[HN Gopher] British Museum gems for sale on eBay - how a theft w...
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British Museum gems for sale on eBay - how a theft was exposed
Author : helsinkiandrew
Score : 111 points
Date : 2024-05-27 16:41 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.co.uk)
| alephnerd wrote:
| Dr Higgs seems to have been doing this for decades.
|
| There is even an article published by the Times in 2002 about
| artifacts being stolen from the British Museum and how Dr Higgs
| was in charge of that investigation [0]
|
| [0] - https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/breakages-and-bungling-
| at...
| dmix wrote:
| https://archive.is/ZaWfP
|
| > Curators with years of experience get as little as PS12,000 a
| year and many complain they cannot afford to live in London.
|
| Curious if that statement came from Higgs.
|
| And possibly this incident inspired him to do later do the
| same.
|
| Note the original article said this as well:
|
| > He had been described by the UK government as "a world-
| renowned curator" in 2015 after helping to return a stolen
| 2,000-year-old statue to Libya. Dr Higgs later appeared on
| BBC's Crimewatch to describe his work.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Based on the original article, it sounds like the British
| Museum was heavily politicized with well heeled donors
| strongarming museum staff to do their bidding.
|
| > One big donor threatened to withdraw her funding from the
| museum when she was told that she could not drink red wine in
| one of the galleries during a party. At another function, a
| catering trolley rammed into a glass case and damaged a
| valuable artefact. Although the incident happened five years
| ago, the artefact is still being repaired.
|
| I think this is what Dr. Higgs used to rationalize his
| thieving - the donors clearly didn't care about the works but
| collectors did, and it I'm getting paid it's a win-win.
|
| I guess it's another vaunted institution that has turned
| rotten, like much of the UK.
|
| But tbf, PS12,000 in London in the early 2000s was not great
| but livable (equivalent to $18k in 2002)
| eterm wrote:
| 12k was shockingly bad for London in the early 2000s.
|
| You can't really convert currency and/or then apply
| inflation or try to compare to 2002 US living costs.
|
| London back then still cost a fortune to live in, 12k
| definitely wouldn't have been comfortable.
|
| Yes, the pound was stronger against the dollar back then,
| but that's little comfort for someone trying to live in
| London!
| alephnerd wrote:
| Fair point!
|
| I guess I was assuming almost $20k a year back then would
| have been livable back then, like it was for much of the
| US excluding a handful of cities like NYC or SF at the
| time.
|
| I think minimum wage was around PS9k/yr back then so I
| assumed 25% above minimum wage was acceptable (not great,
| but acceptable)
|
| Clearly not though.
| avianlyric wrote:
| London is the UKs capital city, and largest most wealthy
| city. It's cost of living in more-or-less on par with
| cities like New York and San Francisco.
|
| It's substantially higher than the rest of the UK, and
| minimum wage in London has generally been higher than the
| rest of the UK (either in law, or as a de-facto standard,
| with companies paying a "London bonus")
| alephnerd wrote:
| > It's cost of living in more-or-less on par with cities
| like New York and San Francisco
|
| More like Chicago in my limited experience, but the pre-
| tax salaries are way lower in London than for similar
| roles in the US.
|
| I never understood how people can afford to live in
| London by the late 2010s/early 2020s.
|
| > It's substantially higher than the rest of the UK, and
| minimum wage in London has generally been higher than the
| rest of the UK (either in law, or as a de-facto standard,
| with companies paying a "London bonus")
|
| Ofc, I'm just assuming London used to be relatively
| cheaper 20+ years ago and the cost of living ratio was
| not as bad then compared to today.
|
| Like Tower Hamlets seemed to have only started
| gentrifying in the early 2000s.
| Atotalnoob wrote:
| If we are doing straight comparisons, London is
| comparable cost of living to NYC and SF.
|
| 20k USD was not livable for either of those cities.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Nah London is definitely a bit cheaper than those cities.
| But yeah even so PS12k is very low.
| clort wrote:
| pretty sure that around 2001/2002 I was earning little
| over PS5/hr. Wikipedia suggest I was being paid more than
| minimum wage at that time:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Wage_Act_1
| 998...
| taylortbb wrote:
| > I guess I was assuming almost $20k a year back then
| would have been livable back then, like it was for much
| of the US excluding a handful of cities like NYC or SF at
| the time.
|
| You're excluding the reasonable comparables. London is
| the UK's equivalent of NYC or SF.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| There's a current open role for a "project curator" at
| just under PS30K:
|
| https://bmrecruit.ciphr-
| irecruit.com//templates/CIPHR/jobdet...
