Destroying Ancient Artifacts for Profit Is Nothing New

this video is sponsored by squarespace so let me tell you how my last month is gone i finished some important deadlines yadda yadda promptly felt aggressively ill got some help did more work still haven't fully recovered okay caz i said to myself we might have a problem so this month's video should probably be something that's not going to aggravate your stress y'all want to see something that's probably going to really piss you off [Music] yeah so i saw that and um i feel like this is a prime time to get this topic out of my system because honestly it's been stewing for a while the destruction of antiquities for profit is nothing new and we're gonna get into that what this company called engineered labs is doing is what they call personal museums these little clear acrylic slabs that contain teeny tiny fragments of various significant historical artifacts ancient pottery like we saw in that tick tock a piece of a roof tile from hiroshima a piece of a shovel from the great depression a bit of mummy wraps incan textile fragments a woolly mammoth tusk metal from a lockheed spy plane etc etc for obvious reasons people did not respond well to the tick-tock of someone from engineered labs breaking that ceramic bowl the backlash was so swift they now have a one-star google rating from hundreds of angry onlookers the company panicked and took the tick tock down along with other videos they had showing them destroying other artifacts for these heritage museums but it was too late by that point they released a statement saying that obviously the ceramic bowl was fake and obviously they would never shatter an ancient artifact that all the fragments in their products are already shattered when it comes into their hands like forgive me for not buying that because come on how on earth do you just happen to acquire these very specific artifacts that just happen to be in a ton of fragments all exactly the right size that you need to shove into these acrylic slabs and sell for 200 bucks a pop why then would you have full size versions of these artifacts in stock if they're just replicas for you to destroy what's the point are you putting fragments of the replicas into these slabs and falsely advertising fake certificates of authenticity and all or are you really destroying historical artifacts for your products because either option is a bad look let's just give engineered labs the benefit of the doubt for a second here let's say that they do acquire these artifacts in exactly the right size teeny tiny fragments that they'd need by pure luck who then is destroying them to make them that size who destroyed those fossils who cut up the mummy wrappings who shattered the real ceramic bowl why then would you joke about it on tick tock with no disclaimer that you're not actually breaking a real artifact and where are you sourcing these artifacts from that they'd end up destroyed for your benefit these are the questions that make their it was a joke claim so hard for me to believe but engineered labs isn't the beginning nor the end of this conundrum they are very blatantly one branch of a massive tree with deep deep roots a tree of lies greed theft and destruction that goes back for centuries if you go on etsy or ebay right now it takes two seconds to find dozens upon dozens of sellers who make a living selling moderately priced ancient artifacts most often pre-columbian stonework or things like that they're intentionally vague about where it comes from i got it from a professor who founded there in the 80s i found it from a reliable vendor who sources the best antique shops in asia i got it from a private collector and if you think about it harder it becomes more and more frustrating to wonder how far back that chain goes at what point and through what means did these artifacts leave their country of origin to be sold to you for 50 on ebay and why i think to fully understand this problem we need to take a trip back in time but first let's take a minute for today's sponsor squarespace at this point you've heard me talk many times about how i've been using squarespace to host my portfolio site well here i am again to really drive the point home because squarespace has managed to accommodate every one of my site's functional and visual needs from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business or showcase your work they have an enormous amount of beautiful and easy to customize templates that are perfect for showcasing your work or getting your online shop up and running seamlessly not only can you create an intuitive digital gallery that is mobile compatible but you can also easily integrate your social media or manage ways that visitors can contact or pay you with how customizable it is it's a no-brainer to create any kind of website that you need in less than a few hours head to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com casro to save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain using my code casro thank you so much to squarespace for sponsoring this video and now let's get back to learning about the theft and destruction of ancient artifacts [Music] the history of plundering and looting is well a tale as old as time just 15 years after king tut died in 1327 bc his tomb was already alluded of the valuable gems and metals inside about two millennia later a number of bronze horses were pillaged from the san marco basilica in venice and paraded through paris by napoleon the conquering and destruction of various civilizations over time has led to innumerable cases of the remnants of those civilizations being repurposed to build the cities of their conquerors sometimes though this is definitely not an example of plundering the great structures of the world were made from the ruined remains of their own ancient history look no further for example than the vatican in rome the vatican's floors and walls are made of ancient roman stone and much much more dr christopher longhurst says that's something the versatile popes did a lot of scavenging and repurposing of material why pay for new works when you compile for it it's been recycled from the roman forum from the coliseum the reason why the coliseum is in the state it's in today is not because of the passing of time no it's because the popes use those places as quarries the marble facades and guts of the coliseum didn't just end up in the vatican they can be found spread across the city in churches as pope gregory the great set about his mission to transform the ancient temples of rome into christian churches the colosseum was being used as effectively a quarry as recently as 1703 i give the colosseum example not to imply that the romans repurposing their own history is equal to the antiquity theft from other cultures rather i want this example to give you an idea of how deeply ingrained it is in human history for people to not see history even their own as something sacred to be preserved a lot of people don't want to keep history alive because they see it as long dead they want to touch it consume it be a part of it possess it make it their own unfortunately a lot of the time the way this goes is that the history of non-white cultures is what gets pillaged of course i need to acknowledge the active role in looting that millionaires in china and japan have played especially in recent years too as well as the cultural theft that happened during the era of japanese imperialism because at the end of the day the core of this issue is about money power and control but there's a deeply historical reason why in the us canada and many european countries our museums are filled with the physical history of asian african middle eastern and south american cultures in 2004 unesco