Ancient Treasures

by Brian Haughton

  In 331 BC Cyrene was conquered by Alexander the Great, and after his death in 323 BC came under the control of the Greek general Ptolemy I and his dynasty. Cyrene became established as a Roman province in 74 BC, and enjoyed a lasting period of peace until the large scale destruction and massacres of the Jewish Revolt of AD 115. The city nevertheless recovered during the reign of Hadrian (Roman Emperor from AD 117 to AD 138) and entered a new age of prosperity that lasted throughout the second century AD. However, in AD 365 a huge earthquake and tidal wave hit the area and Cyrene began to decline, a process exacerbated by the growing aridity of the region and increasing attacks by nomadic tribes.

  Despite the ravages of time, natural disaster, and warfare, the extant remains of ancient Cyrene are still some the largest and most impressive in the Mediterranean. Designated a World Heritage Site by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1982, the archaeological site of Cyrene includes the magnificent Sanctuary of Apollo, begun in the seventh century BC and containing temples to Apollo, Artemis, and the Egyptian goddess Isis, as well as an impressive fifth-century theater (later converted into an amphitheater by the Romans) and the second century AD Trajan Baths. The site also includes the huge Temple of Zeus, began in the fifth century BC but restored by the Romans, the late-seventh-century BC Sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone, various treasuries, an agora, and a large necropolis.

  It is unclear just exactly when the Benghazi Treasure was excavated, though it is known that the hoard is a collection of various finds made by Italian archaeologists at sites in Libya, including Cyrene, while they occupied the country (from 1912 until 1942). Archaeological investigations at Cyrene go back a long way, and there were some attempts at excavation at the site by British teams in the mid-19th century. However, it was not until the early 20th century that any serious work was done. The Archaeological Institute of America excavated at Cyrene in 1910-1911 under the direction of Richard Norton, but on the morning of March 11, 1911, the expedition’s epigrapher, Herbert Fletcher DeCou, was shot and killed by Arabs, and the excavations came to a close soon afterward.

  Italian excavations at Cyrene began in late 1913 and carried on until 1942. Many items from the Benghazi treasure were apparently discovered by Italian archaeologists between 1917 and 1922 at the Temple of Artemis. Between 1928 and 1930 Luigi Pernier and Carlo Anti conducted excavations at the temple of Artemis as part of the Italian Archaeological Mission and uncovered a rich votive deposit that included seventh- and sixth-century BC pottery, terracotta figurines, and a number of objects of gold, silver, bronze, glass, amber, bone, and ivory. Pernier is famous for his discovery of the Phaistos Disc, a supposedly 14th-century BC inscribed clay disc, which he discovered in 1908 at the Minoan palace-site of Phaistos (second millennium BC) on Crete, though doubts persist as to the object’s authenticity. However, the items excavated from the Temple of Artemis by the Italians are only a part—though a major part—of what is known as the Treasure of Benghazi. Other items from the treasure were excavated by Italian archaeologists in 1937 from the Late Hellenistic (c160 BC–30 BC) Roman Villa of the Columns at the ancient port of Ptolemais (formerly Barce), about halfway between Benghazi and Susa. A third element of the treasure is a hoard of 2,000 coins known as the Meliu Collection, though little seems to be known about their origin.

  Although there is no official list of what exactly the Benghazi Treasure comprised, it is believed that there were between 7,700 and as many as 10,000 objects, including 364 gold coins, 2,433 silver coins, and 4,484 bronze coins, of Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and early Islamic origin. There were also 306 pieces of ancient jewelry (including necklaces, bracelets, anklets, rings, gold earrings, gold armbands, and precious stones) and 43 other ancient objects including a gold foil plaque depicting a battle scene; various figurines of bronze, glass, ivory, and terracotta; Egyptian faïence scarabs; pottery; and a limestone head.