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Very ironic considering one of their excuses on returning
| artifacts to countries of origin is "they wouldn't be cared for
| and would be stolen".
| twixfel wrote:
| Same excuse every museum gives. The US is full of European art
| and artifacts.
| alephnerd wrote:
| American museums also seem to have a stronger financial
| muscle [0] as they tend to be overwhelmingly funded by self
| sustaining endowments and more open to monetization
| strategies like IP Licensing (eg. MoMA+Uniqlo's partnership)
|
| [0] - https://www.sothebysinstitute.com/news-and-
| events/news/the-b...
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| The US is a former British colony so it makes sense for it
| have british artifacts
| twixfel wrote:
| European, not just British.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| There's a difference between museums and galleries where
| pieces were purchased and have a good chain of ownership and
| pieces where the museum knows one of the owners in the chain
| looted the piece
| throw5345346 wrote:
| Small beer when it's also built in very large part on stolen
| land, eh? If giving stuff back is important (and I think it
| is), I'd love it if the knee-jerk thinkers of HN would start
| by looking at where they live and which tribe it was stolen
| from by force and murder.
| tasuki wrote:
| Sure, but which land isn't stolen?
| twixfel wrote:
| Well, the USA was completely stolen, every single square
| inch, and the natives genocided. Whereas the Basques for
| example, if they stole their land, did it in deep
| prehistory.
| MaxHoppersGhost wrote:
| The natives weren't one political group of people. They
| were hundred or thousands of tribes. And at some point
| each tribe "stole" it from some other tribe and
| territory. Some tribes (example: the Iroquois) were
| genociding other tribes.
| throw5345346 wrote:
| You know this is the same form of justification that used
| to be used for squirrelling things away in western
| museums?
| MaxHoppersGhost wrote:
| Yes.
| throw5345346 wrote:
| In many cases, the USA knows the names and families of
| the people it stole land from. Knows their lineage. Even
| has photographs of some of them!
|
| In historical terms it is a recent, deliberate,
| judicially-supported, documented theft. Not some
| undocumented invasion in hazy pre-history. Acts of
| Congress were passed to do it.
|
| The British Museum (along with the V&A) has some stuff
| (well looked-after) that people want back. Currently the
| law literally prevents it being returned, and these
| organisations are in many cases trying to find ways to
| work around that law so that it is long-loaned back
| forever, until the law is changed. There's no simple
| intransigence; there is dialogue and politics.
|
| The British Empire did some amazing things, and many,
| many ugly things. You won't find a person in the UK who
| doesn't understand that now, and there are all sorts of
| reparation campaigns, restitution campaigns, history
| projects, etc. etc.; nationally we rub our own noses in
| it so often that there's a right-wing backlash.
|
| So it's tedious in the extreme the way Americans keep
| prattling on about British museums as if there is only
| stonewalling, and as if there is no appropriation from
| native culture in its post-independence history. It's
| literally on paper.
| MaxHoppersGhost wrote:
| All land is "stolen". The tribes that were on the land when
| the Europeans rolled in had stolen it from some other tribe
| at some point too.
|
| Feel free to donate your land back to the tribe it was
| "stolen from".
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > If giving stuff back is important (and I think it is),
| I'd love it if the knee-jerk thinkers of HN would start by
| looking at where they live and which tribe it was stolen
| from by force and murder.
|
| Okay. Where do you live, who was it stolen from, and what
| are you going to do about it?
| throw5345346 wrote:
| In the south east of England. It's not really clear it
| was stolen by anyone. The only people in even slightly
| recorded history to really steal it buggered off a few
| hundred years later because they missed olive oil and
| hated the climate. Everyone else pretty much just turned
| up to run it better, like slightly violent management
| consultants.
|
| The point is that commenters arguing a museum should give
| stuff back from where they took it are often arguing from
| a country that has documentary records in its current
| legislative body that it faux-legalistically stole the
| very land it is on.
|
| In many cases, the USA stole that land after the British
| Museum acquired some object or other. It's astonishingly
| well-documented. Like the objects in the museum.
|
| If the argument is that all land has changed hands at
| some point in history and that excuses the documented way
| the USA murdered people, used biological warfare, and
| walked them to their deaths off their own land, then I'm
| not sure what all the po-faced fuss is about the Elgin
| Marbles.
|
| (Personally I think the Marbles should go home)
| justanotheratom wrote:
| yup, no sympathy for "British Museums".