reported that more than 50 000 art objects have been smuggled out of india in the last 10 years alone and who knows how many more have been taken since other than the obvious racism behind this there's another reason why less wealthy countries are targeted by looting operations aaliyah sopa writes general poverty is another situation where the value of antiquities is exploited antiquities are heavily looted in these developing countries which are often poor and in the process of developing these countries are also known as artifact-rich or source nations when a country is barely holding itself together socially politically and economically two main conditions systematically follow first citizens are destitute and will do desperate acts to supplement meager income or in some cases to create incomes where none exist second with few resources successful law enforcement against looters and thieves is difficult to achieve it is unlikely that resources will be allocated to the patrolling of archaeological sites when killing and other more dangerous felonies are taking place within a country's borders outside of museums no one has any idea how many of these stolen artifacts are floating around the black market sitting in storage warehouses or are in private collections the disappearance of priceless artifacts is a problem many centuries long of course world war ii saw the nazis commit the greatest mass theft in history where organized teams of nazi soldiers spent the war stealing hundreds of thousands of sculptures paintings and antiquities in an attempt to make germany the world's cultural hub many of the things the nazis stole have never been seen again and to this day even when some things are relocated by the families they were stolen from it's a near impossible task to get them back these stolen artifacts had to end up somewhere and even if their new owners got them through legal means and are unaware of their dubious history the fact is the collectors simply don't want to have to give anything up outside of our hyper-consumer society today i'd say one of the eras in which this is the most poignant is the victorian era i think many of us in the history world agree that we have kind of an intense love-hate relationship with the victorians not only were the victorians responsible for some of the most intense and deeply ingrained historical misinformation that we're still unlearning today but the victorian aristocracy frequently engaged in um what i would call hobbies that surpass questionable and go straight into welcome to my twisted mind territory and i do need to emphasize here before we get into this this stuff as usual can usually be traced back to rich people getting into weird because they're rich and seemingly have nothing better to do while i may use the victorians as a general term here i'm usually not referring to the working poor and sometimes not even middle classes because usually they didn't have the time or the money to be pulling this crap time is a flat circle anyway you may have seen an uptick in the last year of people online leaving comments on anything involving the victorian history saying something like yeah well the victorians ate mummies so unfortunately yes a number of rich victorians were eating mummies to understand why we need to talk about egyptamania jay greenfield writes in the return of cultural treasures the 17th and 18th centuries bore witness to the zenith of european passion for collecting antiquities the extension of colonial empires the activities of travelers and traders and the growth of a class of wealthy private collectors made it possible to amass an astonishing quantity of objects from all over the world while the victorians increasingly got extremely into collecting stuff and things and of course the most valuable things came from other cultures which they could easily take advantage of as war and imperialism ravaged countries overseas in south and middle america north africa west asia etc making it incredibly easy to smuggle things out the issue is even many museums in the victorian era and earlier were often not great at keeping a good clear record on their acquisitions so at this point it's nearly impossible to look at long-held antiquities and collections both private and institutional and be able to figure out if they were looted or not this became an increasingly difficult problem in the late victorian years when egypt and its history captured the western world's imagination egyptian mummies were being imported to europe to be used as medicine as early as the medieval era in 1586 a merchant named john sanderson smuggled over 600 pounds of mummies into the continent the early 19th century saw the napoleonic invasion of egypt which set the groundwork for the many many excavations of egyptian tombs and other archaeologically significant locations to come the more ancient egypt was unearthed the more interested europeans largely the british and french became mummies in general were one of the number one topics of fascination for the victorian public as they were displayed in museums for all to see and even touch it's no wonder why people are so fascinated with mummies they are the one thing that is both human and an ancient artifact mummies make people of the past tangibly real to us in the most visceral possible way they give us a window into history in a way that no inanimate object could possibly do the victorian writer hezekiah butterworth mused as we gazed upon these mummies and the relics of egypt's storied past and faded glory the bible stories that we had learned in boyhood seemed to pass almost like dimly remembered scenes before our mind we seemed nearer to jacob to joseph to moses and aaron than ever before to touch a mummy constance classen describes is to seemingly destroy time but this doesn't mean that people weren't also disturbed by them mummy horror began to crop up in increasing numbers as the century drew on such as the mummy by jane webb in 1828 the reanimated mummy and its curses have been a popular topic in science fiction and horror ever since driven by the perception that the ancient egyptians were so carefully mummifying bodies intending them to rise again from the dead someday a lot of the time these stories placed ancient egyptians in a reverse colonialist role in a way conquering the british instead of the other way around in 1884 grant allen's my new year's eve among the mummies was the story of a man who steps into the world of pharaohs where the mummies in a pyramid have come alive he is nearly seduced by an egyptian princess who tries to convince him to become a mummy himself before he is eventually rescued in 1894 arthur conan doyle's the ring of thoth told of a mummy and a louvre museum attendant who died together in an embrace and extremely on the nose as usual friend of the channel bram stoker wrote the jewel of the seven stars in 1903 about an english woman who was possessed by the spirit of a mummified ancient egyptian queen intent on rebuilding her empire ugh those mischievous ancient egyptian royals always possessing people just like in the present day as we'll discuss in a minute poor egyptians during the victorian era often had few ways to make money outside of selling their history to british tourists europeans in general traveling to egypt were confronted at every turn by locals trying to sell them looted artifacts and yes mummies themselves often just parts of mummies dismembered or cut up in order to maximize profit sound familiar many of the tourists recalling these experiences were disturbed or disgusted but in defense of the locals here the tourists were the reason the demand for these things was even there as england effectively tore egypt apart for all it was worth from 1882 to 1952.

