The Green Fiasco in Context
Special Issue on the Papyrus Thefts
In 2009 Christian college teacher Scott Carroll convinced an evangelical millionaire that collecting Biblical paraphernalia could be turned into a lucrative business — both spiritually and economically speaking. On his model, one could build a collection of artefacts and a museum, both for fostering an evangelical interpretation of the Bible and at the same time saving money by applying for tax rebates for the appraisals and donations to that same museum. Carroll was even able to convince the millionaire, Hobby Lobby CEO Steve Green, to be hired as director of the whole enterprise. What could possibly go wrong?
Ten years after they started, we can say that indeed a lot went wrong, from academics being asked to sign non-disclosure agreements down to the destruction of archaeological artefacts (mummies and other cartonnage) and even seizures of antiquities illegally acquired. But the Green enterprise has not operated in a vacuum, as illustrated by the most recent episode in this endless fiasco, involving an Oxford classicist allegedly pilfering one of the most famous collections of papyri in the world.
I won’t comment on that case here, as events are still unfolding. I am deeply affected by them as a trustee of the charity which owns the collection, the Egypt Exploration Society, and an academic who together with others has constantly and publicly criticized the mishandling of papyri recently surfaced on the antiquities market. Instead I would like to address the structural problems that the Green saga has brought to light and explain why it is imperative to take action now in order to avoid having the same thing happen again.
Problem 1: Researchers in text-based disciplines don’t think of texts as objects.
Ancient literature has come to us through a manuscript tradition. Most of the earliest specimens of classical and biblical literature date to the medieval period and following centuries. However, more ancient copies, usually on papyrus fragments, have started re-emerging slowly from Egypt since the country came under European control in the early 19th century (a situation Usama Gad will address in more detail in the next article in this special). Papyri have provided fresh evidence and material for research not only to papyrologists, but also to all those experts who use the texts inscribed on them in their research. For instance, a Greek literature student indeed has contact with papyri when she comments on verses transmitted through them; a philologist working on a new edition of Menander will have to consult papyri; a New Testament scholar interested in Jesus’s sayings will have to deal with papyri that sometimes are the only source for those words.
You would think, then, that anyone in Classics, Biblical Studies, and similar disciplines including ancient history should know something about the nature of papyrus texts, the history of their finding and transfer to European and other countries, and therefore the cultural heritage issues they come with. But they usually do not.
While archaeologists deal with the materiality of the objects they excavate and study, papyrologists and more broadly classicists and those in other textual disciplines often do not grapple with this reality, because these fields have been mainly preoccupied with the inscribed contents of the manuscripts rather than their materiality. More often than not, these specialists produce knowledge that separates the text from where it belongs (i.e. the object) and from the collection process through which the text reached them, including the fact that the text was found in the ground of a colonized country (i.e. Egypt). This break from reality and refusal to grapple with materiality has set these fields back — this problem must be addressed because it has undermined the ability of scholars to understand the very nature of these things and, as a consequence, has fostered a scholarship that has not properly reflected on the legislation and ethical norms regulating the handling of ancient artefacts, let alone the same epistemology of the disciplines at stake. These aspects must be better integrated in the curriculum of Classics, Biblical Studies, and other similar fields.
Problem 2: The purchase and publishing of papyri that have recently emerged from the market and are of questionable legal status.
This is a story that could have been completely avoided if all those involved in the publication of the Green and related papyri (e.g., the anonymous London collector’s new Sappho papyrus) would have executed careful due diligence in verifying the documented provenance of the fragments before buying and publishing. “Provenance” does not mean the history of where and when an object was made, but indicates the physical history of the object — in this case, a papyrus — from the moment it was discovered, detailing its finding spot (if known) to its present location. “Documented” means that tales told by a professor or a collector and his employees or anyone else are insufficient to ensure that a papyrus is legal: one must show documents and they must be reliable. It’s not enough for a seller or publisher to merely check acquisition documents, as these can be forged — something we have recently seen happening in the case of the so-called Jesus wife papyrus. Such documentation must be made accessible to everyone — it is as simple as that. Collectors and editors must check what they are going to buy and publish before purchase and publication and must ensure that contextual documents relating to the fragments are disclosed to the public.
This is called transparency in research and collecting. Is it possible for a legal papyrus to lack documented provenance? Yes, unfortunately it is, as the importance of certifying sales and acquisitions has not been a priority in the past. I would personally avoid publication if documents are lacking, but anyone who decides otherwise must be very clear about why, though documents are missing, they think the papyrus was legally acquired. I have met responsible collectors who apply the same approach to buying: no credible documents, no purchase. If academics and collectors can agree on these points, it becomes possible to distinguish the black market from the legal one. This would be a win-win situation for everybody except some dealers, including famous auction houses, who have thrived in the current grey market.
