The pillage of the Ma’adi museum, part II

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Part II : The museum robbery

THE MA’ADI AFFAIR, INVESTIGATION IN THE THEFT AND TRAFFICKING OF OBJECTS FROM THE MA’ADI MUSEUM

The theft

Everything began one night in 2003, when the Ma’adi museum and its excavation storehouses, on the edges of the site itself, were broken into. Our initial investigation revealed that at least seventy objects were stolen at this time, but a second investigation revealed that at least four hundred objects disappeared. Despite the seriousness of the archaeological plundering, no echo ran through the press at the time of the theft. The police investigation started and floundered just as quickly. Kamel, the museum security guard that was sleeping nearby, is the only potential witness that the Egyptian police seems interested in talking to. The local authorities are far from imagining that the stolen objects are already far away, flooding onto European and North-American art markets.
 

The first sales go unnoticed

Only a few months after the break-ins, the objects start appear with art-dealers and auction houses. On 8 June 2004, a hat-shaped vase, one of the three found at Ma’adi, was sold for 6,573USD at Christie’s New York. The vase is sold with fake credentials: « collection J. Garnish, acquired in Egypt in the 1930’s ». The sales catalogue, which had been read by conservators from the Louvre, the British Museum and Metropolitan Museum – to name the most well known – did not raise questions from a single Egyptologist. Other vases stolen at Ma’adi must already be up for sale by art dealers. No mention is yet made of Ma’adi.
 

Figure 11 : Stone vase from Ma’adi proposed at Christies of New York

Ma’adi vases sold by a London auction house

The inquiry starts on 29 October, 2004, the day after a major London archaeology sale While traveling in Munich, I discover, incredulous, that the content of a London sale includes pre-dynastic objects that are part of the Ma’adi university museum holdings. These objects had been sold the night before on the auction block. The Ma’adi scandal had begun.

Figure 12 : Ma’adi vases for sale at Bonhams in London, 2004. Last row, photos by Luc Watrin, 1996.
 

The catalog from Bonhams, the third most auction house in England after Christie’s and Sotheby’s, proposed for sale on its 28 October 2004 sale five pre-dynastic stone and two pre-dynastic ceramic vases. It is an atypical set, made up of three medium-sized restored basalt vases, a green calcite vase, a limestone ringbase vase and two black potteries and one red pottery. Despite credentials identical to the one used by the vase sold by Christie’s in June 2004, indicating longstanding private ownership, it was clear where they came from: we had seen these vases recently in the cases of the Ma’adi museum!

Apparently, the auction house was itself victim of false information, because its catalog proudly indicated in its complete references “Excavated at Ma’adi”, and even puts up for sale a part of the excavation report! In digging through my archives, I found photographs of these same objects, which I took at the museum in 1996 and 1999: these are proofs that the vases sold by Bonhams were stolen at the Ma’adi museum. Among these vases is a small jug that is unique in its type that O. Menghin and M. Amer had interpreted at their finding as a worship object.
 

Bonhams in reverse

After the sale, the GREPAL sent a letter to Bonhams informing it that the auction that it had organized included objects stolen from the Ma’adi museum. This letter advised Bonhams to freeze the handing over of the identified pieces, and to contact Scotland Yard immediately, as well as the Egyptian authorities at the consulate in London and the S.C.A. in Egypt.

For Bonhams, there is no doubt, the seller of this archaeological material (whose name is withheld) is honest. The collection is presented as a private collection sold in the 1930’s to Joseph Garnish, date at which selling of antiquities was still legal in Egypt, to an engineer on duty in the Cairo region. It was then supposedly kept by the family and transmitted in 2003 to the grandson, Edward Johnson, before being acquired by the person who presented the objects to Bonhams.

Despite our warnings, the Bonhams auction house, still convinced of the good faith of the seller, informed us of a surprising fact: it affirms that the catalog listing all the objects had been circulating for several months before the sale in the great museums of the world, including the Metropolitan Museum and the British Museum, and that none of them had complained about the sale of the objects.

My inquiry focused on the break-in in the museum, and I suddenly discover that there is no echo of the theft in the press, and that no complaint by the Egyptian government had been filed with Interpol. It is likely that high-level connivances had attempted to silence such a serious affair. In his small office at the University of Cairo, the ex-director of Antiquities, Mister Gaballah ‘Ali Gaballah, responsible for the Ma’adi site since 2002, seems surprised and curiously embarrassed by our information. He confirms the break-in, while declaring that “it’s not a state secret […], that the local press mentioned it at that period, and that 70 major archaeological objects had been stolen”.

Meanwhile, Bonhams contacted the Egyptian authorities and gave them a delay in order to prove that the objects it had sold were stolen. The Egyptians furnished documents drafted in Arabic, without any photo. Bonhams was about to hand over the objects to its customers…but the photographs that I’d taken in the Ma’adi museum and that I presented to Bonhams saved the priceless treasures of Egyptian pre-history at the last moment. Just like Bonhams, Christie’s New York opens a procedure to return objects to the Egyptians. The seven objects from Bonhams and the hat-shaped vase from Christie’s are thus sent back to Egypt. But those are just a small portion of the stolen collections, and the investigation had just begun.
 

The Ma’adi objects are sold off on the internet

After the sales in the two major auction houses, I conducted further research, and discovered at the end of 2004 a set of objects stolen from Ma’adi with four North-American antique dealers: 22 objects had been put up for sale online on the website of these dealers! . Among the objects identified on the web are 19 potteries, 2 stone vases, and a spindle. Once again, the mention “ex-Johnson Family Collection” are the credentials of these pieces which also indicate “Excavated at the Predynastic Site of Ma’adi”.
 

