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11 Aug, 4 tweets, 2 min read
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/…
Then again the latest WaPo opinion piece has an unexpected conclusion:

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Michael Press Profile picture
8 Jul
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)?
Read 8 tweets
Michael Press Profile picture
5 Jul
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
28 Jun
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
10 Apr
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
9 Apr
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
Michael Press Profile picture
8 Apr
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. Image
Is anyone familiar with the "Bar Kochba-era parchments" that the article claims were discovered by looters in a cave in 2009? Image
Read 14 tweets

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