by Sarah Parcak
In 2014, six of my colleagues and I testified at the US State Department in support of import restrictions on Egyptian antiquities. I shared my looting data, while others discussed the effects of looting on specific sites. This led, in 2016, to the first bilateral memorandum of understanding on cultural property protection between a country in the Middle East/North Africa and the United States.9
In the fall of 2017, an illegal antiquities trafficking case made headlines.10 The craft store Hobby Lobby, ubiquitous in the United States, makes over $3 billion annually. Driven by their passion for proving the truth of the Bible, the store’s owners, the Green family, started collecting antiquities and founded the Museum of the Bible, a $500 million institution in Washington, DC, which displays thousands of Middle Eastern objects.
Several years ago, the Greens met with experts in the illegal trafficking of antiquities, including attorney Patty Gerstenblith of DePaul University, a deity in the field of cultural property and the law, who wrote the standard textbook on the subject.11 The Greens expressed concern over cylinder seals from Iraq that they had considered purchasing, since they suspected the seals might have left Iraq illegally following the Iraq War. Gerstenblith and her colleagues concurred, advising the Greens not to purchase the objects. The message was crystal clear: buying them was an illegal act and would have serious consequences.
But the Greens bought the objects anyway and imported them into the United States as “roof tiles.” The authorities caught them red-handed, throwing into question the legality of much of the Museum of the Bible’s collection, and fined them $3 million.12 While such a penalty is the financial equivalent of a simple rounding error for billionaires, investigators continue their case against the Greens, scrutinizing hundreds of additional objects as of winter 2018.
Preventing future cases like this is anything but easy. One of the biggest challenges facing law enforcement involves the establishment of “probable cause” for antiquities smuggling. This term refers to reasonable grounds for pressing a charge or making an arrest. Once that probable cause exists, the lawyers’ jobs are far easier when trying to bring a case to trial, but customs and immigration officials still face huge obstacles gathering evidence. When they suspect an individual of purchasing antiquities illegally, they have to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that looters dug it up. They also have to pinpoint when the looting took place.
Looters, We Are Watching You
Technology such as satellite imagery could not only help governments identify objects as looted, but help find the very provenance that gives objects priceless context for archaeologists.13 I can imagine your raised eyebrows, and I understand your skepticism. I have spent this book discussing all that satellites can—and cannot—do for archaeology. We cannot zoom in from space and see individual objects. Even if we could, I would be more likely to win the lottery than to catch the exact moment when looters removed a mummy from the ground. Without any photographic evidence for an object’s place of origin (it’s not common for looters to pose for selfies), we might not be able to support a determination of probable cause.
Please grant me the benefit of the doubt for a moment more. If we could figure out an object’s site of origin, the implications would be enormous. Countries would have a stronger case for repatriation of their cultural heritage, and Indigenous communities might be empowered to ask for those objects to be returned for display in local museums. While the exact archaeological context is still lost, simply knowing an object came from that site advances archaeological knowledge. Finally, it would help prove an object’s origin—the first step in proving it was looted—in court cases and prosecutions, sending people to jail for assaulting our global heritage. Believe me, this can move from hypothetical dream to reality.
Operation Mummy’s Curse
As part of a National Geographic story on looting in Egypt, I gathered information on specific cases.14 I met the author, my partner in uncovering crime, Tom Mueller, a curly-haired, dashing spitfire, in New York in the winter of 2014. He was familiar with my Egypt looting data, but he wanted to see the industry downstream—what happened to stolen antiquities on the Western end of the market.
At the invitation of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Tom and I received clearance to visit a secretive destination indeed. Somewhere in Brooklyn stands an imposing light-brick building with faux windows and a single back-entrance loading dock. It is a storage facility for confiscated art—things collected by the rich and famous of New York. After we had the once-over from the security desk, we were initiated into the upper floor, where boxes of every imaginable shape and size were stacked floor to ceiling, just like the scene from the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. (And yes, I scanned the stacks for ark-shaped boxes. No luck.)
Our agent contact ushered us downstairs to a brightly lit room where antiquities were laid out, recovered during what they called—and I am not making this up—“Operation Mummy’s Curse.”15 In 2009, based on suspicious import documents, ICE had recovered an Egyptian sarcophagus cut in half and sent through the US Postal Service. They made their bust in the New York garage of a well-known collector of Egyptian antiquities, Joseph Lewis III.
Lewis had received the sarcophagus and other goods from a dealer named Mousa “Morris” Khouli. Special Agent Brent Easter had already busted Khouli for a looted statue head from Iraq, but he suspected that was just the first whiff of a very dirty rat. Stalking the website of Khouli’s company, Windsor Antiquities, Easter found multiple Egyptian objects that Khouli claimed had come from the United Arab Emirates.16
Khouli finally admitted that they came from Egypt, meaning they violated Egypt’s National Stolen Property Act,17 which forbids removing antiquities from the country. Easter made a bust, finding objects worth $2.5 million. Khouli only got six months of house arrest, community service, and a year’s probation. Lewis pleaded ignorance of receiving stolen goods, and, after the case was retried in 2014, was made to forfeit several objects seized by Homeland Security and was cleared of all charges.18
Tom told me afterward that he wished someone had taken my picture to capture the look on my face as I walked into the room with the recovered antiquities: shock, disgust, and utter amazement. At that moment, this Egyptologist could not speak, for an ancient vision floated before me, weightless, into the vault of memories to be relived on my deathbed. Reds, whites, creams, blacks—a palette of perfection was painted on a 2,400-year-old sarcophagus unlike any I had ever seen. The decoration included a beautiful carved face, perhaps a portrait of the deceased.
