Ancient Treasures

by Brian Haughton

  The part of Turkey that constituted ancient Lydia was both fertile and resource-rich; consequently settlement and civilization in the area dates at least as far back as the Chalcolithic Period (5500 BC–3200 BC). Lydia emerged as a Neo-Hittite kingdom following the collapse of the Hittite Empire in the 12th century BC, which had included at its height central Turkey, northwestern Syria, and Upper Mesopotamia (north eastern Syria and northern Iraq). At its greatest extent, the kingdom of ancient Lydia covered all of western Anatolia. Central Lydia, where the treasure originated, was the heartland of the Iron Age (sixth century BC) kingdom, which had its capital at Sardis (modern Sart in Manisa Province). Lydia lay at a cross-road of eastern and western cultures, and its rich culture shows traces of both Near Eastern and Greek influences. Indeed the Lydians were well known to the Greeks, and a number of their kings, including Alyattes and Croesus, sent rich offerings to the renowned oracle at Delphi. According to Greek historian Herodotus (c484 BC–425 BC) the Lydians were the first people to introduce gold and silver coins. Modern archaeology has proven Herodotus partly right, as the earliest known coins are indeed found mainly in parts of Lydia, although they are made from a naturally occurring mixture of gold and silver called electrum.

  The heyday of the Lydian kingdom lasted from the seventh to the fourth centuries BC. The earliest ruler of the kingdom we know of is King Gyges, founder of the Mermnad dynasty, who reigned either from 716 BC to 678 BC or from c680 BC–644 BC. Gyges is known to have established trade networks and political alliances with other states, and embarked on various military campaigns to conquer lands in the west of Lydia, thus increasing the power and wealth of the Lydian kingdom. One of the most important sources of Lydia’s wealth at this time was the gold extracted from deposits washed down by the Pactolus River, the river on which the Lydian capital of Sardis lay. The Lydians used this gold dust in the manufacture of some of the world’s first coins.

  Alyattes, king of Lydia from c610 BC until his death in 560 BC, is considered to be the founder of the Lydian empire, mainly due to the success of his military campaigns. He attacked the Greek city of Miletus, in western Anatolia, around 20 miles south of the present city of Söke, Tur; expelled the nomadic Cimmerians, who had previously attacked Sardis and killed the Lydian King Gyges; and fought a five-year campaign against King Cyaxares of the Medes (an ancient Iranian people). According to Herodotus, the war against the Medes was interrupted by a solar eclipse during a battle at the River Halys (now known as The Kizilirmak) on May 28, 585 BC. This momentous event apparently brought hostilities to an end, and a treaty was drawn up where a border between the great two powers was established at the River Halys.

  During the reign of Alyattes’s eldest son, King Croesus (the last king of the Mermnad dynasty), Lydia subjugated the Greek cities of mainland Ionia (on the west coast of Anatolia), including Ephesus and Smyrna. Allying himself with Egyptian pharaoh Amasis (who ruled 570 BC–526 BC), the Greek city state of Sparta, and Nabonidus of Babylonia, Croesus also decided to attack the emerging Persian Empire, which under Cyrus the Great had been threatening Lydia’s eastern frontier. Before embarking on this campaign, Croesus consulted the oracle at Delphi, which gave the famously ambiguous response that if he marched against Persia he would destroy a great Empire. Encouraged by this reply, in 547 BC Croesus crossed the Halys and attacked, but the result of the battle was indecisive, and the Lydian king returned home and partly disbanded his army. However, he had severely underestimated the perseverance of Cyrus and his army. The Persian forces pursued the Lydians all the way to Sardis, where the two armies fought a battle on the plain north of the city (the Battle of Thymbra) in which the Lydians were easily defeated. Croesus was either captured or killed during the fighting and Lydia became a satrapy (province) of the Achaemenid (first Persian) Empire. A certain Tabalus (546 BC–545 BC) was appointed by Persian ruler Cyrus the Great to be the first governor of the area.

  4.1. Jug from the Lydian Treasure. Image by Mr. Arif Solak. Licensed under the Creaitive Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license on Wikipedia.