  In 1942, when Allied forces invaded Libya, the Benghazi Treasure (or at least most of it; we do not have an inventory for this period) was packed up into two padlocked military chests and shipped to Italy, where it was displayed in the Museo Coloniale (Colonial Museum) of the Ministry of Italian Africa in Rome. In 1944 the chests were moved to the city of Cremona on the left bank of the Po River in northern Italy, and then to Val Brenta, in the Dolomites, in the northeast of the country. In 1961 the chests containing the treasure were finally returned to an independent Libya, when an inventory was apparently taken, though the objects were for some reason not photographed. Crucially, however, we do not know if the contents of the chests at this time included everything that the Italians had taken out of Libya in 1942. After the chests were returned to Libya, they were moved into two safes in the vaults of the National Commercial Bank in Omar al-Mukhtar Street, in the center of Benghazi. Unfortunately, during the Gaddafi regime scholars were forbidden from studying or documenting the collection, apart from the Islamic coins; consequently the contents of the chests were last checked as long ago as 1974. We know that in 1980 another collection of coins and artifacts from Benghazi was placed into the two safes, but apart from that the treasure remained in the vault largely forgotten about.

  Toward the end of October 2011, at a conference in Paris held by UNESCO, details of an extraordinary robbery in Benghazi were revealed. Apparently, in the weeks following the taking of the city by rebel forces in February 2011, robbers broke into the National Bank, probably from a neighboring building, and drilled directly through a ceiling comprising more than 2 feet of steel-reinforced concrete and entered the vault. Then, probably using a circular saw, they sawed through the hinges of one safe and through the back of another to get at the wooden chests containing the treasure. The robbers then tore open the chests and took the most valuable of the ancient objects from inside. Items of lesser value in the vault were left untouched. On June 2nd, Fadel Ali Mohammed, chairman of the archaeology department of Libya’s newly created National Transitional Council in Benghazi, wrote to the attorney general about the theft, which had in fact occurred on May 24th, and informed UNESCO in July. But why had it taken five months for details of the robbery to be announced to the public?

  Hafed Walada, a Libyan archaeologist and a research fellow at King’s College London, has said that that the robbery may have been an inside job carried out by robbers who knew exactly what they were looking for. Another archaeologist, Dr. Ahmed Buzaian, a professor of archaeology at Benghazi University, has also voiced his belief that the people who broke into the vault knew what was kept there and how valuable it was. The robbery certainly seems to have been well planned, and the thieves must have had advanced knowledge about the contents of the vaults, which points to there being some help from the inside—hence the delay in announcing the robbery. However, extensive questioning of bank employees and inquiries with staff at the Department of Antiquities in Benghazi led nowhere. There is another peculiarity about the robbery: The hole that the robbers drilled through the concrete ceiling was just about big enough to allow a child or a tiny adult through into the vault. How could such a person have carried out the extensive damage to the safes? Perhaps there was another reason why the theft was announced so long after it took place. It has been suggested that after struggling so hard to gain international recognition of their overthrow of the Gaddafi regime, Libya’s National Transitional Council were worried that their reputation would be tarnished by admitting to the theft of such important antiquities.

  Whatever the reasons for the delay in reporting the incident, it did not change the fact that the valuable objects were missing and that, because there were apparently few if any photographs of the objects, the treasure would be extremely hard to track down. Nevertheless, Francesco Bandarin, UNESCO’s assistant director-general for culture, together with a number of Libyan archaeologists, organized a worldwide hunt for the Benghazi Treasure, and Interpol alerted 188 national police forces to be on the lookout for the stolen items. At first these actions seemed to have paid o
ff, as reports came in that a farmer in Egypt had attempted to smuggle a 3-inch-high gold figurine and 503 gold coins through the port city of Alexandria. There were also stories that an unusually high number of classical coins had been appearing on the Benghazi downtown gold market and also on the Egyptian black market. However, authorities were unable to locate the farmer, and it was never discovered whether his items or those sold in Benghazi were actually part of the Benghazi Treasure. Yussuf ben Nasr, director of antiquities for the city, has stated that he believes most if not all the objects have left the country. A worse fear is that the metal objects from the treasure have been melted down and sold. The most serious problem hampering the recovery of the collection is that without detailed illustrations or photographs of the stolen items, it will be almost impossible to prove what exactly belongs to the Benghazi Treasure.

