My post on 2010/11/26 started out simply enough.  Just something to share with the readers.  A post that was a mere gloss over something larger. 

I started the article out with: “Want to see some Roman Art?  Why wait for a museum to have a showing?  It’s all there on ebay.  Just put the following words into the search engine:   Roman Antiques. This on-line auction house  is truly the ‘peoples museum.’  Where else can such a collection be brought together at a touch of a key?  Roman marble head of bearded man  Starting bid $700. Roman Iron Knife with Bronzed handle  Starting bid $24.”

I admit I thought I was being clever.  Yes, a big mistake for someone with a  blog and podcast.  

Robert Greaves pointed out what the real story was.  

“Do you think ebay encourages the trade in illicit antiquities? Not so much stolen ones, but ones that have not been properly declared in the country they come from, which means people are not giving new sites a chance to be properly excavated by archaeologists.”

 I made a mistake.  I wrote him back with a simple:

“You could very well be right.”

Mr. Greaves had given me a teaching point and I had totally dismissed it.  No insight, no further exploration on the direction he gave me.  He had brought up a very important point.  There was something more here than the nature of museums and ’junk drawers’.  

For instance, read the following article.

University of California – Los Angeles. “EBay Has Unexpected, Chilling Effect On Looting Of Antiquities, Archaelogist Finds.” ScienceDaily, 9 May 2009. Web. 19 Apr. 2011. — Having worked for 25 years at fragile archaeological sites in Peru, UCLA archaeologist Charles “Chip” Stanish held his breath when the online auction house eBay launched more than a decade ago.

“My greatest fear was that the Internet would democratize antiquities trafficking, which previously had been a wealthy person’s vice, and lead to widespread looting,” said the UCLA professor of anthropology, who directs the UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.

Indeed, eBay has drastically altered the transporting and selling of illegal artifacts, Stanish writes in an article in the May/June issue of Archaeology, but not in the way he and other archaeologists had feared.

By improving access to a worldwide market, eBay has inadvertently created a vast market for copies of antiquities, diverting whole villages from looting to producing fake artifacts, Stanish writes. The proliferation of these copies also has added new risks to buying objects billed as artifacts, which in turn has worked to depress the market for these items, further reducing incentives to loot.

“For most of us, the Web has forever distorted the antiquities trafficking market in a positive way,” Stanish said.

Looting, which is illegal, is widely recognized as destructive to cultural heritage because it can remove from public ownership tangible links to a people’s past. In addition, looting is perceived as the enemy of scholarship because it typically is done without regard to any appropriate methods that allow scientists to date objects and to place them in a larger, more meaningful context.

One of the world’s premiere authorities on Andean archaeology and supervisor, at UCLA, of the one of the world’s largest collections of working archaeologists, Stanish has been tracking objects billed as antiquities on eBay for more than nine years. His conclusions also are informed by experiences with the U.S. customs service, which occasionally asks him to authenticate objects. In addition, Stanish has visited a number of workshops in Peru and Bolivia that specialize in reproductions of pottery and has interviewed these artisans. While his background is in South American archaeology, he has tracked eBay listings of antiquities from many cultures.

“Chinese, Bulgarian, Egyptian, Peruvian and Mexican workshops are now producing fakes at a frenetic pace,” he writes.

When he first started tracking eBay’s sales of antiquities, Stanish focused mainly on objects related to his field. At the time, the ratio of real artifacts to fakes was about 50-50, he estimates. About five years later, 95 percent were fakes. Now, he admits, he can’t always tell, because the quality of the fakes has improved so much.

He estimates that about 30 percent of “antiquities” currently for sale on eBay are obvious fakes, in so much as creators mix up iconography and choose colors and shapes for visual effect rather than authenticity. Another 5 percent or so are genuine treasures. The rest fall in the ambiguous “I would have to hold it in my hand to be able to make an informed decision” category, he writes. Stanish admits himself to occasionally being duped by fakes encountered in shops in areas where both looted items and fakes are sold.

The advent of eBay has had the biggest impact on the antiquities market by reducing the incentive to unearth precious treasures in the first place, Stanish has found.

