Amazing that this is the full provenance statement for a Palmyrene funerary relief in a reputable academic journal in 2014 -- around the height of the Syrian Civil War.
To be fair, that's not quite it: in the footnote, the author thanks the gallery for permission to publish and for providing photos.
Also to be fair, it's better than this article from the same journal in the following year, where all we learn of the collection history of seven Palmyrene reliefs is that they're in "a private collection in Lebanon"
In this case, though, we can identify the reliefs as belonging to Jawad Adra and the Nabu Museum in Lebanon
How does Shaked/Ford/Bhayro's 2013 publication of the Schøyen Collection Aramaic incantation bowls deal with provenance? This is an interesting case, worth looking at a bit.
From the EBSCOhost ebook, it would seem the word "provenance" doesn't occur in the book . . .
Much of the review is concerned with how archaeology is presented to the public.
Finley recognizes that, for all their flaws, 19th-century archaeologist-explorers had this down.
Has anyone heard of the book Testaments of Time by Leo Deuel? It's a popular account of manuscript hunting, first published in 1965. @EvaMroczek@LivLied
It's a broad survey of the material, what you might expect for 1965: starts with Renaissance humanists, and moves on to chapters on Tischendorf, the Cairo Geniza, Oxyrhynchus, the Dead Sea Scrolls, but also a range of other things . . .
It also includes what you imagine might have been standard attitudes in the 1960s, cheering on manuscript hunters like Tischendorf who "outwit" the "negligent but perversely possessive" and "half-literate" monks
Jerusalem Post has an interview with Eitan Klein (deputy director of IAA's theft prevention unit) about the recent announcement of Judean Desert finds.
Several things here worth attention . . . jpost.com/jerusalem-repo…
Klein repeats the claim that the trigger for the survey project came with the appearance of the "Jerusalem Papryrus" on the antiquities market -- without noting that it's likely a forgery.
Is anyone familiar with the "Bar Kochba-era parchments" that the article claims were discovered by looters in a cave in 2009?
A week after a settlement reached between Sotheby's, the Museum for Islamic Art in Jerusalem, & other parties regarding the cancelation of the museum's sale of objects, the museum's director announces he's leaving his position at the end of the month. haaretz.com/israel-news/cu…
There's no suggestion from the article that Sheiban's resignation is directly tied to the sale or its being cancelled, and his resignation letter frame things quite differently, but the article does notes that the saga "cast a pall over Sheiban’s tenure as museum director"
To be clear, these new find is *not* from Qumran -- it consists of fragments of a slightly later Bar Kokhba scroll from Wadi Murabba'at (Nahal Darga) to the south.
The find was part of the operation started in 2017 to survey the Judean Desert.
What Haaretz doesn't tell us -- it's only hinted at by the reference to the Civil Administration -- is that most of the Judean Desert, including Murabba'at, is in the West Bank.