  As to the wider issue of the looting of Libya’s ancient sites and museums, there appears to some disagreement as to how much damage was done to the country’s rich historical heritage during the nine months of hostilities. In August 2011 English-language Indian daily newspaper The Hindu published an article by journalist Vladimir Radyuhin that described mass looting of ancient artifacts in Libya and NATO aircraft bombing of the ancient sites of Leptis Magna and Sabratha. The article also stated that the “plunder of Libya’s cultural heritage has been going on since February.”1 The source of this sensational news was a certain Nikolai Sologubovsky, a “Russian expert on Western Asia” also described in the article as a “scholar…orientalist, writer and film maker” who had spent April to July of 2011 in Libya as a correspondent for a Moscow tabloid.2 Sologubovsky also went on Russian television in August 2011, informing the public that NATO had bombed Libya’s ancient sites and that the al-Jamahiriya National Museum in Tripoli had been looted and its antiquities shipped by sea to Europe.

  However, in September 2011, a fact-finding mission by UNESCO experts found that there had in fact been minimal damage to Libya’s ancient monuments, and no damage at all to Leptis Magna and Sabratha. The lack of major damage was partly because NATO had purposely avoided bombing archaeological sites; indeed, a no-strike list of cultural heritage institutions in Libya had been drawn up before any air strikes took place. So who to believe? Research by Dr. Samuel Hardy of the Conflict Antiquities blog has discovered that Nikolai Sologubovsky was neither a scholar nor an expert on Western Asia, but the official publicist of the Russian Committee of Solidarity with the Peoples of Libya and Syria, which as Hardy says is an “explicitly pro-Libyan dictatorship, pro-Syrian dictatorship lobbying group.”3 Nikolai Sologubovsky obviously has an agenda in spreading stories about mass looting and NATO bombings in Libya, and of course has never provided any evidence to back up his claims.

  This disinformation campaign by Sologubovsky does not mean, of course, that looting did not take place in Libya during the rebellion, as the theft of the Benghazi Treasure shows. Unfortunately, the museums and ancient monuments of a country undergoing political and social upheaval will always be at risk of looting and damage, as witnessed in Egypt during the fall of President Hosni Mubarak and in Iraq, after the downfall of Saddam Hussein. Thus museums, auction houses, and art dealers throughout the world need to be made aware that items coming from any country during or immediately after uprisings, like that seen in Libya, may well be looted, and it is their responsibility to check the provenance of such objects carefully. Unfortunately it seems increasingly probable now that the Benghazi Treasure will never be recovered, but its theft does highlight the fact that museums and archaeological sites in Libya are hugely underfunded and a large proportion without adequate security after years of government neglect. For a country with such a rich and varied archaeological heritage, of which the remains of the ancient Greek colonial cities of Cyrenaica are just a part, that is a situation that needs to change soon.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Morgantina Treasure and the Looting of Italy

  The Morgantina Treasure is the name given to a 16-piece collection of Greek silverware originating from the ancient settlement of Morgantina in Sicily. The story of this controversial ancient treasure starts around 1979–1980, when looters excavated an area of the ancient site under the very noses of the authorities and made off with a hoard of valuable ancient objects. The treasure was soon smuggled out of Italy and ended up in Switzerland with infamous antiquities dealer Robert Hecht. Over a period of several years in the 1980s Hecht sold the objects to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for around $2.74 million, with the Met announcing its new acquisitions in 1984. Suspecting that the objects had been looted, a prominent archaeologist made numerous requests throughout the following years for an opportunity to view the pieces more closely but was constantly refused by the museum. Eventually the Italian government intervened and the objects were finally returned to Italy in 2010. But why had it taken so long for the Met to admit its mistake, and what does the case of the Morgantina Treasure tell us about the shady world of the black market in Italian antiquities?

  The collection of 16 highly ornate silver pieces with gold detail that make up the Morgantina Treasure includes two large bowls, plates, a ladle with a dog’s-head handle, pitchers, a cup with two handles, an emblem depicting the mythical sea monster Scylla in sculptural relief, and two distinctive miniature horns, which may at one time have been attached to a helmet. Archaeologists believe that the collection had been hidden inside two decorated kraters (wide, two-handled vessels used in ancient Greece and Rome for mixing wine and water). Such beautifully crafted silverware would have been used for religious ceremonies and symposia (ancient Greek drinking banquets). The fact that the pieces vary in date and style, though they were locally made (probably in Syracuse, a city renowned for its highly skilled silversmiths) and all belong to the third century BC (the Hellenistic period), suggest that the objects were the property of a collector, perhaps the owner of the house in which they were found.

