Where is UNESCO when you need them? In the complex landscape surrounding the trade and museum storage of antiquities, another bizarre case has added its name. While scholars strive every where to fight black market dealings that sell global antiquities making it that much more difficult to study the past, while countries fight to have valuable national treasures like the Elgin Marbles returned to their homelands, a judge in Washington D.C. decides to distribute priceless Persian antiquities to survivors of a suicide-bombing in Jerusalem's Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall.
Don't get me wrong. I am sure that surviving a suicide bombing is horrible and traumatic, especially when one has sustained lifelong and debilitating injuries, so traumatic that no price tag can be placed on recuperation. Yet a U.S. court has decided a pricetag can be placed on their suffering, and they have chosen a path (after the attorney for the victims, David Strachman, suggested it) that comes at great cost to world heritage, to scholars, and cultural critics, none of whom can be held responsible for the original victims' suffering. Because Hamas claimed responsibility, and the survivors believe Hamas did this with financial support from Iran, the survivors have sued Iran for reparations. Oddly enough to begin with, they were awarded, in Washington D.C. (thousands of miles from Jerusalem, Iran, or Hamas as far as I can tell, but that's another issue), a sum of $412 million. Since there is no way of collecting such money, their lawyer convinced a judge that antiquities on loan to the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute is how they will collect the money.
The tablets of the Persepolis Fortification Archive are just bureaucratic information, but they still require years of study in order to understand the Persian empire prior to Alexander the Great. Legally, the Persepolis Fortification Archive belongs to Iran, but the collection has been on loan to the University of Chicago for study since the 1930s. Technically, the Archive belongs to the government of Iran, a government under a shah in the 1930s, not even the Islamic Republic of Iran. Nonetheless, it is Iran's heritage specifically, but more than that, these tablets are world heritage and do not belong to anyone. They cannot and should not be sold to the highest bidder. It sets a dangerous precedent in already murky waters when it comes to antiquities dealings.
More than that, the people who feel punished are European and North American scholars, as well as Iranian scholars no doubt, but you know who doesn't feel punished by such actions? The Islamic Republic of Iran. So, while the victims have indeed suffered, how can their suffering be alleviated by profiting off tremendous sacrifices to the study of world heritage? Imagine if we had found newly discovered manuscripts from the Mayflower voyage, manuscripts for which there were no other copies, and we sent them for study at a school in Austria. Imagine that while there, Austrian citizens who had been victims of Pinochet's regime in Chile sued the U.S. government for the CIA's role in Pinochet's ascendancy to power, and they won reparations in an Austrian court that our government refused to pay. Would we find it acceptable that these victims, who no doubt suffered and survived horribly painful disfiguring torture, were allowed to sell off individual pages of these manuscripts to the highest bidder? Imagine how much worse it is when we are talking about the documents of an ancient nation who no longer exists, and when understanding that nation's history is about world heritage not just the heritage of the nation only tangentially responsible.
So please President Obama, keep the Archive in the hands of the Oriental Institute because Iran has no real rights to them; the scholarly world community does. World cultural heritage cannot and must not be sold piecemeal to the highest bidder.
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The European Iranologists' Society has a petition for President Obama requesting that he stop this crazy act, that Obama must not allow the U.S. to become involved in the sale of world cultural heritage. If you are an archaeologist, even remotely, please go to this link and sign.
The National Iranian American Council also is sending form letters to President Obama, which you can sign.
Information for this post was taken from the recent Associated Press piece published in the International Herald Tribune.
In memoriam, 2012
11 years ago