  In terms of archaeology, there is not a great deal remaining from the ancient kingdom of Lydia. One form of architecture that does remain is the monumental tumulus (burial mound), which the Lydians constructed over the tombs built to house the remains of their royalty. These mounds were constructed of earth and stones sometimes covering a stone-built grave chamber beneath. Lydian earthen mounds can be anything from just over 32 feet high to more than 130 feet high, but the colossal tomb of Alyattes, on the southern shore of the ancient Gygaean Lake (Lake Marmara), 6 miles to the northwest of Sardis, is 201.64 feet in height with a diameter of 1,165.06 feet, making it as high as many Egyptian pyramids. This colossal tomb, which Herodotus described as “the greatest work of human hands in the world, apart from the Egyptian and Babylonian,”1 lies within the Lydian royal cemetery known as Bin Tepe (“thousand mounds”), where a total of 116 tumuli were recorded by Boston University’s central Lydia Archaeological Survey in 2005. The Tomb of Alyattes was partially excavated in 1854 by Ludwig Peter Spiegelthal, the Prussian consul in Smyrna, who discovered that the tomb, which had been constructed of highly polished blocks of marble, had already been plundered, and the sarcophagus and its contents removed.

  The Lydian Hoard originated from at least three Iron Age burial mounds (Toptepe, Ikiztepe, and Aktepe) located near the village of Güre, in the U§ak region of western Turkey, and from at least one other (the Harta-Abidintepe tumulus) located farther west in Kirkag’aç-Manisa. Between 1965 and 1968, these tombs were looted by local villagers, who often went to great lengths to secure their plunder. After many nights unsuccessfully attempting to dig through the thick marble chamber door of the Ikiztepe Tomb, a group of villagers from Güre dynamited the roof in order to get at the riches within. Once inside the tomb, the men discovered the wealthy burial of a Lydian princess and proceeded to plunder the collection of 2,600-year-old artifacts that had been placed alongside the ancient noblewoman, practically destroying the tomb and its mound in their frantic search for treasure. There is a particularly interesting example of the folklore surrounding treasures and treasure hunting in some of the reports of the thefts from the Ikiztepe Tomb, which state that the looters entered the chamber at 6 a.m., on the 6th of June, 1966.

  Further looting of local tumuli by the same villagers over the next couple of years added to their considerable haul from the royal Ikiztepe Tomb. The treasures they had stolen now comprised gold jewelry, including a magnificent gold and glass pendant/brooch depicting a hippocamp with wings (in Phoenician and Greek mythology, the hippocamp is a sea-horse), exquisite gold and silver vessels, including a silver oinochoe (wine jug) with a handle in the shape of a human figure, and a silver alabastron (a vessel for holding oil or perfume) decorated with battle scenes, a pair of marble sphinxes, ivory and wood objects, and pieces of wall paintings. What the villagers now wanted to do with this treasure was to move it on before they were caught.

  Between 1965 and 1968 the looters sold most of the artifacts to Ali Bayirlar, an antiquities dealer from Izmir, who quickly sold them on to a dealer in Europe, believed to be George Zacos in Switzerland. Zacos, in turn, sold the pieces to New York art dealer, John Klejman, from whom the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired 200 pieces of the hoard (in three separate batches) by 1970 for $1.5 million. Some items from the hoard had been recovered from the looters by Turkish police before they could be sold on, after they had argued among themselves as to how the money from the treasures should be divided and one had informed the police. As in many cases of buried and recovered treasure, a good curse does not go amiss, and the Lydian Hoard does not disappoint, with tales of suicides, accidental deaths, insanity, and financial disasters apparently affecting all those involved in the initial looting of the Lydian tombs.

  Despite rumors circulating of the Met’s shady acquisition nothing more was heard of the Lydian Hoard for more than a decade. Indeed the treasure had been languishing
in the Museum’s storerooms for around 14 years before it was decided that some of the more exquisite pieces should be put on permanent display. However, rather than indicate the true origin of the objects, the Met simply labeled its 1984 exhibit of the collection “East Greek Treasure” and described the items as “fine vessels made of ceramic, stone, and precious metals (silver, gold, and bronze), exquisite jewelry, a range of sculpture and wall paintings, and ancient implements.”2 That the Met knew about the un-provenanced nature of the treasure is shown by the discovery of a number of documents, including minutes of the meeting of the acquisition committee of the Board of Trustees at which the acquisition of the Lydian Hoard was approved.