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| There is no one to return them to, everyone from the past is
| dead.
| wigster wrote:
| my first girl friend is still alive.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| I think since these are cultural artifacts, many times looted
| in war or conquest, there's an argument to be made they could
| be returned to the cultural institutions or museums of the
| place they were taken from.
| dmix wrote:
| The FBI is investigating the sale of the gems to US buyers as
| well:
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3gqq7xy5xdo
|
| > The British Museum says of 1,500 items it estimates are stolen
| or missing, 626 have so far been recovered and 100 more have been
| found but not yet brought back.
| nopakos wrote:
| This doesn't exactly strengthen the museum's case against
| returning artifacts.
| jpablo wrote:
| There's a spanish saying: Ladron que roba a ladron tiene 100 anos
| de perdon.
|
| A Thief that stoles from a Thief has 100 years of forgiveness.
| frutiger wrote:
| Not taking a side in this debate, but what _is_ ownership? As
| far as I can tell it is an invented concept and has no
| objective truth, only a "truth that we all agree on".
| haiku2077 wrote:
| I like the word "possession" for this. Either actual
| possession, when you physically control and can use
| something, and constructive possesion, where you might not
| have physical contact with something but still control it.
|
| Ownership is when you convince the right people that you
| should possess something.
| 725686 wrote:
| Come on, you know exactly what he means.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Given the debate about the ethics of how the museum sourced
| its artifacts, I think this is a prime example of ownership
| being complicated.
| outlore wrote:
| Would you philosophize about ownership if someone stole your
| laptop or phone?
|
| Side tangent: there is an interesting Vox story about a
| Greenland meteorite. It illustrates the real human cost of
| these expeditions that filled museums. Therefore I find it
| hard to disentangle "ownership" from "violence". In this
| story, the change of ownership is a violent and traumatic
| event.
|
| https://youtu.be/yvdtWfHpCR4
| kleiba wrote:
| That's easy, man!
|
| Ownership is when you _buy_ a movie and then can watch it as
| many times as you want... until the streaming service goes
| out of business.
|
| Oh, sorry, I meant "book" and "read".
|
| No, sorry, wrong again... geez...
| will1am wrote:
| A form of karma
| nsguy wrote:
| In Hebrew there is a saying that goes roughly like "He who
| steals from a thief is exempt". This is commonly interpreted as
| you're not liable but goes to a Mishna (circa 100AD) that says
| you're exempt from the normal fines that apply to stolen
| property.
|
| https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%94%D7%92%D7%95%D7%A0%D7%91...
|
| Wouldn't surprise me if there was some sort of link to the
| Spanish but if there is I can't find it...
| ak_111 wrote:
| Another relevant Arabic saying: ham-eeha, haram-eeha.
|
| The guardians are the thieves.
| MaxHoppersGhost wrote:
| Not really relevant since the thief is really stealing from the
| public since these artifacts' sole purpose is for public
| enjoyment/education.
| upmind wrote:
| Why would they sell these gems on eBay, seems a bit daft to be
| honest.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Because he needs a way to sell them and it's a niche enough
| item that it'd be hard to sell elsewhere unless you have a good
| connection - who would likely get suspicious if _all_ of the
| stuff was going through them.
| balderdash wrote:
| I don't understand how the museums collection can go un-cataloged
| for decades, it seems to be a pretty fundamental element of
| running a museum (knowing what you have in your collection)
| asperous wrote:
| > estimated 2.4 million items
|
| That's 5 years if one person worked on it nonstop without
| sleeping and each item took 60 seconds.
|
| I would assume they probably sit in a secure location and items
| on display or items leaving/transferred are catalogued first so
| there's bit of a triage and backlog.
|
| Museums probably don't want to turn down valuable item
| donations even if they don't have the resources to catalogue if
| right away.
| shanemhansen wrote:
| This seems like a reasonable use of resources and time? I'm
| assuming the British Museum has been around a bit longer than
| 5 years and hopefully plans on being around longer than 5
| years.
|
| Maybe than can hire a couple people. [edit] removed
| inflammatory last sentence.
| nickff wrote:
| British Museum seems to have about 439 employees who work on
| "care, research, and conservation", of a total of around a
| thousand employees. Seems like they have enough budget and
| staff to get such a high-priority task done.
|
| https://www.britishmuseum.org/sites/default/files/2023-07/br.
| ..
| londons_explore wrote:
| > That's 5 years if one person worked on it nonstop without
| sleeping and each item took 60 seconds.
|
| Or... 2 people doing regular working hours for 3 years taking
| 10 seconds per item.
|
| Each item can literally be 'photo' + drawer/cabinet number.
| All other details can be crowdsourced or done later.
|
| How long does it take to take a photo?