  The ancient city of Morgantina is located in fertile hills near the modern town of Aidone, in the province of Enna in central Sicily. The site has been settled at least since the beginning of the late Sicilian Bronze Age (c1270 BC) and was occupied well into the Roman period, up until around 50 BC. The settlement occupied two different sites successively, beginning with the hilltop known as the Cittadella, and from the middle of the fifth century BC the neighboring series of hills called Serra Orlando. Morgantina became established as a significant town in the first quarter of the sixth century BC in the wake of the wave of Greek colonization of many areas of South Italy and Sicily that took place from the eighth to the sixth centuries BC. This Greek area was to become known as Magna Graecia. In 459 BC Sikel leader Duketios (the Sikels were the local indigenous people) captured Morgantina and even managed to defeat a combined army from the powerful Greek cities of Syracuse, in southeast Sicily, and Akragas, on the southern coast of the island.

  Although Duketios’s control was to be short-lived, perhaps lasting around a decade, it was probably during this period that the site of Morgantina moved to Serra Orlando. At its peak, the second city of Morgantina was an important place, containing around 1,000 occupied house lots and an estimated urban population of around 7,000.

  In 396 BC Morgantina was captured by Dionysios of Syracuse, and for the next two centuries it remained under the influence of the mighty Greek city-state of Syracuse. Later, under King Hieron II, who ruled Syracuse and many other cities in eastern Sicily from 270 BC to 215 BC, Morgantina flourished and many of the extant buildings on the site date to his reign. From 262 BC onward, Hieron II had been a faithful ally of Rome, but after his death in 215 BC, during the struggles between the Roman Republic and the Carthaginian Empire (the city of Carthage was located in present-day Tunisia), which constituted the Second Punic War, Syracuse joined forces with Carthage. Morgantina stayed faithful to Syracuse, which fell to the Romans in 212 BC and was sacked by the Roman army the following year. Morgantina was subsequently handed over to the Spanish mercenaries
who had fought on Rome’s side during the battles in Sicily, and the former inhabitants of the city were sold into slavery. From that time onward Morgantina declined, with a number of public buildings falling out of use and whole residential neighborhoods being abandoned. The latest remains on the site date to around 50 BC, and by the middle of the first century AD the once-flourishing city was no more than a handful of scattered buildings.

  Throughout the centuries the ruins of Morgantina gradually disappeared beneath farmland until rediscovered by archaeologists in the modern era. In fact, even the location of Morgantina had been lost in time. In 1955 archaeologists from Princeton University were combing the hillsides around Aidone looking for traces of the ancient site when they began to discover scatters of artifacts and, most important of all, at the top of the Serra Orlando ridge, a small wooden die marked MGT—for Morgantina. It was then they knew that the lost city of Morgantina must lie somewhere beneath their feet. Since 1955 the ancient city has been under excavation by American and Italian archaeologists. The initial excavations were undertaken from 1955 to 1963 and 1966 to 1967 by the Princeton University Archaeological Expedition to Sicily under the joint directorship of professors Erik Sjöqvist and Richard Stillwell of the department of art and archaeology. Excavations continued on the site into the 1970s and beyond; in 1980, Malcolm Bell III, professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Virginia, took over as director of the Expedition and still directs work on Serra Orlando today.

  6.1. View of Morgantina. Image licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license on Wikipedia.

  More than half a century’s work on the remains of Morgantina have revealed some fascinating remains, including a large agora (marketplace) with stoas (ancient Greek covered walk or colonnade) on three sides, a small theater, a granary, various sanctuaries, Classical and Hellenistic houses (many containing mosaics), a bath complex, shops, cemeteries, and roads. Astonishingly, only around a fifth of the ancient site has so far been uncovered.