Problem 3: Private collections have accessibility problems.
Collecting, even if done responsibly, presents obstacles to scholarship. Collectors do not like publicity — for reasonable reasons (privacy and security) — and tend to establish a privileged relationship with specific scholars. Let us take for example the “elderly” gentleman (as historian and broadcaster Bettany Hughes defined him), who has provided private access to his Sappho fragment to Dirk Obbink. That “elderly” gentleman, in London at that time and who knows where now, cannot be approached by anyone wishing to check the text other than the first editor of his papyrus; Obbink is the only person, to my knowledge, who knows his identity and whereabouts. Not to mention the fact that the owner might have sold the Sappho fragment in the time since, as this “elderly” gentleman in fact sounds more like a dealer than anything else. I am of the opinion that the adjective “elderly” is a play on the dealer’s name rather than a reference to his age. Am I wrong? Perhaps I am, but as long as the owner stays anonymous, we will never know, and the new Sappho text and its whereabouts will remain a mystery.
In other words, dear Classicists, especially those among you who have commented and written pages and pages on the new Sappho poems, we have completely lost track of the only extant copy of the verses in question, verses otherwise unknown and unattested. Leaving aside the problems connected to the very unclear provenance of this “elderly” gentleman’s fragment, to me this seems a remarkable illustration of the unfair conditions of access that come with private collections.
Problem 4: Accessibility is also problematic in institutional collections.
The fact that papyri are in the possession of certain institutions and not others creates disparity of accessibility for scholars–especially to unpublished material, a situation that we should try to overcome. Unpublished material is the fresh meat for papyrologists and it needs to have papyrologists around in order to be deciphered. This is a very delicate matter: how open should access to unpublished material be? Collections have different views and politics, and also — and this is even more crucial — different levels of funding support. In order to be made accessible, fragments must be in good conservation conditions, fully digitized, and ideally freely available in that format.
This means that papyri should be hosted in a library or other place with enough dedicated staff, space and resources to carry on all these complex tasks, including autopsy of the object. The bigger the collection, the larger the budget should be.
But this is hardly the case. I can assure you from firsthand experience that, at least in the United Kingdom, even the funding of basic curatorial tasks rests mainly on the shoulders of academics and librarians who, on top of their normal job tasks, have to apply constantly for funds to do any kind of work on the collections. This is the current situation of the collection of my university, for instance, where it was only recently possible to conserve unpublished and some published papyri because we applied successfully for some money. Now we will have to sort out full digitization. Curatorial and conservation positions are rarely advertised and more often than not are precarious; jobs in papyrology are exactly the same. What do you think a collection can possibly achieve in these conditions?
Shortage of funding concerns even long-term extremely successful and necessary projects such as Trismegistos and the Papyrological Navigator; there aren’t enough funds to cover the amount of work and technological infrastructures necessary to maintain these collections and databases. Imagine if wealthy collectors, instead of spending money on a market that is heavily tainted, helped to preserve and bring to light what we as communities already have in libraries and museums, fostering the study of the manuscripts that they, too, love so much. We can think together and creatively about fruitful (and legal!) exchanges: for instance, collectors who support institutional collections could receive something back in the form of curatorial and other work on their (legal!) manuscripts.
Problem 5: The black to grey market is a serious threat because it involves criminals.
As documented by research and UNESCO reports, crime in art and antiquities is the business of dangerous people and organizations. The products of such endeavors are later laundered through transit countries, the grey market, and also academic expertise and publications that make any illegally-sourced antiquity more acceptable to the public.
Given this last point, I am appalled by the fact that in 2019 some academics still think that publishing unprovenanced materials has no consequences on society. The idea that scholarship lives in a vacuum, in a separate universe from the rest of the world, is not only unrealistic–it’s unacceptable. In Egypt, criminals are taking advantage of the socio-economic climate: looting, theft, and trafficking are thriving. These activities have harmed local communities deeply and in many ways, and not only because they destroy archaeological evidence: children employed to pick up antiquities from shafts have been seriously injured and killed, and guards of archaeological sites have lost their lives protecting objects and places. Would you pay the price to be at the end of this crime chain just for the sake of adding another line on your CV?
This brings me back to the episodes addressed in the rest of this special issue. As the Green collection includes many more fragments than those at the center of the current scandal, can I finally receive an answer to the question I have been asking since 2014: where the hell are these other papyri from?
Roberta Mazza is a Lecturer in Graeco-Roman Material Culture at the University of Manchester. She currently holds the Tipton Distinguished Visiting Professorship in the Department of Religious Studies at UCSB and the title of Associate Professor in Papyrology in Italy.
