Recent news reports out of the City of Paphos, Cyprus describe a clash between the Mayor of Paphos on the one hand and the Cyprus antiquities department and its local Museum in Paphos on the other, with official pronouncements, competing press conferences and plenty of mudslinging. The Mayor indirectly accuses staff at the Museum and… Read More Bizarre antiquities-related political feud erupts on Cyprus
A new post on the Staffordshire Hoard website has announced completion of the cleaning and conservation project. With many tiny fragments emerging from the soil during this process, the total number of pieces is now about 4,000. Several pieces have been reconstructed from these fragments, with surprising results. The research phase is continuing and a… Read More Staffordshire Hoard Conservation Programme Completed
Here is a review in “The Art Newspaper” of the remarkable show now at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, exploring Hellenistic Art – http://theartnewspaper.com/shows/hellenistic-greece-emerges-from-the-shadows-of-classicism/
A ruling by Israel’s high court, supported by the Israel Antiquities Authority, now requires all dealers to document every object in their inventory online with a description, including provenance, and a photograph. While this may at first sound sensible, it is important to point out that much of the trade in Israel is in very… Read More Israeli high court: antiquities dealers must document all artefacts online
A few proposals floated in the final months of 2015 offered rational, practical options for saving antiquities and ancient monuments.… Read More Rational Proposals for Safeguarding Antiquities – But Will Anyone Act?
With Islamic State on the rampage, and other groups swearing allegiance to them in Libya, Tunisia, Nigeria, Yemen and Afghanistan, the threat to ancient heritage is greater than ever, and the debate over whether or not to return antiquities, looted or legally exported, to the modern nation states where they were discovered is fiercer than ever.… Read More Making Matters Worse? The Debate Over “Repatriating” Antiquities to Failed States in the Middle East
A BBC online feature entitled “The men who smuggle the loot that funds IS”, 16 February, 2015, opens with the following remarkable claim: “The trade in antiquities is one of Islamic State’s main sources of funding, along with oil and kidnapping.” At no point in the dozen or so paragraphs that follow does author Simon… Read More Sensationalist Reporting and the Antiquities Trade: If it’s in Print it Must be True!
The recent decision by The British Museum to send a single sculpture from the famed Parthenon Marbles (or Elgin Marbles) on loan briefly to the Hermitage in Russia, causing outrage in Greece, has once again drawn attention to issues of cultural heritage relating to antiquities. Whatever the merits of the arguments put forward by those… Read More Greek Antiquities in the British Museum, London
In dealing with antiquities, one tends to focus on objects truly “ancient” in that they belong to cultures such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome. Defining precisely what is ancient or an antiquity is itself something of a puzzle, with scholars, dealers, curators and collectors all having varying opinions. Clio Ancient Art has defined any object… Read More Medieval Antiquities in London: The British Museum and Museum of London
This is a truly amazing piece of research with broad implications. The international team involved plans next to determine if these trade routes for valued materials continued into the later Bronze Age and beyond. Here is the article in the online journal ScienceNordic.com, including a link to the original research in Danish (opens in a… Read More NEWS ITEM: Danish Bronze Age glass beads traced to Egypt
Clio Ancient Art & Antiquities 
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