Stolen Fragments
Black Markets, Bad Faith, and the Illicit Trade in Ancient Artefacts
by Roberta Mazza (Redwood Press)
The book is a few things. It is a true crime book about the illegal removal of artifacts, specifically ancient writings on papyrus, from the nations in the Near East where they are from. This is historical, in the ways that colonial explorers laid claim to what was not theirs to take, but also modern, and the lack of good provenance to this class of artifact in general. It includes secondary thefts, such as the one from Oxford, but there is as much that is unethical while not outright illegal.
The picture here is pretty sorry. I get the impression that there is no such thing as a legitimate market or trade here, with how many stolen fragments there are; how many presumptive gatekeepers wiling to look the other way.
It is also a memoir. The author was involved in these investigations, instigating or inspiring some. The author’s work is usually in a scholarly capacity rather than a criminal justice one, but even still this earns her threats against her person. The interesting part about this, other than the author’s from the trenches perspective on events, is all the different points of interaction, opposition, and alliance that the author makes.
The artifacts in question have historical value, religious (Christian) value, and material value. The author is a classics scholar, but her progression through the story of what happens has her in constant interaction with these people, also with their own interests in the artifacts. The surprising alliances and heel-turns make for the drama of the book, rather than the solve of the crime itself.
It is also a polemic. I am on record as loving a good polemic, but this is more contempt than attack, going so far as character attacks. And no, making a joke about something being an ad hominem does not make it less of an ad hominem, it just shows that you know what you are doing. Mixing baseless attacks with well-sourced ones only makes the latter weaker.
I struggled to read this book, and I struggled to understand why that was. The prose is crisp and the events follow logically. The author explains all the concepts that ‘civilians’ need to have explained. But the disparate levels of attention break the feeling of a through-line to all of the chapters and different events.
At first, I wrote this off as being the weakness of the memoir style, but in the epilogue, it clicked. It is a polemic, and the target of the polemic is the author’s fellow scholars. They do not have a voice in the book, which I think is a weakness. This is not a both-sides-ism. Taking the author’s facts as given, the opposing argument is colonialism with extra steps. But leaving it out of the text, mostly, makes it feel like a stronger and more sympathetic argument. And what I think is happening is that the author’s presumed audience is someone already in that mindset, probably not outright, but willing to overlook illegal and unethical behavior in the interest of their own academic curiosity and self-aggrandizement. Then the book has a structure, showing all the wrongs that arise and how they create real harm.
This is a good supplementary book. I would read it in conjunction with the material of your particular interest: the Hobby Lobby scandal, art crime, colonialism and the question of the West, et cetera. As a standalone it is fine, but shows the perils of writing about something that you were a part of.
My thanks to the author, Roberta Mazza, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Redwood Press, for making the ARC available to me.
CITATION HEEDED 