is it any wonder why the locals would have assumed this is what they wanted when oftentimes it was constance classen writes one victorian traveler wrote that it was disgusting to see antiquities hunters tearing up the body of some poor old egyptian for a few worthless amulets why should not these old egyptians have been suffered to lie in peace did they not silently appeal to our honor and beg us to leave them in their chosen sepulchers the mummy which seemed so powerful when enveloped in legends and showcased in a museum appeared abjectly powerless when broke into pieces and scattered over the sands tourists could be just as cavalier in their treatment of mummies as collectors john briggs wrote that when he found a deep hole in a mummy burial chamber i looked around for something to throw down to try the depth by sound and seeing nothing but the remains of the dead i stuck my candle in a niche of the limestone wall and raising a mummy hurled it down the pit there was a short pause then thud it fell with a distinct hollow sound at a great depth the foreignness of mummies and their implicit status within the west as trophies of colonialism no doubt made it easier for westerners to treat them so casually it's hard to imagine john briggs duplicating his actions back in england and using a skull from a local cemetery to sound the depth of a church well in any case many victorians weren't disgusted and in fact sought out mummies for various purposes some travelers in egypt even used mummies or their coffins as firewood in their camps people used pulverized mummies to make medicinal pastes or ate them for various ailments sometimes mummies were imported to england for use as crop fertilizer earlier around the 16th century mummies began to be used to make a paint called mummy brown who knows when you look at a painting in a museum the ground up remains of an ancient egyptian body might be there on the canvas it was a favorite paint of the pre-raphaelites in particular mummy brown only stopped being produced in the 1900s because there were so few mummies left we literally ran out of mummies rich victorians eating mummies didn't come out of nowhere there is a long history of the body as medicine all around the world after 1492 europeans became morbidly fascinated with reports of cannibals in the americas and over time cannibalism became people's favorite topic of disgust ironically their vitriol towards these cannibals whether they were real or not was hypocritical given the fact that europeans had been using various elements of the human body for medicinal consumption for decades at least in the medieval era distilled human bone was used as an epilepsy treatment and distilled blood of healthy young men was sometimes used as a tonic the word mummy itself originally meant medicine as egyptian mummy started to be used to treat ailments too but the word applied in a medicinal context to all corpses to be used as medicine some fresh some not followers of the paracelsian school of medical thought were dedicated to the idea of corpse medicine and they grew in influence throughout the 1600s in the winter of 1668-69 the traveler edward brown saw a man publicly executed in vienna he wrote as soon as his head fell to the ground while the body was in the chair a man ran speedily with a pot in his hand and filling it with the blood yet spouting out of his neck he presently drank it off and ran away meanwhile in denmark famous author hans christian anderson recalled a pitiful poor person made to drink by his superstitious parents a cup of the blood of an executed person in an attempt to cure him from epilepsy as you can tell from the tone of these quotes corpse medicine wasn't a universal belief but rather a common superstitious one so it's not fair to peg it on every historical european a lot of them were rightly disgusted by it ridiculing all historical europeans for this stuff is kind of like if in a couple hundred years from now people looked back on us during the covet pandemic and were like can you believe all americans were using horse parasite medicine to treat kovid what idiots like damn some of us yes all of us absolutely not there are stupid and gullible people in every era at the same time let's give some more context to why european christians would have fallen for the idea of the corpse as medicine think about it in a deeply deeply religious christian society every week at church people were consuming the body of christ the eucharist this too would have been seen as a form of corpse medicine consume christ's flesh and your soul is cured so it's not a far leap for people back then to think surely then a physical body can cure my physical problems the body in death means nothing their soul is in heaven it's saved the person they were no longer matters what issue is it then to make use of the soulless thing left behind when the soul was all that mattered especially when the corpse was that of a felon or a convict it's just a completely different realm of thought but more often than not the corpse medicine was done by the wealthy at the expense of the poor richard sugg writes marcilio ficino was one of the most highly respected figures of renaissance europe in the 1490s facino suggested that the age could rejuvenate themselves if they would suck the blood of an adolescent who was clean happy temperate and whose blood was excellent but perhaps a little excessive facino also makes it quite clear that blood was indeed used as a medicine by good doctors at just this time if you chance upon the word vampire in a non-fictional text of the victorian period there is a good chance that it will refer to some kind of allegedly oppressive person system or nation it seems however that in the early modern period there may well have been real vampires rich elderly men who sat in velvet chairs their mouths clamped to the arm of some living and impoverished donor the exploitation of human life rarely gets more direct than this people eventually stopped with the medicinal cannibalism as medical advancements grew and grew and medicine became a markedly less religious affair but the obsession with egyptology never really went away i mean i get it i still love yu-gi-oh and i had this book as a kid and damn it i enjoy the mummy but probably because of rachel weiss very gorgeous to me there's no question that the fixation on ancient egypt and the colonialist roots of egypt mania is a deeply complicated issue it goes without saying that it is an unspeakable tragedy that egypt's ancient treasures and mummified dead were so brutally looted destroyed and scattered across the rest of the world and in the turn of the century the more egypt's historical riches were exported the stronger its grip on the european imagination was coming to an explosive head in the 20s when pseudo-egyptian aesthetics dominated fashion and pop culture everyone wanted a piece of that history against the wishes of egyptians