“People who used to make a few dollars selling a looted artifact to a middleman in their village can now produce their own ‘almost-as-good-as-old’ objects and go directly to a person in a nearby town who has an eBay account,” he said. “They will receive the same amount or even more than they could have received for actual antiquities.”

As a result of the rise of a ready market, many of the primary purveyors have shifted from looting sites to faking antiquities.

In addition to linking craftsmen with a market for cheap fakes, eBay has tended to have a depressing effect on prices for real looted artifacts, further discouraging locals from pillaging precious sites.

“The value of … illicit digging decreases every time someone buys a ‘genuine’ Moche pot for $35, plus shipping and handling,” he writes. (An authentic antiquity would sell for upwards of $15,000.)

So far, authentication techniques have struggled to keep abreast of increasingly sophisticated fakes, Stanish said. Pottery can still be authenticated reliably, although the process is costly. In addition, forgers tend to only guarantee the authenticity of their pieces as long as no form of “destructive” analysis is used. While just a tiny flake of pottery is required for thermoluminescence dating — the gold standard for pottery — the process is technically considered destructive, Stanish points out, so the test invalidates such warrantees, no matter its conclusion.

Thanks to laser technology and chemical processes for forming antique-appearing patinas, stone and metal, reproductions are “almost impossible” to authenticate using today’s technology, Stanish writes. However, the prospect of authentication techniques eventually catching up with today’s fakes is also having a chilling effect on the market for antiquities, by dramatically adding to the risk of illicit, high-end trafficking.

“Who wants to spend $50,000 on an object ‘guaranteed’ to be ancient by today’s standards, when someone can come along in five years with a new technology that definitively proves it to be a fake,” he asks.

 -30- (End of story)

For actual pieces of antiquities never to catalogued, measured against other pieces, never to be studied by academia due to the business of digging it up and selling it on ebay for profit, puts a hole in the historical record.  Fake pieces are false made up facts, giving us a view of the past that never was.   Actual pieces dug up illegally and sold illegally empty the historical record of important evidence– giving nothing except building someone’s ego or filling space on a coffee table or taking up space in someone’s ‘junk drawer.’

Yes, I would like to own a bit of the past.  In a strange way it would make me feel ‘immortal’.

I admit its an odd emotional reaction, but if owning a bit of the past prevents the historical record from being whole, if it prevents knowledge from being studied and weighed, I’ll forgo the pleasure of making my bid on ebay.

Go to:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090504193641.htm  to read the original article.

Mr. Greaves has a great blog site:  http://matters-arising.blogspot.com/

The title of this blog entry is “A Red Letter Day.”  To my understanding there were red letters on the Roman calendar to denote festivals and special events.  Yesterday, in one viewing day I had 1017 page views.  This was unusual for me, and was the first time that I noticed this level of statistic.   

Today, I interviewed Dr. Carl RiCHARD (I put the last 5 letters in capitals to denote the accent on the last part of the name — he explained a CAJUN pronounciation).  He has written the book “Why We’re All Romans, The Roman Contribution to the Roman World.”     He inspired me, so I decided to change the direction of the next podcast for Season Seven.    Ancient Rome Refocused will concentrate on the influence of the Romans on early America and the U.S. today.  

Watch for it in the next couple of weeks.

I have been emailing back and forth on FaceBook one Mark Schauss.  He has a fascinating podcast called Russian Rulers History (on itunes by the way).  He has tantalized me with his observations on similarities between the Caesars and the Czars and has agreed to an interview.  I am going to call him tomorrow to interview him for a future show.

Stay tuned!

Does anyone have an opinion on the book: Cleopatra, A Life by Stacy Shiff?  I have been listening to an audio book from itunes. 

Anyone?

I’m behind schedule. 

Episode Seven will be about Cleopatra, and our perceptions of her.  This has been the hardest one to write due to the passionate interest in her.  I am going to take it a controversial angle on this one.  As always, if someone disagrees with my conclusions, they are free to write in.

Make your objections interesting enough and according to the ‘house rules’ (they are posted on the left), I will put you on the next podcast.  

