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Reassessing the balance of antiquities and forgeries in Abu Sayyaf’s stash
Someone kindly prompted me to reconsider the balance of antiquities and fakes in Abu Sayyaf’s stash and I thought it might be worth trying to count some of the sets of objects on display. I didn’t want...
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Islamic State archaeology book club reading list – deliberately acquired and...
Last month, Mehmet Nuri Ekinci reported that Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) had seized equipment from Turkish Islamic State fighters in Syria; @hasavrat noticed that they had confiscated a...
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Buzzfeed’s Mike Giglio’s been in Turkey’s borderlands after Syria’s looted...
‘Over the course of a month’, Buzzfeed’s Mike Giglio ‘traveled along Turkey’s 565-mile-long border with Syria to meet more than a dozen people involved in this illegal trade, from the grave robbers and...
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‘The smuggler had been smoking a cigarette when he pulled into an ISIS...
When the Islamic State conquered Palmyra, ‘the world recoiled in horror, fearing [its] destruction’. The week after, Buzzfeed’s Mike Giglio ‘sat in a sunlit living room near the border with a looter...
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Note: Rim Turkmani hasn’t estimated IS income from Nabek as $36m, she’s noted...
The headline in the post. When the Australian’s Jamie Walker said that, ‘in recent research for the London School of Economics, Syrian-born scientist Rim Turkmani estimated that Islamic State had...
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A gang in Germany robbed assets from churches and schools to fund jihad in Syria
Yet another reason for quietness on the blog is that my computer is broken, but I just saw this story via Money Jihad and wanted to highlight it, not because it is evidence of significant trafficking...
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Islamic State did not destroy things attached to people, it killed people...
You can read either story. The relevant sections of the texts are both from the Associated Press. But the titles? In one newspaper, “Islamic State ‘blows up three captives tied to Roman columns’ in...
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Antiquities, looted from Syria’s Palmyra Museum, seized while for sale in...
Update (30th November 2015): the objects were ‘pretty crude fakes‘ that seem to have been advertised as conflict antiquities from Palmyra Museum. Original post I think I’ve found the little information...
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‘pretty crude fakes’ that were advertised as conflict antiquities from...
I thought that the statue looked like a forgery, but I have no background in this material, so I didn’t want to judge. Plus, I didn’t think that Google would be able to translate “alleged antiquities,...
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Schlagzeile geht schneller als Recherche – über die journalistische Arbeit...
Esther Saoub and Amir Musawy have published a clear, helpful (German-language) article about Abu Sayyaf’s antiquities stash and how headlines move faster than research – on journalistic work on...
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Is the “wine chalice”“from Palmyra Museum” a modern bucket from someone’s house?
Last week, Classical archaeologist and art historian Vladimir Stissi looked at the ‘pretty crude fakes’ “from Palmyra Museum”. Highlighting the importance of scales in photos, Stissi observed, As far...
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Syria-Lebanon antiquities smuggling involves transport in meat trucks as well...
I noted before that conflict antiquities trafficking involves ‘petty theft as well as grand larceny, burglaries by fundraisers outside as well as plunder by combatants in the war zone’. Likewise, it’s...
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I am not there. I have not said that. I could not say that. I do not know that.
I appreciate that this information is being circulated by someone who is trying to secure funding for research and analysis in which I would be involved. And I appreciate that this information might be...
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Were these ‘Palmyrene statues’‘recently excavated’? At least one appears to...
I had been planning to leave this note until later, as I am supposed to be writing – and, my dear and unduly patient editors, I am writing – something on iconoclasm. However, since the evidence is...
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Of fingers and forgeries – illicit Palmyrene art
In the original title of my previous post, I asked, does one of the ‘recently excavated Palmyrene statues’ have six fingers? In a somewhat unexpected turn of events, some people seem to have...
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ISIS and the missing treasures, the missing treasures and ISIS?
Last year, Simon Cox led a team who investigated ISIS: Looting for Terror for the BBC (File on 4). Since then, he has led a team who have investigated ISIS and the Missing Treasures for Channel 4...
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conflict antiquities, from Libya to Italy and from Syria to Belgium, and lack...
Fortunately and unfortunately, I’m going to be staying in Turkey longer than expected, so I won’t be able to go to the International Arts and Antiquities Security Forum (@IAAS_Forum). Happily, the CEO...
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Exploitation of refugees from Syria or exploitation of plausible deniability...
On the 22nd of February, police stopped and searched a ‘suspicious’ vehicle on Alparslan Türkeş Avenue in the Çukurova municipality of Adana city (as opposed to the Çukurova district of Adana...
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fake Christian manuscript, possibly from Syria, in Turkey, seized from Syrian...
Hürriyet Daily News reported an ancient book, stolen in Syria, seized in Turkey, by Gendarmerie in Bursa, where a Syrian-and-Turkish team of traffickers intended to sell it over the internet....
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‘There are customers for everything [Für alles gebe es Kunden]’ from Syria...
In a documentary next week, Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (MDR)/Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (ARD) will explain ‘how looted Syrian...
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