themselves who often had no choice but to go along with or even enable the pilfering of their culture so what do we do now when egyptians themselves want to take the unearthing of their history into their own hands [Music] in 2020 a video of an egyptian mummy sarcophagus being opened by a team of archaeologists in sakata went viral and well you could say the internet was pissed because this incident was coming on the coattails of a number of other antiquities scandals and online discussions about the white pillaging of non-white cultural history people's first instinct was to believe that this was the same but in truth this excavation wasn't carried out by foreign white archaeologists looking to exploit egypt's dead it was run and operated by egypt's supreme council of antiquities and a team of egyptian archaeologists led by mustafa wazri significantly there's an obvious reason why egypt chose to publicize the findings at cicada so dramatically this was november of 2020 when the early part of the coveted pandemic had taken a metaphoric sledgehammer to egypt's tourism industry and whether we like it or not egypt's economy still depends very heavily on tourism hinged on the historical aftermath of egypt mania it is completely understandable why the internet's first reaction to the opening of the sarcophagus was to assume that white archaeologists with dubious intent were doing it because well that's who was doing it for many many decades but while understandable the backlash from the internet still echoed ironically dehumanizing ideas left over in our culture from egyptimania in particular the idea that opening this sarcophagi will unleash the mummy's curse anyone who's ever ridden the indiana jones wait no that was right i was right anyone who's ever ridden the indiana jones why is it so wrong to me indiana jones anyone who's ever ridden the indiana jones ride at disneyland has gotten a pretty prime example of how standardized the mummy's cursed rope has become from the mummy to night at the museum to goosebumps to tuttenstein to yu-gi-oh to the other mummy to scooby-doo to under wraps to literally any random documentary about ancient egypt and the numbers are nine and nine is also the number of the planet mars did we come from mars or was mars a stopping place or was this a symbol that we were just arriving at the ability to get to mars mummies and all of ancient egypt for that matter cannot exist on their own in any mainstream discussion they always come coupled with this idea that egypt's dead are inherently supernatural and though often the mummy's curse is portrayed as a punishment for overzealous and disrespectful white archaeologists or travelers it still simultaneously paints them in an antagonistic light however disrespectful our protagonists were to the wishes of the supernatural dead there still are protagonists and the dead are still scary and must be put in their place though in non-fictional discussions people frequently use the curses of the dead are gonna get you for being stupid enough to open that coffin up as a well-intentioned way of slamming entitled researchers it's also often an outdated way of looking at the issue that accidentally falls into the trap of painting non-white cultures as not the unique and complex systems that they are or were but spooky ooky paranormal things that definitely will curse you which in a way serves to dehumanize and demonize them these mummies weren't omniscient immortal ghost wizards they were regular people and i really do think that we can have meaningful discussions about ancient egyptian religious and mystical beliefs and practices without falling into these pitfalls sure you could say maybe those archaeologists were egyptian but they should have just left the dead to rest why do we need to dig up these treasures well if not them then who at what point does the culture start and stop having a sag and what they can do with their own physical history the western world already gutted egypt's dead for all their worth are egyptians themselves not allowed to take their history into their own hands you could argue about the intentions of the supreme council of antiquities or whether or not these archaeology teams actually reflect the wants of the regular egyptian citizens the tragic issue is as nice as it would be to believe that if we purposely don't touch these treasures they'll rest in peace forever that's just not the case because no matter what culture we're discussing people know they're there and if anyone knows where they are they can be exploited to fall into the hands of the rich and disappear forever it needs to be acknowledged that oftentimes local people can be active participants in the looting of their own cultural artifacts because they desperately need the money aaliyah sopa continues the process of looting antiquities is socially organized and requires a multi-layered network of diggers middlemen and dealers the actual taking of antiquities is often carried out by local diggers referred to as either treasure hunters or grave robbers the treasure hunters and grave robbers view looting as a way to supplement their inadequate incomes earned from their legitimate jobs and legal jobs the challenge to these individuals is locating the antiquities but over time these looters develop tremendous knowledge of where to locate and how to value artifacts once they have found the artifacts it is relatively easy to obtain them as archaeological sites are often ill-protected or unknown to those outside of archaeological circles ultimately these individuals will sell their fines to a middleman in hopes of liquidation the middleman in turn sells the artifacts to either local or foreign dealers a significant portion of the looted goods are smuggled out of the country via planes trains automobiles and boats and into art-collecting countries such as the united states switzerland germany france japan and hong kong making illicit antiquities trade truly international in nature in fact smugglers are said to come from all walks of life but are oftentimes journalists art brokers and even diplomats who take advantage of the immunity from of search given to diplomatic bags as expected this opens up yet another pandora's box of problems and questions who owns the history of the dead should it by right be entrusted only to those who have the means to preserve it when a random person finds an artifact in the ground who does it belong to the government or the finder after all that artifact is the cultural history of a people and what is a country but its people you may be wondering at this point what the laws say about this issue since at least the mid-1400s countries have been putting laws on the books detailing what should be done with excavated artifacts but these laws are always notoriously hard to enforce a lot of the time looters will first deface an artifact in order to make it unrecognizable to law enforcement