Ma’adi jars sold in New York by Howard Nowes

The first batch of Ma’adi objects identified on the web is proposed by the Howard Nowes Ancient Art gallery, in New York. They are two potteries, around 18-cm high, and representative of the most common Ma’adi productions.

Figure 13 : Jars stolen from Ma’adi on sale at the site of Howard Noves, 2004 (© Howard Noves)

Ma’adi jars sold in the United States at Janus

Two other jars are then identified on the internet site of the Janus gallery in the United States. They can only have come from the storage depository at Ma’adi located next to the museum of the Ma’adi site. Their inventory numbers, that they still bear, corresponds to an archaeological object that had always been conserved in Ma’adi museum or in its reserves.

Figure 14 : Jars stolen from Ma’adi sold on the site of Janus, USA 2004 (© Janus)

Ma’adi jar sold in Canada at Wallis

The Canadian antiquities gallery proposes on its website an oval ring-base jar. The clay ring that supports the foot of this jar is characteristic of Ma’adi pottery since nearly half of the utility vases from the site have one. The auction house indicates that a number is inscribed on the foot of the jar, and this reference corresponds to the inventory numbers of this type of jar – around thirty – discovered during the first excavation campaign at Ma’adi in 1930-31.

Figure 15 : Ring-base jar sold on the site of Wallis, Canada, 2004 (© Wallis)

Potteries, stone vases, and spindle from Ma’adi on sale in Michigan at Orpheus

Orpheus is by far the richest gallery in stolen Ma’adi objects, since its website presents an avalanche of 17 stolen objects! Ceramics unique to Lower-Egyptian Chalcolithic are presented as vulgar potteries, photographed next to a soda can for scale. Insult to the Egyptian heritage is even more flagrant in the description of a hemispheric ring-base jar – unique in its type – presented as a “poppy flower shaped jar”. Objects of the greatest scientific interest have become, like tins of sardines, simple trade goods, and the interpretations made by Orpheus combine incompetence and dishonesty, just like when they present a spindle as a pear-shaped ceremonial mace-head…

The thoughtlessness of the merchant even allowed us to recover proof of the fraudulent origin of the objects. He published on his website photos of the inventory numbers etched onto the vases. For another small jar with no rim, the merchant didn’t hesitate to include a photo of the excavation label contained in the jar, indicating its location where excavated: “square LVII, under the earth”!
 

Figure 16: Palestinian jar of importation. At left, photo of Orpheus, 2004, at right, photo of Luc Watrin, 1999 (Ma'adi)

Figure 17: Objects for sale, with the well-known pear-shaped ceremonial mace-head (© Orpheus, 2004)

Figure 18 : Upper left, photo of L. W., Ma'adi, 1996, front of the same object, Orpheus, 2004. In the middle, photo of L. W., Ma'adi, 1996, top of the same objects, Orpheus, 2004.

What proofs are there of trafficking of Ma’adi objects?

Two types of proofs can be advanced in establishing that the pieces sold by the auction houses and the merchant websites were stolen from the Ma’adi museum. The first proof is the inventory number that appeared on about half the vases, and which was not erased, making it possible to find their publication and proving their presence in the museum or in the storage depositories before the break-in of 2003. The second proof is more visual, being photographs of the objects taken directly in the Ma’adi museum recently. Using these documents, the objects from Ma’adi can be saved from dispersion.

WHERE IS THE AFFAIR TODAY?

The sales, at just four months interval, of eight key objects from the Ma’adi collection, organized by Bonhams in London and Christie’s in New York, then the online sale of twenty-two other objects with the same fake credentials, is a scandal for archaeology and an attack on the Egyptian heritage. These objects belong, with no compromise, to the site of Ma’adi whose museum and storage depositories were plundered by criminals in 2003. These treasures of Egyptian pre-history mustn’t be sold nor bartered!

The legal investigation which has just begun will be bitter (if the local authorities feel like they are concerned…), because the fake credentials invented to launder the objects, the same every time, proves that a single individual is behind all the trafficking. Moreover, the number of objects stolen and their great fragility necessitate a widescale operation, carefully organized with individual packing for each object. Will high-level local complicities be uncovered? Is there a bad apple among those responsible for protecting the objects?

To-date, thanks to investigations pushed by the GREPAL, a small portion of the objects stolen from the museum have been found. That is a good start. But other, more valuable pieces, particularly the basalt vases, are still circulating, hidden, in the West thirsty for antique relics. A complete dossier on the Ma’adi affair has been transmitted to the S.C.A. in Cairo, and in particular to its current director, Mr. Zahi Hawass. We can only hope that investigations continue for the purpose of the protection, the preservation, and the valorization of the Egyptian heritage. The Director of Antiquities, M. Zahi Hawass, and the Director for Lower-Egypt, M. Mohammad Abd-el-Maksoud, have taken personal interest in this affair and can count on the assistance of the GREPAL to coordinate all information relating to this dossier. A positive reaction by the merchants, having recognized the fake credentials of their objects, lets us hope that some rare objects from pre-history will be returned to their museum.

Tracking objects stolen from Ma’adi is thus a noble mission. They are not random objects made in series, but are unique objects that are the last testimony of a brilliant civilization which was the first in Africa to have transformed copper and built stone edifices, thanks to its close exchanges with its Palestinian neighbors. Ma’adi was the economic capital of Lower-Egypt around 3850-3625 B.C., a major production center for fine basalt vases and a unique emporium at the commercial crossroads leading from Upper-Egypt to the Levant. In that light, its archaeological remains are as fundamental for understanding this period as are the objects from Tutankhamon’s tomb for the 18th dynasty.