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| How much time does it take to move a specific piece of
| artefact in/out of storage? What are the dimensions of the
| artefact? Are they sensitive to light? Are special
| equipments required to handle them? Every piece is
| different, not to mention the mandatory planning involved
| before moving every item. It's not the same as a retail
| store photographing their merchandise.
| PeterisP wrote:
| That's not cataloguing, that's recording, and as far as I
| understand this is long ago done - cataloguing is those
| "all other details" which require expertise and time; all
| the things like figuring out that this coin is a roman coin
| from 1st century, and that other coin from the same find is
| from another location.
| NavinF wrote:
| If it's long ago done, where is the wiki with 2.4 million
| photos? If it's not online it might as well not exist
| clwg wrote:
| It's one-quarter of their collection, and they've had 271
| years to accumulate and catalog all this material. As others
| have mentioned, they have enough staff.
|
| I would assume they issue a receipt and itemize donations
| nowadays. I think part of it could be reluctance because not
| everything they have in their possession is rightfully
| theirs[0].
|
| I don't know all the attributes required to properly catalog
| an artifact, but I imagine that advances in computer vision
| and translation could help tremendously.
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/british-empire-stole-
| cultura...
| Archelaos wrote:
| > and each item took 60 seconds
|
| The required time depends on a lot of things, such as on the
| target quality of the data record, the complexity and
| fragility of the item, etc. The primary purpose of a
| catalogue is not to prevent theft, but to provide a tool or
| research. Therefore you typically want high quality photos,
| ideally from different sides, angels and lighting (or even a
| 3D scan), a description of the item, its provenance, its
| treatment, keywords from a normalised vocabulary, a
| bibliography, etc.
|
| Here is a random example from the British Museum catalogue: h
| ttps://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/G_1896-0201-..
| . -- Just think yourself how long it would take you to
| compile all this information. I would estimate several hours,
| if not days.
|
| Following the theft, the British Museum announced a plan for
| a quick inventory of 2,400,000 items in 5 years for PS10m.[1]
| This means PS4.17 per item. If we use the UK adult minimum
| wage of PS11.44 as a lower bound, this yields an upper bound
| of 2.74 items per hour -- in other words: not more than
| aprox. 22 minutes per record (but probably a lot less,
| depending on the wages of the people involved). Such a tight
| budget does not seem like it would allow for anything useful
| to be compiled for research. It sounds more like a big waste
| of money.
|
| [1] https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/10/19/british-
| museum-to...
| haiku2077 wrote:
| The collection began 270 years ago, and has moved buildings a
| number of times, including a distributed dispersal during the
| war.
| tephra wrote:
| The British Museum have somewhere on the order of 8 million
| objects. Having been collected since 1759 (and indeed before)
| in various state of being catalogued correctly at the time of
| collection.
|
| The collection has survived new buildings being built (a time
| when stuff easily gets misplaced) and of course the ebbing and
| flowing of funding.
|
| I would say that keeping that large of a collection of such a
| long time completely in order is a hard problem.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| Uncatalogued doesn't necessarily mean unrecorded, just it
| hasn't been investigated enough to record its history,
| condition, and significance etc. The items could need cleaning,
| they could be a box of fragments of pottery that might make a
| vase, or a large collection of scrolls that haven't been
| interpreted.
|
| It isn't just a record "one Roman gold looking brooch", a badly
| catalogued museum item is just as bad as a non catalogued item.
| will1am wrote:
| It's indeed puzzling how a museum's collection can go un-
| cataloged for decades...
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| It's the same thing as clutter but on a professional level.
| Eventually the collection becomes large enough that it is
| infeasible to catalogue every single item. Any museum only has
| a small fraction of its collections on display at any given
| time, so things that are low prio on the display rotation will
| also be low prio on the catalogue shortlist.
|
| The British Musem only has 1025 full-time staff (Page #9 in
| this document https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a
| 7c0c2a40f0b...), and I imagine only a small fraction of that
| number are experts who are qualified to perform cataloging
| operations. The number of people-hours required to go through
| 2.4 million pieces of artefacts likely exceeds any realistic
| projections.
| creer wrote:
| Donations. I expect until recently the museum accepted
| donations of thousands of items at once. Some old private
| "cabinet of curiosities" or hobby collector's hoarde would be
| transfered - and nobody would particularly care for any but a
| few select items at that time. So quickly a backlog builds up,
| which nobody particularly cares to clear, even now.
| lotux wrote:
| British Museum itself is the master of all thieves, should return
| everything to real owners
| jfoutz wrote:
| I very much wanted to make the, have a navy and invade
| everyone, joke. But this isn't Reddit.
|
| I'm not sure how this all works going forward. There were some
| plausible arguments about protecting artifacts, the uk was
| pretty stable in comparison.
|
| This article seems to make it clear, that's no longer the case.
