Posted on 09/26/2024 10:37:04 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
ArtNews reports that the J. Paul Getty Museum has repatriated to Turkey a bronze funerary couch dated to 530 B.C. Provenance records suggest that the bed had been in several European collections from the 1920s through the 1980s, when the museum purchased the artifact from an antiquities dealer. However, Gökhan Yazgı of Turkey's Ministry of Culture and Tourism and officials from the Getty Museum confirmed that the records had been falsified by a former owner. Recent research determined that the couch had been illegally excavated in the early 1980s in western Turkey's Manisa region, where Turkish archaeologists have excavated a tomb with similar fabrics, wood, and bronze artifacts. "We seek to continue building a constructive relationship with the Turkish Ministry of Culture," concluded museum director Timothy Potts.
(Excerpt) Read more at archaeology.org ...
Baloney. Archaeologists getting a monopoly is wrong. They find things, catalogue them and store them away forever.
There is zero reason private collections and excavation is wrong.
This is the same mentality that nobody should go hunting arrowheads.
You don’t send priceless treasures to places where superstitious idiots will deliberately destroy or sell them off.
The do-gooder return the artifacts movement is tragically wrong.
I did not see anyone on FR agreeing with ISIS destroying those old BC era ruins. No one.... can you provide an example of someone here supporting ISIS doing that?
“ISIS destroyed what was left of Pergamon”
I cannot find that ISIS even got there. It’s in Turkey.
“American Museum Repatriates Bronze Couch to Turkey”
Why’d they do that? It’s not Turkish.
It was stolen from them. How they keep it is up to them.
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