frequently artifacts are damaged anyways during the act of looting itself because the looters are in a hurry it's nice to think that antiquities are safest in the hands of scholars today researchers and archaeologists have extremely strict protocols and have worked very hard to re-establish public trust in the archaeological process before i get into this section i just want to say that i have a lot of respect for the work archaeologists and museum professionals do today archaeologists are extremely outspoken on treating historical sites and artifacts as well as their people with respect it's not perfect sure but the field today is a world away from what it used to be but of course there are exceptions for example the building of the wall separating israel from palestine's west bank has in very recent years caused damage to palestinian archaeological sites oftentimes the proper excavation of these sites was forced to be done hastily or improperly in order to get it done before the wall's construction or the wall itself was rerouted to encompass these sites on the israeli side as of the late 2000s over 2 800 sites were negatively affected by the separation wall the relationship between locals and archaeologists here has a similar history to other swana regions in the 1950s american archaeologist james pritchard excavated the palestinian historical village of gibeon an excavator from algeb recalled this man excavated the village at the end of the 50s he came three or five months not the whole year he would come in june or july and stay until october and then he would disappear together with his group in the winter when the weather gets cold the local people who worked with him would start digging but not in daylight just at night the people of the village would object to that because diggers were destroying the land but pritchard would encourage those people and give them money for their fines later on those people started working for themselves pritchard was buying their finds through a middleman from the area of southern hebron this man would store all the finds in his home until pritchard came back and pritchard would take all the objects and pay him any money he asks for no questions asked other people were also selling him objects and when he was not around they were selling them to souvenir shops in jerusalem stories like this are common reasons why so many locals turn to digging for artifacts themselves if we don't do it foreigners will and if anyone should be profiting from our history shouldn't it be us it's an incredibly complicated problem nowadays archaeology is largely focused on contextual data how are these objects found where are they in the site and around what other objects what can their location and condition tell us about what they meant people or were used for this cannot be said for many historical archaeologists who were largely focused on collecting treasures often with grave consequences heinrich schleiman an amateur archaeologist who worked in the late victorian era is possibly one of the most notorious examples of archaeology gone wrong in the words of spencer daniel heinrich schleman was a lying cheating grifting thieving charlatan and overall scumbag who only became famous because he was extremely rich and highly skilled in the art of lying to make himself seem more impressive than he really was i couldn't have said it better myself and here's why schleiman grew up dreaming of discovering the ancient city of troy made famous in homer's the iliad many people outside of greece believed that it was an entirely fictional city but truthfully locals in the surrounding area in greece always kind of knew where it was under what was then called hisarlik they were really chatty about it too as early as 1801 the english traveler edward daniel clark wrote that he had visited the ruins of troy at his sarlic but according to schleiman's romanticized story he told he actually followed homer's description of the land and was able to locate it for the very first time thus proving everyone wrong that's right schleiman was the only one who found it first and thus the trojan war really happened and we should all be thanking him except he's a dirty liar so all of that is throughout the mid-1800s various people including john brunton and frank calvert began excavating parts of isarlak on their own unearthing loads of ancient greek artifacts they were thoroughly convinced it was troy but didn't have the budget to do a full investigation this was the one advantage that schleiman had over everyone else he had a lot of money the thing is though schleiman believed that troy was actually at panarbasha until he met frank calvare and frank was like no dude troy's over there i've been excavating it this whole time and schleiman was like whoa look everybody i just discovered troy by myself so schleiman started woeing and wailing about how he had finally proved all those mean non-believer scholars wrong and troy is actually real thanks to him and other scholars were like me we already kind of suspected that but okay so schleiman and his fat wallet got to work fully excavating troy unfortunately because he was a who was obsessed with homer he ended up destroying most of it he dug a massive trench through the city and obliterated all of the upper layers of the city with dynamite calvaire was deeply upset by this and published a huge call-out article exposing schleiman to try and get everyone to cancel him but it was too late and all that destruction was truly misguided too he did it because all he cared about was locating homer's troy in the deeper layers of the city uv andreas writes h schleiman who discovered troy in 1870 was mistaken in assuming that homer's troy was the settlement second from the bottom of the seven occupations discovered at the same site in fact it has now been established that troy ii belongs to the second half of the third millennium bc that is it was occupied almost a thousand years before the trojan war troy 7a was ignored by schleiman even worse the relatively well-preserved stone walls of troy 7a were demolished to construct barracks for the workers hired by schleiman he even failed to sketch them thus schleiman succeeded in completing agamemnon's work by destroying troy and not leaving a trace the alleged backwardness of archaeological science of the time is a poor excuse in this case because archaeology had by then accumulated more than one century of experience the devastation doesn't end here having thoroughly destroyed troy schleiman then proceeded to loot it of its valuables because he continually lied about where he located various artifacts we will never truly know who they belong to or any other contextual information he then smuggled the treasure out of the ottoman empire with his wife sophia who would go on to personally wear the jewelry that they dubbed the jewels of helen not narcissistic in the slightest schleiman would continue