  In 1984 Özgen Acar, a Turkish journalist who had been on the trail of the Lydian Treasure for a number of years, happened to be visiting the Met when he came upon the display of the 50 pieces that constituted the East Greek Treasure. Acar immediately noticed the resemblance between the objects on display and the description he had of the Lydian Hoard, and went straight to the Turkish Ministry of Culture with the shocking news. An investigation was launched, during which photographs from the Turkish police of items seized from the original looters in the 1960s were compared with the pieces at the Met. From this evidence it was obvious that the East Greek Treasures on display at the Museum were part of the Lydian Hoard. In July 1986, Turkey made a formal request to the Met for the return of the Treasure, sending its consul general over to the United States for a meeting with museum officials. The request, based on Turkey’s contention that the objects in the hoard had been illegally excavated and taken out of the country, was, however, rejected.

  In May 1987 Turkey filed a lawsuit in federal court against the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but the Met filed a motion to dismiss the claim on the basis that the three-year limitation period in the statute of limitations had expired. In 1990 this motion was denied. Further legal battles followed during which Turkey produced evidence for the illicit nature of the treasure, which included statements from the looters themselves and from museum officials at the Met. Due mainly to the weight of this evidence against them, in 1993 the Met agreed to settle out of court and the objects from the Lydian Hoard were returned to Turkey. The treasure first traveled to Istanbul, Ankara, and other Turkish cities before finally arriving in the one-room Uşak Museum in 1995, where it was to be exhibited alongside the other artifacts from the looted tombs recovered by the Turkish police in the 1960s.

  The retrieval of the Lydian Hoard was a landmark achievement not only for Turkey but for all countries whose history and culture had been damaged by the actions of looters, unscrupulous museums, and the shady dealings of the illegal antiquities trade. The irony of the case, as noted by Özgen Acar, is that the Met had paid $1.5 million for the Lydian Hoard in the late 1960s, but had ended up spending at least twice that amount on legal expenses. However, this was not to be the end of the controversy surrounding the infamous treasure.

  In April 2006 the “Treasures of Croesus” hit the headline again when major Turkish daily newspaper Milliyet published the sensational news that one of the main pieces from the collection, the golden hippocamp brooch, which was on prominent display in the Uşak Museum along with the rest of the collection, was in fact a fake. According to reports Kayhan Kavas, the governor of Uşak, had received an anonymous letter maintaining that the hippocamp brooch had been stolen, probably between March and August 2005, and replaced with a forgery. Worse news was to follow a few weeks later when it was announced that the director of the museum, Kazim Akbiyikoglu, was suspected of the theft. An official inquiry discovered that a coin and perhaps other pieces from the hoard had also gone missing. Akbiyikoglu protested his innocence, claiming that as far back as 1996, when the collection arrived at Uşak Museum from Ankara, he had realized that one piece was missing, although he had not noticed that the hippocamp brooch had been replaced by a counterfeit until March 2006. He also suggested that the brooch may have been switched with a fake during the time it was in the United States. However, Omer Erbil, the journalist who wrote the original piece on the theft in Milliyet, was quoted as saying that Akbiyikoglu was also being prosecuted for other crimes, including complicity to smuggle artifacts and gambling on museum premises. Erbil further added that Akbiyikoglu had “obstructed past attempts to count and inspect the Croesus treasures.”3

  In July 2006, 10 people, including Akbiyikoglu, were charged with “embezzlement and artifact smuggling in a case involving the theft of a piece of the famed Lydian Hoard at the Uşak Museum,” according to the Turkish Daily News.4 But it was not until January 2009 that a court in Uşak sentenced Kazim Akbiyiklioglu to 12 years and 11 months in prison for theft and embezzlement, and the nine other defendants received lesser prison terms. In November 2012, it was reported by the English-language Turkish newspaper the Hurriyet Daily News that the hippocamp brooch had been recovered in Germany.5 The brooch, worth millions of dollars, is set to be returned home to Turkey, where it will receive pride of place in a new national museum, set to open in December 2013. Perhaps the curse of the Lydian Hoard is finally wearing off.

