For those who missed it, the opening paragraphs of an article from the
NY Times earlier this week. The complete text should still be available
online.

-L. Dewey


This article from NYTimes.com

Loot: An Illicit Journey Out of Egypt, Only a Few Questions Asked

February 23, 2004
  By BARRY MEIER and MARTIN GOTTLIEB


The past is everywhere in the Upper Egypt city of Akhmim,
and mining it is a constant occupation.

At a government archaeological site, workers haul
bucketfuls of soil and sand from a vast crease in the
earth, gradually revealing a mammoth temple from the reign
of Ramses II. But unsanctioned digging goes on all over
Akhmim - at an ancient cemetery riddled with holes left by
looters; at farms and construction sites; inside homes
where residents, sometimes inspired by the divinations of
fortune tellers, hunt for treasure beneath dirt floors.

A decade ago, laborers excavating a building site in Akhmim
hit a four-foot-high, tombstone-shaped slab of limestone
incised with hieroglyphics and the image of Osiris, god of
the lower world. The ancient Egyptians offered this kind of
monument, known as a stele, as a tribute to a god or a dead
relative.

Under Egyptian law, the stele should have been turned over
to the government, a recovered shard of the national
patrimony. Instead, something considerably more commonplace
happened. It became an outlaw. Quietly, it passed into the
global antiquities market. Five years later, cleansed of
its illicit origins, it emerged in New York as a rich man's
prize, in the foyer of a Fifth Avenue apartment.

Journeys like this one are traced by countless artifacts
from Akhmims all over the world. Typically they begin in
silence and end in silence, few questions asked.

But the stele from Akhmim has given up its secrets. Two
years ago, it was seized by federal agents in New York as
part of a court case. The records from that case, together
with dozens of interviews and documents gathered on three
continents, provide that rarest of commodities in the
antiquities trade: a detailed account of the smuggling,
marketing and selling of a piece of loot.

That narrative reveals the inner motivations and mechanics
of the flourishing worldwide market for high-end
antiquities. And while much of the material flowing through
that market is unassailably clean, the stele's progress
shows how seamlessly looted objects can blend in, whether
dealers are aware of it or not.

"People think that there is an illicit market and a
legitimate market," said Ricardo J. Elia, associate
professor of archaeology at Boston University and a
frequent critic of the antiquities industry. "In fact, it
is the same."

(continues)

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