eBook - ePub

Stolen Fragments

Name: Stolen Fragments
ISBN: 9781503640320

Black Markets, Bad Faith, and the Illicit Trade in Ancient Artefacts

Roberta Mazza,

272 pages
English
ePUB (mobile friendly)
Available on iOS & Android

eBook - ePub

Stolen Fragments

Black Markets, Bad Faith, and the Illicit Trade in Ancient Artefacts

Roberta Mazza,

About this book

In 2012, Steve Green, billionaire and president of the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores, announced a recent purchase of a Biblical artefact—a fragment of papyrus, just discovered, carrying lines from Paul's letter to the Romans, and dated to the second century CE. Noted scholar Roberta Mazza was stunned. When was this piece discovered, and how could Green acquire such a rare item? The answers, which Mazza spent the next ten years uncovering, came as a shock: the fragment had come from a famous collection held at Oxford University, and its rightful owners had no idea it had been sold.

The letter to the Romans was not the only extraordinary piece in the Green collection. They soon announced newly recovered fragments from the Gospels and writings of Sappho. Mazza's quest to confirm the provenance of these priceless fragments revealed shadowy global networks that make big business of ancient manuscripts, from the Greens' Museum of the Bible and world-famous auction houses like Sotheby's and Christie's, to antique shops in Jerusalem and Istanbul, dealers on eBay, and into the collections of renowned museums and universities.

Mazza's investigation forces us to ask what happens when the supposed custodians of our ancient heritage act in ways that threaten to destroy it. Stolen Fragments illuminates how these recent dealings are not isolated events, but the inevitable result of longstanding colonial practices and the outcome of generations of scholars who have profited from extracting the cultural heritage of places they claim they wish to preserve. Where is the boundary between protection and exploitation, between scholarship and larceny?

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Yes, you can access Stolen Fragments by Roberta Mazza in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Storia & Storia dell'antico Egitto. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.