ISIS released a video showing its men ransacking Mosul’s museum,
desecrating what historians called
“artifacts from the cradle of civilization.”
We are now talking about the wholesale destruction
with huge looting teams,
sometimes with earth-moving equipment.
The Islamic State has created a ministry of antiquities
to industrialize the looting and sell the treasures.
Iraqi officials believe that IS
could be generating as much as 100 million [dollars]
from the sale and trafficking of antiquities alone.
Antiquities are the one thing
that can make its way from the ground in a conflict nation
to Fifth Avenue in New York.
Antiquity theft is nothing new.
For much of the 19th and 20th centuries,
few in the West bothered asking just how ancient objects
ended up traveling so far from their homelands.
There’s a good reason why a leading lawyer called the British Museum
“the world’s largest receiver of stolen goods.”
Antiquity trafficking is big business,
a booming global trade that continues to devastate
the cultural heritage of countries around the world.
This is
In this episode, we’ll be looking at antiquity trafficking,
a complex web of international crime
that connects the theft of ancient artifacts
to an under-regulated global art market.
[THE BUSINESS OF CRIME]
Most Iraqis, when they saw the statue of Saddam fall down,
everybody was elated.
We were, you know, happy as can be.
And then... the Baghdad museum was looted.
We already knew of three masterpieces looted from the galleries—
the man-sized stone statue,
the statue base,
and a large decorated vase.
The individuals were selective and knew precisely what to take.
When Mustafa Al-Kadhimi’s plane touched down in Baghdad
after a July 2021 official visit to the US,
it carried some unusually valuable cargo.
On board with the Iraqi prime minister
were 17,000 archaeological artifacts
repatriated after years spent in the US,
displayed in, among other venues, an evangelical Christian museum
and an Ivy League university.
It marked a long-anticipated homecoming.
The priceless treasures had been hoovered up by enterprising thieves
over at least three decades,
first in the aftermath of the first Gulf War in the early 1990s,
then after the security meltdown
that followed the 2003 US-led invasion.
Gauging the precise size and value
of the illicit antiquities trade isn’t easy,
with estimates ranging from $300 million to $6 billion a year.
As with many other forms of crime,
there isn’t a dutiful accountant keeping meticulous books.
Even with exact figures proving elusive,
there are clearly huge profits to be made
in a quasi-industry where demand is constantly outstripping supply.
Western countries like the United States and the UK
are the largest consumers of these kinds of antiquities.
Today, the trafficked antiquities market is hardly clandestine.
Instead, it functions as a shady open secret,
a gray market that stretches across the globe,
where legitimate institutions
and often hyper-rich collectors in the West
benefit from the labor of organized criminals in faraway nations.
Naturally, there has to be a layer of plausible deniability—
don’t ask, don’t tell.
Think of it like money laundering.
An artifact has been smuggled from its home country
with a taint of theft still on it.
It may then take a tour around another couple of countries
until it’s clean enough for the open market.
We see a lot of trafficking and looting in the Middle East,
particularly countries like Syria and Yemen,
but we also see countries like Egypt suffering from
a major scourge of looting.
And this is in part because Egyptian artifacts
are so in demand and recognizable around the world.
The gold coffin,
which is believed to have once held the mummy of Nedjemankh,
is now finding its way back to the Egyptian people
after a seven-year investigation that spanned five countries.
It is not the protection of our heritage,
but it’s the protection of mankind’s heritage.
In 2019, the New York Met Museum
returned a stolen ancient Egyptian coffin
that had been looted and smuggled out of the country in 2011.
The 2,100-year-old artifact
had been stolen by a global trafficking network
using fraudulent documents.
After being smuggled into Germany, it crossed the border into France,
where the museum had paid $3.2 million
to a Parisian art dealer.
It was, authorities believed,
likely one of the hundreds of artifacts
looted by the same multinational gang,
and questions were raised about the museum's own lack of scrutiny.
When you can have major institutions
that are purchasing these types of items without their due diligence,
it’s very difficult to prove that an individual
or a private collector is engaging in that due diligence
or even aware that they are purchasing something that's looted.
To be clear,
in many cases they are aware that they’re purchasing looted material,
but proving that they are aware is a different story.
Though coverage of the issue has intensified over the past decade,
this hasn’t stopped the market from expanding.
Between 2010 and 2014,
the illegal antiquities trade rose in the Middle East,
driven largely by bloody conflicts across the region.
Instability is good news for smugglers,
even if the looting of cultural property is considered a war crime
under the 1954 Hague Convention.
At the peak of the Islamic State’s power in Iraq and Syria,
the sale of stolen antiquities was second only to oil
as the terrorist group’s primary source of income.
The western flow of artifacts was so easy and so prolific
that middlemen were openly hawking their wares on Facebook.
Prior to the introduction of technology platforms
and social media,
much trafficking took place from person-to-person interaction.
It was a slower process.
Moving items out of a country into another and to a wider market
took time and connections.
But now, thanks to global social media platforms like Facebook,
global antiquities traffickers can connect with one another
at the click of a button.
And as a result,
we’re seeing an explosion of this illicit material online.
Global criminality requires a joined-up response.
For many countries, particularly those heavily reliant on tourism,
it isn’t just a moral issue but a financial necessity.
In early 2021, Egypt introduced a law punishing antiquity theft
with a life sentence and a maximum $5 million fine.
It remains to be seen what impact this has
in a nation where the amount of illegal digs
more than doubled in 2020.
Because when looters loot sites, what they’re looking for is small,
phenomenally valuable pieces of artwork that collectors want.
And to get at that material, they have to destroy everything else.
And when archaeological sites are destroyed,
we lose that knowledge,
we lose the possibility of expanding our knowledge.
The illicit antiquities trade isn’t merely an act of cultural vandalism
but a crime with wide-reaching and profound consequences.
This isn’t just about the globalization of crime
but a stark reminder of colonialism still playing out in the present day,
plundering countries to sate the appetite of a rich elite.
Few illicit trades sum up global inequalities so neatly.