Managing to tear my eyes away, I toured the other objects while the National Geographic team took photographs for the story. From Middle Kingdom boat models and a wooden sculpture from around 1800 BC, to additional coffins supposedly from the same sarcophagus set, all were recovered by ICE. The agent explained that colleagues of mine had translated the sarcophagus texts,19 giving it a date between the Late and Ptolemaic Periods, perhaps the same era as Artaxerxes III’s attack on Tell Tebilla.
Thanks to those texts, my vision had a name: Lady Shesep-Amun-Tayes-Herit. ICE knew her sarcophagus had entered the United States illegally but had no idea of her point of origin. I suggested that I use her as a test case, to see if the satellite database we had spent so long compiling might help. That summer, she would be repatriated, so the research was a worthwhile endeavor.
There’s No Place Like Home
Maybe, just maybe, the satellite imagery documented this specific looting incident, assuming the lady came from a cemetery and not a rock-cut tomb in the cliffs. Common 2,500 years ago, a cliff burial would have hidden her from satellites, so fingers crossed.
I started narrowing down a database of 279 looted sites, with occupation dates for each based on previous excavation and survey data. Agents brought me radiocarbon dates for the sarcophagus, which confirmed the Late to Ptolemaic Period date range of 664–30 BC. So, step one was to determine which of the 279 looted sites had cemeteries of the right
date. This narrowed down the possibilities considerably, to 33.
As I turned my head to the side to look at the lady’s face, her eyes caught mine. I saw tiny glints in the corners—grains of sand. Thank goodness the looters did a bad job cleaning up the wood. The sand meant a desert origin, and the great state of preservation also suggested someplace dry.
The second step was to narrow down the sites even more, to a cemetery along the desert edge. We also needed a site near an urban center, as our lady represented the highest form of art, created by a da Vinci–quality workshop. In antiquity, we would expect to find them in a large city.
Only 10 sites now matched the criteria. Fortunately, we had the lady’s date of arrival stateside. It can take a year or more from an object’s exhumation to its trafficking to foreign markets. The pieces were seized between September and November 2009, and the looting probably occurred between 2005 and early 2009.
Much of the looting documented on the satellite imagery took place from 2009 onward, after the global recession. Only 5 sites out of the 10 had looting before 2009, and only one site, Abusir el Malik, had thousands of looting pits from 2005 to 2009.
In ancient Egypt, names often ran in families, and Shesep-Amun-Tayes-Herit is not a name you see every day. A coffin with the exact same name, from the same period as our lady—now located in the Tampa Museum of Art in Florida20—gave us a crucial link. That wooden sarcophagus, colorful but not nearly as artful, had a provenance of Abusir el Malik. It seemed too strong a coincidence. I also found a statue of a scribe from “the Saqqara region,” the same region as Abusir el Malik, on which the name Shesep-Amun-Tayes-Herit appeared, in this case as the scribe’s mother.21
Abusir el Malik, Egypt. Note the thousands of looting pits. [IMAGE COURTESY GOOGLE EARTH]
With a long history of looting, Abusir el Malik is a cratered moonscape, with tens of thousands of looting pits, old and new, and intense new activity in that crucial range. Human remains lie across the site like leaves beneath a tree in fall. My colleagues who have visited come back visibly shaken. It seemed ever more probable that this was our lady’s home.
She was laid to rest in an elite cemetery there 2,500 years ago, in a time when a city flourished there, along the banks of the Nile. From the title recorded on her sarcophagus—Chantress of Amun—she worked in a temple, one of the highest positions a female private citizen could hold. She probably lived in a multistory house, appointed with considerable luxury, and was beloved by her family. They worked to ensure she was buried in a sarcophagus made and painted by the city’s elite artisans, and it follows that her tomb was filled with statues, shabtis, jewelry, and all the finery imaginable. The lady’s family paid the priests well to make her offerings, probably for several generations. Her name is now remembered; the looters stole her things and destroyed her body, but ironically, they helped preserve her memory and fulfill her dreams of immortality.
A Drop in the Bucket
Finding the likely origin of a single sarcophagus is a first step. Once archaeologists have data on looted sites, they can then create lists of objects likely looted from those sites, and that could help break the chain from looter to market.
But understanding the mechanisms behind the whole dark trade is key. Currency devaluations, unemployment, a drop in tourist numbers, and price inflation all provoke looting. Security is far better now at large archaeological sites, but at remote sites, the looting may get worse before it improves. Innovative solutions are needed to combat this issue, one of the great “hidden” problems of the 21st century. Hidden, but so dangerous.