| If you have some money, seems like you can bribe out whatever
| artifacts you want.
| hereaiham wrote:
| I wanna protect your TV and computer, I think they are not
| safe at your home, even though they have been sitting there
| for years, but I wanna protect them because I decided I know
| better, and if you take them back you are a thief. I mean
| come on, even children would be ashamed of being as brazen as
| the world class burglars AKA the British museum.
| varjag wrote:
| There are clear cut cases like with Pantheon, but for many
| artefacts there are no real owners left. Their cultures have
| been wiped out, and the people who wiped them out were wiped
| out too.
|
| And frankly it's fine to care about survival of (otherwise
| publicly accessible) pieces of art and culture first and
| foremost. There's not going to be more of them.
| s_dev wrote:
| >There are clear cut cases like with Pantheon
|
| The fact that these aren't handed back really shows the true
| colours though. The one that personally disgusts me is the
| Irish Giant:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Byrne_(giant)
|
| A man who's only wish in life was not to end up a museum and
| the British stole his bones and put him on display.
| karencarits wrote:
| Yes, it was indeed unethical and there are many moral and
| legal arguments that the skeleton should receive a burial,
| but the stealing was arranged by a Scottish surgeon and not
| the British government. It was removed from display last
| year. There seems to be some additional legal issues too,
| at least for the board of the museum: "since 1799 its
| trustees had been legally bound to preserve the collection
| of John Hunter - the pioneering Scottish surgeon and
| anatomist who the museum is named after - in its entirety"
| [1]
|
| [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20231127211244/https://www.
| thegu...
| dtnewman wrote:
| Parthenon (Athens), not Pantheon (Rome).
|
| As far as survival of arts and culture, the whole problem is
| that they aren't the steward of historical treasures that
| threy claim to be. It's insane that the British Museum, one
| of the preeminent museums in the world, is having stuff
| stolen from them, and can't even identify what is stolen
| because they haven't catalogued everything. If they want to
| claim that antiquities will be kept up for future
| generations, then they at least need to take that role
| seriously.
| varjag wrote:
| Naturally it's a good point in a thread about stealing from
| said museum (and yes I butchered the name). However its
| track record has been comparatively good, even if more due
| to geographic isolation of Britain and stability of its
| political system than anything else.
| dtnewman wrote:
| I don't think they've been horrible stewards. And the
| British Museum is delightful to visit. I'm just pointing
| out that it's a bit rich to loudly proclaim that you are
| the best stewards of antiquities (that other countries
| might otherwise have better claims to) and then not do
| simple things like properly catalogue your collections.
| jdietrich wrote:
| The legal ownership of the Elgin Marbles is anything but
| clear cut.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elgin_Marbles
| MaxHoppersGhost wrote:
| Most of the countries these artifacts come from don't have the
| ability to properly store and protect them. Not to mention mass
| looting and stealing that would/could occur in the more
| politically unstable countries.
| MatthiasPortzel wrote:
| A reminder that not only open-source projects are at risk of
| sabotage from trusted members.
| veggieWHITES wrote:
| Isn't the most surprising thing is that a curator would sell a
| $15,000 item for $40??? Was he addicted to meth and just really
| needed an easy $40 or what?
|
| Or perhaps he really was a moron and was just breaking the stones
| out, selling the gold for melt value, and selling the stones for
| whatever worthless sum he assumed they were/just rocks?
| ayewo wrote:
| Much more likely he was trying to stay under the radar. The
| article mentions more than a thousand items went missing under
| his charge.
|
| He typically removes the gold casings and sells that to dealers
| directly.
| mrkramer wrote:
| They say this kind of stuff happens on Dark Web but on Ebay?!
| C'mon man....this is so ridiculous.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| The museum is _very_ lucky that they got any further cooperation
| after initially dismissing the person reporting it.
| nopakos wrote:
| It looks like the museum was dragged to do something thanks to
| Mr. Gradel's determination.
| bparsons wrote:
| Comical hearing the British Museum complaining about theft.
| ak_111 wrote:
| Shows you the total lack of imagination in public policy that is
| the UK.
|
| Currently there is no apprenticeship route in archaeology.
| Simultaneously there is something like millions of objects
| uncatalogued at the British museum (note cataloging is not simply
| recording, it is more like expert annotation). So you could
| literally keep an army of apprentices occupied and rigorously
| trained for at least three generations by just maintaining the
| British museum catalog.
|
| What is annoying is that the main imaginative policy that will
| come out of it is a politician giving a full newspaper spread on
| how they intend to use AI to solve the cataloging issue and, to
| rub salt on the wound, by outsourcing the AI system to
| Microsoft/Accenture.
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