to destroy ancient artifacts and structures in greece by ordering the destruction of the medieval frankish tower on the acropolis because it wasn't from classical antiquity against the wishes of both the greek government and the public another case involves my mortal nemesis henri lut a french explorer and ethnographer float led load led led through the mid-century lot led numerous expeditions through the sahara desert in algeria funded by the paris musee de lome which he was able to do because algeria was occupied by the french until 1962. lot and his team located over 800 rock paintings in the desert in the book he wrote on his findings lot publicized his stupid belief that these rock paintings were depicting extraterrestrials from outer space effectively beginning the modern trend of believing that ancient aliens are responsible for all of the cool things that ancient people of color did outside of the irreparable damage that loot's shitty hypothesis did to the public ideas about the ancient world he also did unbelievable physical damage too jeremy keenan writes he likened the local people the tuareg who made many of his discoveries to wolves and living by the laws of the jungle significantly he made no reference in his discovery claims to yolanda shooti the swiss ethnologist whose work preceded his own worse still he undertook what might be regarded today as the systematic vandalism of the sites not only by liberally washing the paintings to restore their color but by collecting and removing copious quantities of material artifacts from the area a very key aside here is that schleiman was not a professional archaeologist and the damage that loot caused is widely recognized today but while today we don't usually need to worry about narcissistic scholars and archaeologists obliterating ancient ruins for no reason various governments and militaries are doing that on their own just fine it's unfortunately true that oftentimes some scholars may indirectly play a part in looting systems whether they're aware of it or not alright let's talk about hobby lobby [Music] these are some of the 5500 iraqi artifacts that oklahoma-based hobby lobby says it bought to demonstrate its passion for the bible and steve green acknowledges quote regrettable mistakes that he blames on inexperience so yeah as most of you can probably recall craft store giant hobby lobby was involved in an early 2010s scandal regarding the purchase of thousands of antiquities that were smuggled out of iraq through israel and the united arab emirates in order to supply the inventory of the then unopened museum of the bible in washington d.c iraq tragically is no stranger to the widespread pillaging of its historical artifacts as we've seen war-torn and destabilized and poor countries are the ones most vulnerable to being looted by people from the very countries responsible for their suffering edak was already a target before but as soon as the u.s invaded iraq following 911 it created a hurricane of looting and pillaging supplying the black market with antiquities especially to christian collectors looking to hoard what they believe to be bible-related history from the holy land this is exactly what hobby lobby was looking to do hobby lobby is owned by steve green of the green family who are extremely devout evangelical christians you may recall the time in 2014 when they went to the supreme court to contest the affordable care act's requirement that employer health insurance covers birth control so yeah you know who to thank for that in 2010 steve green traveled to the uae to look over and purchase more than 5 000 iraqi artifacts which were spread on the floor arranged in layers on a coffee table and packed loosely in cardboard boxes in many instances with little to no protective material between them hobby lobby wired 1.6 million dollars to seven different bank accounts associated with five different people to pay for the items the artifacts were shipped to the united states in multiple packages falsely labeled tiles sample they were also sent to multiple locations as the complaint notes the use of multiple shipping addresses for a single recipient is consistent with methods used by cultural property smugglers to avoid scrutiny by customs on customs forms the uae dealer supplied false invoices that substantially undervalued the pieces presumably as a way to avoid customs inspection hobby lobby defended themselves saying that it was new to the world of acquiring these items and did not fully appreciate the complexities of the acquisitions process to put it bluntly the greens didn't care about how they acquired the artifacts they didn't even fully care much about the condition their claim to ignorance isn't even true in 2010 they sought out paddy gerstenblith to give them expert counsel on cultural property law and then deliberately ignored her a lot of it was about quantity and authenticity because that's all they needed to stock the museum of the bible which at the time was still being developed the u.s department of justice fined hobby lobby 3 million dollars and forced them to give up about 3594 artifacts this may seem like they got put in their place but in actuality this punishment is more akin to a gentle stop that and a tap on the wrist with a soft feather the green's wealth is wholly unaffected and they still have more than 40 000 artifacts in their collection all this did was clear the path for them to open the museum of the bible uninterrupted and it did it opened in november of 2017 but has caused smuggling controversy as recently as last year when they were forced to return the gilgamesh dream tablet back to iraq when it was discovered to have been illegally smuggled out of the country with a forged letter of legality the same year the greens also had to return to iraq over 8 000 other looted artifacts and 5 000 to egypt as well proving that they haven't learned their lesson because they already knew the lesson and frankly just don't give a about it if i covered every theft and return incident these people have gotten into in the last 10 years alone we'd be here all goddamn day the theft and smuggling of historical heritage is a very complicated system as we discussed earlier so complicated in fact that it's easy for scholars and good intentioned researchers to get caught up in the web just by trying to do the very important work of interpreting and uncovering the history behind these valuable items eagerness to learn what we still can from dubiously sourced antiquities often leads scholars to authenticate stolen pieces thus legitimizing them and then driving up their price exponentially which instigates more looting thus destroying more history lather rinse repeat our knee-jerk reaction may be to lay blame then on scholars and museums but in many cases no one has any idea that they're dealing with looted goods because the market has gotten so good at forging extremely legitimate