Skip to main content

When faced with excitement of seeing a new but unprovenanced Sappho fragment or the administrative archive of a Mesopotamian city whose location is unknown except to looters, it is easy to come up with justifications to explain why the advance to knowledge of publishing the find outweighs the harm done during the process of bringing it to market. These harms are often dismissed as exaggerated or having happened so long ago that refusing to study the text now would have no preventative effect.

I will counter these arguments by discussing three categories of harms caused by looters searching for marketable ancient texts. First, I will present evidence of the ongoing and extensive looting activity required to locate ancient texts. I will next use a collection of recent sales listings of unprovenanced, most likely looted, artifacts to show that inscribed antiquities are commonly manipulated in destructive ways in order to increase their price on the market. Finally, I will conclude with thoughts about the way in which scholarly willingness to publish or authenticate unprovenanced inscribed objects encourages forgers to try their hand at enlarging a corpus. Many scholars have assumed that they cannot be fooled by forgeries, but I will show examples of scholars becoming entangled in the marketing of forged texts.

I hope this evidence will make the harms of looting as vivid to potential translators and authenticators as the benefits of finding an interesting text.