With antiquities law, good intentions may have bad results
IN their commendable effort to preserve Bible artifacts, officials with Oklahoma City-based Hobby Lobby recently ran afoul of regulations regarding the import of historic items.
The antiquities market in the Middle East is notoriously opaque, and it’s difficult for even the most scrupulous individuals to determine how a seller came into possession of items. No one doubts that the Green family, owners of Hobby Lobby, acted in good faith.
A bigger question generated by this incident, raised recently by Pennsylvania attorney Kyle Sammin, is whether existing regulations regarding antiquities still serve the public good.
Writing at The Federalist, Sammin argues, “Western governments ought to consider whether the Middle East is the best place for irreplaceable antiquities when leaving them there keeps them in the firing line of the next version of the Taliban or al-Qaeda to sweep those countries. Given jihadists’ tendency to burn, smash, or dynamite anything that doesn’t comport with their narrow view of Islam, most artifacts are almost certainly safer in the Smithsonian or the British Museum than they are in Baghdad or Mosul. Western nations should change their laws to encourage this trade, not block it.”
Current U.S. policies, arising in part from a 1970 United Nations convention, are designed to keep artifacts in their country of origin for the most part. The idea behind those policies is understandable: People with the strongest cultural connections to artifacts should have the opportunity to preserve them in their own museums and institutions.
Yet as Sammin notes, this policy has allowed priceless artifacts to be destroyed in many instances in recent years.
The most famous example occurred in 2001 when the Taliban used explosives to destroy the Bamiyan Buddhas, massive statues built into a hillside that had been in Afghanistan since the sixth or seventh century. Sammin notes those statues could not have been exported, because of their size, but their destruction highlighted the extremist attitudes some groups hold toward such historic items.
In 2012, Sammin points out, an al-Qaida-linked group targeted Timbuktu, which is home to libraries of unique centuries-old manuscripts. The group vowed to destroy the items, and managed to burn some manuscripts before the Malian government retook the city. The destroyed items had survived for centuries prior to the 2012 incident and the oldest may have dated to 1204.
“Unlike the Bamiyan Buddhas, these works could have been removed to be studied and digitally imaged in safer environs,” Sammin wrote. “Leaving them in Mali was culturally sensitive, but ultimately counterproductive.”
Those examples are only the tip of the iceberg with similar incidents of destruction occurring in Libya, Pakistan, Tunisia, Egypt, and more.
Sammin’s argument deserves consideration. On the one hand, no one wants to encourage a marketplace in which thieves steal artifacts without consequence and local communities are robbed of their heritage. Yet at the same time, it’s clear that the continued existence of many artifacts is highly uncertain in some countries given local political realities.
The balance between preserving mankind’s history and respect for different cultures can be precarious. But when facts change, reconsideration of policies is warranted.