  The case of the Lydian Hoard is one of the thousands of incidents of the looting of ancient sites from around the world, but the problem is particularly bad in western Turkey. Dr. Christopher H. Roosevelt, one of the directors of Boston University’s Central Lydia Archaeological Survey, has written that during his 2001 survey, he discovered that of the 397 ancient tumuli he visited, 357 had been at least partially looted, with 72 of them having been completely destroyed. In Roosevelt’s 2005 survey of the Bin Tepe cemetery, he found that a staggering 96 percent of the tumuli had been looted, with 18 destroyed. In 2008 Roosevelt’s team revisited 18 of the tumuli in Bin Tepe, to discover that eight showed signs of recent looting, one within six weeks or so of their arrival. Perhaps the low point was reached during the 2007 survey, when the Boston University team found that the tomb-chamber opening of one tumulus had been cleared and was being used as a toilet.6

  One important question about the looting of these ancient tombs is: Where are the stolen items going? There is obviously a huge demand for looted ancient Lydian artifacts on the international antiquities market, so it is inconceivable that the contents of hundreds of Lydian tombs have remained in Turkey. But beyond the fact that most if not all the valuable artifacts from Lydian tumuli leave Turkey via the city of Izmir and pass through the hands of dealers in Europe and the United States, we know little else. Unfortunately what we are left with is the sad fact that, due to the vast amount of looting taking place in western Turkey, archaeologists like Dr. Roosevelt are never allowed the opportunity to investigate untouched tumuli, and so gain important insights into the culture of the ancient Lydians and the archaeological landscape of western Turkey.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Treasure of Benghazi: Heist of the Century?

  During the chaos of the civil war in Libya in 2011, there was a major robbery from a bank in the city of Benghazi. In what newspapers described as one of the biggest heists in archaeological history, thieves broke into the bank vault and made off with thousands of ancient coins, jewelry, and statuettes originally from the site of Cyrene in north east Libya. The so-called Treasure of Benghazi was never seen again, though there were reports of some items from the hoard turning up in the Benghazi gold market and in neighboring Egypt. However, there have been serious questions asked about the theft. For example, why, if the robbery took place in May 2011, did bank officials not report it until October 2011, and how, because the presence of the treasure in the bank vault was a closely guarded secret, did the thieves know it was there? The robbery also brings into focus the wider issue of the scale of looting in Libya during the conflict of 2011, with some archaeologists stating that the country’s antiquities were safe despite the chaos, while other sources claimed that Libya’s museums were being looted and ancient sites destroyed in NATO bombing raids.

  The site of ancient Cyrene is located in modern Shahhat, a town in the Dist
rict of Jebal al Akhdar (“Green Mountain”) in northeastern Libya. The name Cyrene is derived from the ancient Greek Kyre, a spring on the site that the Greeks consecrated to the god Apollo. According to ancient Greek historian Herodotus (fifth century BC) Cyrene was founded in 631 BC by Greek emigrants from the island of Thera (modern Santorini), an island in the southern Aegean Sea, who, racked by famine, were advised by the Oracle at Delphi to send a colony to Libya. Located in a fertile valley, Cyrene soon flourished and developed into a major commercial and cultural center, eventually giving its name to the whole region: Cyrenaica. The success of Cyrene led to the establishment of four other Greek colonies in the region: Apollonia (the port of Cyrene, located in modern Susa), Barce (also known as Ptolemais, located near modern Al Marj), Tocra (originally Taucheira—on the coast to the northwest of Barce), and Euesperides, the westernmost of the colonies in Cyrenaica, situated on the outskirts of modern Benghazi. These five Greek colonies were collectively known as the Pentapolis.

  5.1. Archaeological site of Cyrene. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

  Cyrenaica was ruled as a republic from the mid-fifth century BC and was at the height of prosperity in the fifth and fourth centuries BC. The city’s economy was based on the export of grain and the medicinal plant silphium. Silphium was exploited in a number of ways; perfume was extracted from its flowers, its stalk was used as food, and medicine was obtained from its juice and roots. As early as the seventh century BC Greek and Egyptian women were using the plant as a contraceptive. Indeed, silphium became so important for Cyrene’s economy and way of life that it was depicted on the city’s coinage for many years, though over-harvesting finally exhausted all supplies during the Roman period and the plant has long been extinct.