looking papers it's a truly unfortunate situation for most people involved with no easy answers michael press writes we've all experienced a loss here because people like green are willing to buy these things the rest of us lose a massive amount of interesting information about the ancient past these tablets have no context were they bits and pieces looted from many sites were they all one library did the looters trash crumbly tablets that weren't pretty enough for the market but in the hands of archaeologists and epigraphers could have told us marvelous and groundbreaking things what else was with the tablets we don't get to know because a rich guy felt his desires were more important than history and heritage at the end of the day of course we all lose valuable history that can never be found again but more importantly the loss is so much more painful and deep for the people from the places these artifacts are from looting artifacts specifically steals away the irreplaceable history of people from edoc from egypt from south america from palestine from any of these places that are hemorrhaging history in a very physical sense every day i know some of you have already gone down to the commons to angrily type something like who cares it's just stuff why should we give a about some old dusty objects all of us are suffering every day for more pressing issues who cares if some dumb millionaires are buying antiquities well of course i'll give you my real answer but if you really feel that way i don't know if anything i say can reach you if you don't care that's okay maybe history doesn't mean much to you in which case i don't know why you're here on my channel but logical reasons aside which are fairly obvious isn't the pain of the people whose cultures are being stolen from enough is it not enough that it hurts people to in a very material way lose their past their ancestry that's something that i can understand on a very personal level with my own culture during the showa and the issue with stealing antiquities is you can never get the context of its discovery location back when something is stolen it starts a war of ownership that never needed to happen if not for someone's greed it hurts in already hurting people so how much of their pain is enough for you to care humans just love to collect stuff we love having fun stuff and things and we love holding on to them because we attach sentimental value to them like a dragon sitting on hordes of golden jewels for instance i have a shelf of little guys and i know you're gonna ask for a tour so let's take a sec to tour my shelf of little guys so this is my shelf of little guys let's start over here this is an owl that my friend duna brought back to me this is um just some old man i've named him earl hi earl uh that's pom pom point this is a little wood block that looks like my dog roxy this is a little mouse that i got from an estate sale when my neighbor died moomin mama over here tiny clay figurine of my webcomics antagonist you this is a little bunny i love him not sure what his deal is he's a little suspicious but don't worry about it a little wooden golden retriever who looks like my dog luna i don't know i got this guy from world market it's a little um mouse based on the ones from the hilda cartoon made by my friend yuna two more felt mice this is mouse frodo and mouse gandalf and these two are the newest members to the shelf they were sent to me by a subscriber named audrey thank you so much audrey and yeah my collection of little guys when does it stop being okay to collect things i would say damn use common sense i feel like it's pretty obvious but apparently not because here on the internet we've seen more than our fair share of people with collections that leave the funky and unique category and have drifted into something a lot more morally dubious if not completely deranged let's return to the world of tick-tock for a second and bring our old friend tumblr into the ring as well if you're tuned in to nerdy internet spaces you might remember a fascinating incident that happened on tumblr in 2015 that is frequently dubbed bonghazi that december a call-out post by tumblr user pastel provere surfaced accusing user little monster of stealing human remains from louisiana graveyards little monster aka heathen aka ender darling had posted to a facebook group called the queer witch collective group talking about how they had collected washed up human bones from a graveyard in new orleans after backlash on tumblr started to surface darling fought back accusing those upset of racism because they offered to donate the bones to other people in a safe space for poc witches darling wrote i was walking into the graveyard like i usually do once a week because it's in disrepair and i try to do what i can with weeding and offerings and i witnessed an old man digging with a shovel and a backhoe tearing into old plots you want to threaten me yet don't actually sit to rationally think about how inground cemeteries actually continue to be able to have bodies buried there i made a quick decision when i watched a few bones tumble from the dirt and into the street i picked them up and went through the graveyard and picked up the ones i saw on my path knowing that they were either gonna be crushed or swept away and i'm sorry but for me a spiritual person who works with death seeing a machine tear into graves like that seemed a lot less respectful to the dead you all are so concerned about than me picking them up and saving them i did not dig up anything here's the thing you bunch of magic is dark magic is bloody magic is scary magic isn't just white light fairy dust bowls of honey on your damn altar instead of being angry at the frat parties that actually break into cemeteries and cause damage for your stupid college parties you want to be angry at the kid who literally picked up bones from the ground to save them from getting swept away so he's just the most tumblr sounding post i've ever heard now here's the thing i was lurking on witchcraft tumblr in 2015 so i saw this whole debacle unfold firsthand for what it's worth i left witch blur because of the rampant anti-semitism and it looks like many of those people have now migrated to tick-tock and have gotten even worse anyway darling was not the only person on which blur who considered themselves to be a sort of benevolent scavenger and it was incredibly common for people to be collecting all sorts of random things for use in their practice if there's one thing which is love it's hoarding junk especially glass bottles in any case it usually wasn't human bones animal bones sure and you can argue about the ethics of that too but not human bones so this caused a pretty big stir in the community and people began to argue about when scavenging is or isn't okay people argued people had a good laugh at darling suspense and people moved on except history always repeats itself and in 2021 tick tock had a bone collecting controversy of its own tick-tock user johns bones aka john ferry built a large following on his bone expertise he had a room completely filled with bones most of which being human bones including a um spine wall fairy said and in the u.s

