nypost.com/2002/10/09/art…).
These are all available from the same eBay dealer, who is just not even trying.
The most infuriating part about the sales listings? They all talk about how mysterious and unknown Nok culture is. Why so mysterious? Because looters got to almost all of its sites before archeologists, destroying our chances to learn while filling our lust to own.
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Arguing that tales of dragons are evidence that dinosaurs lived in human times - humm. Arguing that anything Herodotus says was literal truth - nope. (Nice buff H-man, there, though.)
“by funding scientific studies on Native American human remains… federal agencies have created incentives for institutions to hold on to ancestors in ways that undermine the goals of NAGPRA…”
It’s not that they didn’t think about consulting tribes - it’s that they thought doing so was a bad idea for their research. Holy moly.
Inscriptions friends... is pecking out a circular letter form instead of carving freehand weird for ca. 530 BCE? (Context in next tweet.)
So, John Marshall buys this stele in fragments from 1902-1913: metmuseum.org/art/collection…. Marshall was offering £10 a letter for further fragments of the inscription, or £500 for the rest of it.
In 1907, here's the part of the inscription he has (left) and two more parts he's offered by a dealer in Athens (right). The new parts have the cautious circles.
The Art Institute of Chicago knows about this photograph from 1970 of its Buddha sculpture embedded in the wall of a shrine in Nepal. It knows Nepal prohibited the export of such antiquities in 1956. And yet it's still working on whether to repatriate it...
The Art Institute currently holds at least four Nepali artifacts for which there are photographs or other evidence of theft - all donated by a single collecting couple, the Alsdorfs, who previously had to return nine other stolen artworks.
Even I didn’t think it was this bad: “Reporters reviewed the [Metropolitan Museum’s] catalog and found at least 1,109 pieces previously owned by people who had been either indicted or convicted of antiquities crimes; 309 of them are on display.” nepalitimes.com/here-now/in-se…
“A look at the museum’s catalogue of more than 250 Nepali and Kashmiri antiquities, for example, found that only three have any origin records explaining how they left the regions.” 😳