Some experts have suggested that looting has deep ties to terrorism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Syria, and has funded considerable arms purchases.22 Anecdotal evidence for this exists in spades. In Syria, ISIL’s looting of antiquities was “overseen” by the same branch of the caliphate’s government that managed oil profiteering, with a charge of 20 percent “rent” of the total value of items looted by the groups who tear apart ancient sites.23 Elsewhere, there are potential connections to the drug trade and human trafficking. While more work remains to be done on these illegal networks, they are likely connected.
Profits in the antiquities trade are rumored to be significant, with numbers thrown around ranging from millions to several billion dollars a year. As with any black-market trade, it is impossible to know for sure. Far more work needs to be done to tease apart the networks and to understand how objects move from places like Egypt to Europe, Asia, and the United States. Outraged proclamations from governments and organizations such as UNESCO are too easily ignored. The problem requires a global movement to stop the collection of illegally obtained antiquities.
We cannot say that every looter is a terrorist. It is not that simple. We need to understand what classes of people profit from looting and what life is like for the average looter, in order to discern the true nature of the crisis.
In local looting rings in Egypt, village collectives have been known to split the minor proceeds from any objects sold. Local looters—and they are often children—may get a small fee per object or be paid per night of digging, no matter the risk. Tunnels collapse. Open shafts are literal pitfalls in the dark. Sometimes guards discover a looter working deep down a shaft, and even if the guards are unarmed, ample large stones abound. As one guard told me, “He dug his own grave. I just eased his passage.” It’s an understandable antipathy, considering that site guards, usually mature men and fathers, are regularly shot at and sometimes killed by the more organized looting rings.24
It is a desperate crime. Locals may sell to criminal elements, but they loot out of a need to support their families. Even for those for whom looting is a side hustle, as I have heard it described, it may often be for meat to feed a large family, or for money to pay for an operation. Not quite desperation, but neither are these “first world problems.” If we can look with empathy at this end of the crisis, we have a chance of coming up with effective solutions.
Wealthier individuals also loot or serve as middlemen, and that’s where the real money starts to be made. Professional criminals loot, too, without it being their primary source of income; the antiquities trade, gunrunning, prostitution—it’s all the same in the underground networks that both buy and sell for profit.
The big money is made by end sellers, perhaps via large auction houses or private dealers, though we do not know how much the network marks up pieces along the way. The people who really cause that first shovel to be stuck into the sand are the buyers in the West and Far East—ranging from anyone bidding on a $100 scarab online to those paying millions at a high-end auction for a sculpture. They drive the market.
If no demand existed, looting would simply not be at the current level. It’s that we must combat first. Similarly, cultural demand for endangered animal parts and exotic pets must be tackled through comprehensive reeducation combined with rigorous punitive measures, or countless wild species will be lost. The blame for both the trade in wild animals and antiquities cannot be shifted down the food chain—it is the top-level consumers who must be sought out. Even, and perhaps especially, if that means looking in our own cultural mirror.
Solutions … Maybe.
Satellite imagery only complements ground-based action to protect sites. Local training and educational initiatives are essential and have already had a great impact on site protection, and there are hundreds of such projects globally. They move beyond the “poverty porn” sold by so many NGOs and nonprofits to real programs that help local people find legitimate, sustainable, economic value in their heritage.
Partnering with key stakeholders from communities near archaeological sites and learning what their needs and skills are can be a powerful way to assist with site protection. When those towns and villages see their economic situations improving, they know their future is with the past. Also, engagement with youth is essential. We can show them that they are the true guardians of their cultural treasures and that there are great li
velihood opportunities through tourism.
An example of what can be done comes from Jordan, where archaeologist Morag Kersel has worked with the Petra National Trust, for their Petra Junior Rangers and Youth Engagement Petra programs. She helped them to create a module for over 100 girls aged 12 to 17, about the importance of archaeology, museums, and protecting sites from looters. The participants then interviewed tourists and the people running stalls at Petra, asking questions about the sale of antiquities. These types of workshops can empower youth to become stakeholders in protecting their own history.25 Kersel has also pioneered the use of drones to map looting at sites in Jordan as part of a program she calls “Follow the Pots.” She has my vote for one of the coolest women working in the Middle East today.26
Where local people are engaged, it makes all the difference in the world. Consider Luxor. Compared to the rest of Egypt, virtually no looting has occurred there that’s visible on satellite imagery. Yes, looting does happen, but given the hundreds of sites and the scope of the archaeological landscape, it is minimal. Nearly 100 percent of Luxor’s economy has close ties to the tourists who come to see the area’s ancient wonders.
With the uncertainties that arose in 2011, many tourists have stayed away, and everyone in Luxor has struggled, from tour guides to hotel staff to the guy on the corner selling tomatoes to his cousin in the hotel kitchen. Even so, the value placed on ancient Egyptian heritage stands strong. Please come to Luxor yourself. You’ll find cheap hotels, great food, lovely people, and you’ll make a difference in the war against looting.