Never mind the research, feel the money

Another magazine, and another prominent antiquity shows up in a saleroom, makes headlines and disappears again. Well two, actually. On July 2 Sotheby’s sold an ivory chess piece for £735,000. Two days later, again in London, Christie’s raised £4.74m for a carved stone head of Tutankhamun.

There are unanswered questions around both sales, which, one might think, did little to respect antiquity or very rich people. The two stories have much in common, starting with that old bugbear, provenance.

For salerooms, provenance means ownership, which we’ll get to, but we’ll start with the archaeological definition, which is about where things came from – the context in which they had finally departed from the time when they were made and used. Unsurprisingly (this is a world where what matters is money and looks, not knowledge) there is almost no information on this for either object.

The chess piece, confirmed to have been made from walrus ivory which has been radiocarbon dated to ad1280– 1480, looks like “warders” in a famous collection found in 1831 in Lewis. The record of that hoard’s discovery is poor, but a study by David Caldwell, Mark Hall and Caroline Wilkinson in 2009 concluded that 93 pieces were kept, and 93 are now in the British Museum and the National Museum of Scotland. However, they suggest there were originally four chess sets, leaving four warders and 44 pawns missing.

None of the known Lewis pieces has been dated, so chronology is dependent on style. Caldwell and colleagues think they were perhaps made in Norway between “the second half of the 12th century into the early 13th,” making Sotheby’s 14th-century radiocarbon determination significantly different. Otherwise it’s possible to imagine the new piece also having been found in Lewis in 1831.

That’s far from saying that’s where it came from, however, and the very mastery of the carver’s art seen among the 93 implies there must have been many more sets made. More research could dispel much uncertainty, but the piece was taken to market too fast. And it is for this reason that both National Museums Scotland and the British Museum declined to bid: in the words of the Edinburgh museum, the warder’s “authenticity or its connection to the Lewis hoard or to Scotland… cannot be proven beyond reasonable doubt… [without a] considerable programme of research”. Setting itself against two museums of world renown, Sotheby’s encouraged buyers to think otherwise. It remains to be seen whether the currently anonymous owner will want to pursue the matter.

Of the stone head, there is simply nothing to say in this respect. It looks like Tutankhamun, said Christie’s, so it must have come from ancient Egypt. The Egyptian authorities agree, and are not happy: they believe it was stolen and illegally exported.

An undocumented artefact for sale needs to have left its country of origin before 1970 if it is to satisfy the relevant Unesco convention. Christie’s said it “understood” the head had been “in the collection” of Prinz Wilhelm von Thurn und Taxis “by the 1960s”. Writing for Live Science (June 25), Owen Jarus tracked down descendants of the prince, a historian who knew him and an Egyptologist who studied the statue in the 1980s. None remembered Wilhelm having anything to do with it or any interest in antiquities.

Christie’s was more confident about the head’s post-1970 ownership, listing three dealers including Heinz Herzer, from whom the latest seller acquired the head in 1985. Herzer is associated with a number of questioned antiquities sales, not least an ancient bronze statue of a youth, bought by the J Paul Getty Museum in 1977 and the subject of decades of police enquiries. Egypt has asked Interpol to investigate.

The chess piece’s story is also curious. It was sold by the family of a man who bought it from an Edinburgh dealer in 1964, for £5. No one apparently knew it to have anything to do with Lewis, despite the hoard’s fame and, already in 1964,the children’s tv show, Noggin the Nog, and chess-inspired movies.

With both chess piece and head, the auction houses’ claims to care deeply about provenance, authenticity and ownership would have carried more weight had they allowed time for proper research. The same could be said of another sale, on July 3 (it was a good week for wealthy collectors), of a hoard of Roman bronzes found in Gloucestershire in 2017. It contained a spectacular dog (pictured in First sight Nov/Dec 2017/157). Any hopes that Bristol City Museum might have acquired it were dashed when it sold for £137,500, three times the estimate.

Christie’s had thrown in the rest of the hoard, which itself contained many unusual pieces – under proposed changes to the Treasure Act, this might have been classed as Treasure and so avoided its saleroom vanishing trick (feature May/Jun 2019/166). Unless the new owner returns these other pieces to the museum, however, we’ll never know their full story. There just wasn’t time to research them.