there's no federal regulation against the ownership sale or possession of human osteology so it's completely legal as it turns out ferry had a company called john's bones which sold and distributed bones to osteologists and medical institutions he admitted that most of the remains he sold were sourced from india china and russia in terms of where the bones come from they typically came from china russia or india india being one of the largest suppliers and were most likely very poor people he was unable to adequately prove that the bones were sourced ethically in any situation where the poor dead are involved the answer is probably no india banned the export of human remains in 1986 but the black market there still thrives as grave robbers dig up dead poor people to sell up until 2016 you could buy human remains on ebay it goes without saying that the users of tick tock were a little bit pissed now i know what you're probably thinking caz what the do the social media bone clowns have to do with antiquities theft i'm connecting the dots okay i'm connecting the dots my point is people love hoarding and collecting even when it's bad even when it hurts people because they might think that they're justifiably not hurting anybody these are human bones sure but this person is long gone they're dead what difference does it make if i have them i'm not like the rich victorians and their mummies or the renaissance europeans and their corpse medicine i'm not eating the bodies i'm respectfully holding on to them i do believe that ender darling didn't have bad intentions when they collected those bones they used bones in their practice and they allegedly saw workers in the graveyard apparently destroying some graves and the graveyards are poorly cared for and flooding washes the bones up all the time what difference does it make if darling takes them well the issue is these graveyards are majority non-white graveyards those are the bones of people of color they could have done any number of other things that would have at least been respectful but the fact is darling took those bones because they wanted them the same reason why john ferry didn't just have a morally dubious bones company he had a bone's room they like bones they saw them they wanted them they got them and people's outrage at the bone collecting comes from a deeply personal space that is the same part of our souls that's first instinct was to be angry when we saw the circado sarcophagus being opened a deep sadness for the ancestors who can no longer help themselves and a deeper fear for ourselves a part of us wonders when i die someday in the future will my bones end up on someone's altar or bone room will i know and more importantly will someone anyone bring me home and lay me back to rest [Music] when the ancient artifacts are looted and taken away from their home countries by thieves it feels the same way because those artifacts are the souls of people's cultures when they're smashed and sold in pieces for profit real people's history is torn asunder too they hold the answers to infinite historical contexts and mysteries that get lost permanently these artifacts are the spiritual bones of a people in 1970 unesco held the convention on the means of prohibiting and preventing the illicit import export and transfer of ownership and cultural property in an attempt to fight back against theft pillage and misappropriation of cultural property and its restitution during peace times 178 countries signed the convention including the u.s france switzerland and germany which is surprising given that they have the most to lose with restitution then again the 50 years since have proved that the convention is extremely hard to enforce just like every other law attempting to prevent black market artifact threat thrift black market artifact theft many nations signed on with extreme conditions such as that it can only apply to artifacts already unearthed by 1970 and not held in private collections it can also only apply to artifacts stolen from museums and other institutions these conditions rendered the convention effectively useless and once again left no official international agreement for the restitution of stolen history this is a two-pronged issue too the more legal restrictions countries place on antiquity looting the stronger the black market gets and the more likely it is that artifacts are purposely damaged or destroyed by the looters to get around law enforcement and all too often many countries with the largest art collecting market simply don't feel inclined to return anything especially if not directly asked because they truly believe that these artifacts are better off here anyways i guess i have a personal story that could serve as a good anecdote here a few years ago before the pandemic i was puttering around goodwill as one does and i came across an incredibly beautiful painting it was a self-portrait made by the artist over 50 years ago and i won't say the name of the artist just in case he'd prefer that his privacy be protected here i had heard of him before so after buying it i sent him an email asking for any history behind the painting as it turns out he never knew what happened to it in the last half century and asked if i'd be willing to part with it this is the part that i think a lot of collectors get tripped up at they think well isn't there a reason this thing was for sale in some crappy place i bought it so don't i own it now where does artist ownership end why why can't i keep this beautiful thing that i found why must you make me feel guilty when i didn't do anything wrong well here's the thing as it turns out the painting ended up at the goodwill by mistake it was never meant to be there the artist wanted it to stay in his family and this painting most likely made when he was an art student is a precious part of his history he was willing to pay me to get it back but i didn't feel like that was the right thing to do as tempting as it is to recoup costs as a recently graduated art student myself at the time luckily i was able to meet up with his brother and hand off the painting and it was personally driven back home to his hands do i miss that painting sure i do i'm an artist i love history it's a painting by an artist that i had heard of it was a special find but the feeling of knowing that it's backwards supposed to be talking with this artist on the phone and hearing how happy and relieved he was to be reunited with it well that's a better feeling than any amount of money could be that's a better feeling even than owning the painting itself becaus

2022-05-27 16:35

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