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Michael Press Profile picture
@MichaelDPress
Jul 8, 2021 • 8 tweets • 4 min read • Read on X
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The strangeness of this article is perfectly symbolized by what looks like a fashion photoshoot featuring a BM curators with props.
telegraph.co.uk/art/architectu…
h/t @PortantIssues
It's good that the article does not continue Simpson's insistence that looting in the Middle East mostly stopped after 2003-04.
I'm guessing the £30 million here is just a typo (as this has been repeatedly reported to be around £3 million)?
Regardless, the article makes it sounds like the scheme is purely altruistic (this has been the BM's spin of course), while ignoring the many benefits the BM has received from it, including a new excavation to contextualize its own looted artifacts.
Why is a BM curator suggesting that ISIS might have looted a Sumerian plaque when they weren't close to the area of ancient Sumer?
More sensationalizing the threat of ISIS: they were "a day's drive away" from Tello!
(In this case, that means around 300 km away at their maximum extent.)
Sadly this isn't so strange as it's all too typical: antiquities looting is bad because of TERRORISM and CRIMINAL GANGS -- but apparently not because it funds continued violence in war zones.
Overall the Telegraph article reads like promotional material for the museum -- ignoring above all the fact that the BM's opposition to antiquities looting seems inconsistent, given how much of its own collection was once obtained from looting.
hyperallergic.com/597566/the-bri…

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More from @MichaelDPress

Michael Press Profile picture
Jun 12
Not sure what Live Science is doing here but it's worth a brief look 🧵
livescience.com/archaeology/ot…
Why this story?
As far as I know, there are no other news articles on this, not even from any Israeli news outlets.
Instead, it looks like Live Science just browsed the IAA journal Atiqot for a news story
publications.iaa.org.il/atiqot/vol117/…
Why does Live Science have this headline?
A 19th-century grave was found in the Negev (Naqab) with a woman and a child. Why frame it this way? Presumably because the story isn't actually newsworthy. Image
Read 9 tweets
Michael Press Profile picture
Aug 11, 2021
The headline for this was originally "Why did the Museum of the Bible have to return 17,000 ancient artifacts?", but then the Post discovered that 1000s were actually returned by Cornell & changed it
(The url and the Twitter card reflect the original)
washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/…
Current headline:
It feels like the scandals of the last few years were a great opening for a better discussion of provenance & its importance, but I suspect many -- certainly the Washington Post -- would rather use it to mock evangelicals.
washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Read 4 tweets
Michael Press Profile picture
Jul 5, 2021
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 . . .
But in fact this appears to be a case of poorly-done OCR, as the word does occur.
We find it on (at least) one page of the text, though here it refers to ancient provenience, not to modern findspot or collection history.
Read 15 tweets
Michael Press Profile picture
Jun 28, 2021
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. Image
To be fair, that's not quite it: in the footnote, the author thanks the gallery for permission to publish and for providing photos. Image
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" Image
Read 5 tweets
Michael Press Profile picture
Apr 10, 2021
This is a really interesting review by Moses Finley of several books on archaeology, published in 1966.
Thanks @EirikWelo
nybooks.com/articles/1966/…
Among those under review is Leo Deuel's Testaments of Time (1965), which started my interest in the review.
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.
Read 10 tweets
Michael Press Profile picture
Apr 9, 2021
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
Read 15 tweets

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