In my readings I have read the book Becoming Cleopatra, The Shifting Image of an Icon by Francesca T. Royster.    The book is a great read, less history and more social commentary.   I had to wade through some sections that I thought had little to do with her main subject, but found her overall conclusions right on target. 

Time to get back to work on the script.

The New Library of Alexandria

This thought did not occur to me until I bought myself a Kindle. 

How much of ancient history that we read by modern authors is new?

Don’t get me wrong, I think I realized it on some sort of sub atomic level, but the thought did not appear in my consciousness until I noticed something offered on Amazon.com.   The company not only offers books you can download, but there seems to be no charge on some books that have been out of print for a long time.  The book I am reading right now is called Cleopatra by Jacob Abbot, 1803-1879.  Abraham Lincoln was a fan of his work which was a consistent work of anecdotal history termed ‘juvenile history’ with an age category of 18 to 25.  Go figure that one out.

I found the book enjoyable to read (especially when they are trying to explain the relationship between Caesar (50 years old) to Cleopatra (18).  An awful lot of verbiage was used to talk around of an older man and a younger woman ‘hooking up.’   What do you expect for the middle 1800s?

The interesting thing is I have a copy of Abbot’s books  ( There were two brothers by the way: Jacob and John) and the narrative is pretty good, written over a hundred and forty years ago.   What does a hundred and forty years smell like?  I found out when I opened the book that was sitting in my apartment’s party room simply as decoration.  The cover was pretty old, and the pages harbored that dusty, sweet smell when the earth begins to reclaim the pages.  It smelled like Egypt.     It took a Kindle to get me to crack it open.  

I think what is interesting, that much of what was written I had heard recently in a lecture given at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.  This brought up the thought of: “How much of what historians tell us is new?”

In my opinion — not much. 

After all, it’s not the information, but how it is told which is important.

I think interest in the classics is generational.  It is the telling, not he what, but the  how.  The story captures the imagination, at different times, and is retold in a fresh and interesting way, and in the words of the time.    A good comparison is the teachings of the astronomer Carl Sagan.   Much of the information told in his TV show COSMOS had been around for generations, and the science though current, was not fashionable or sexy.  What made Carl Sagan popular was HOW he told it.

Cleopatra, A life, by Stacy Schiff has struck the imagination of the public and will soon be made into a movie starring Angelina Jolie.  Every generation or so, we see books (fiction and non-fiction), and movies on this subject, telling and retelling the story with a unique perspective of the generation telling it.  One Cleopatra is a ‘vamp’, one Cleopatra looks like a ‘flapper’ of the twenties, one Cleopatra is a girl-child enthralled by the attentions of an older man (Shaw and his white whiskers should come to mind), one Cleopatra is hard to tell where the movie star stops and the real Cleopatra begins (shades of Elizabeth Taylor and being the first ‘million dollar’ actress).  Cleopatra morphs and changes, and becomes African American, and morphs back again into a sex siren or intellectual (as proposed by an Egyptian historian).  It all depends what generation or WHO is telling the story. 

Yet, what it REALLY is a retelling based on the same data.   Plutarch , Lucan, Dio Cassius, Straaabo (I like saying it with three ‘a’s) , is the foundation of other writers who today write under the names of  Brown, Schiff, and Goldsworthy. 

In between you got a guy called William Shakespeare who more than likely read Plutarch.

In between you got a guy called Emil Ludwig who wrote Cleopatra: Geschichte einer Konigin.  It was translated and published in 1939, and Ludwig gave credit to Plutarch, Appian and Dio Cassius.

In between you got a guy called Michael Grant, who wrote a book titled Cleopatra, a doctor of letters and Cambridge, who more than likely broke open his copy of Plutarch sometime during the writing.  

And in between there are a whole host of titles and authors telling and retelling the story in such books as: Cleopatra: Beyond the Myth by Michel Chauveau, Cleopatra: A Biography by Duane W. Roller, Cleopatra by Prudence Jones, and so on, and so on, and so on. 

And where did you think they got their sources?

Plutarch , Lucan, Dio Cassius, and Straaabo (with three ‘a’s).