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Message:: [QUOTE="Valentinian, post: 3850456, member: 44316"]Alan Walker of Nomos ( <a href="https://nomosag.com/" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://nomosag.com/" rel="nofollow">https://nomosag.com/</a> )wrote a followup on cultural property to the comments I quoted in the original post. Here it is, with his permission: In my first post on Nomos 19 I wrote about some of the problems, which have arisen from the passing of the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, a treaty that was thought by many of its ratifiers to be a way to insure that items that were truly of real importance for a country's heritage would be protected; and if looted and dispersed abroad the Convention would make it easier for them to be recovered and returned. I think the operative word for so many people was importance, and that is surely why so many people supported the Convention, even including many collectors, dealers, art historians and museum professionals who one would think were the Convention's natural opponents. To most people, there were types of archaeological pillaging that were simply unacceptable: like the destruction of ancient buildings in Central America to get wall reliefs; the smashing of statues to gain salable fragments in Southeast Asia; the ransacking of ancient tombs solely for salable items, with the remainder being destroyed or discarded; and so on. But those same people were fully capable of thinking that other forms of treasure hunting were much more defensible. In other words, most of the commentary, both pro and con, on the 1970 Convention, at least that, which concerns us as collectors of, dealers in, and scholars working on, ancient coins, actually only covers precisely 2 out of the 15 categories of objects covered by the Convention. It is about time we look at those categories, and the thinking that led to their choice, a lot more closely. Before we do so, however, we really ought to look at the background of the Convention, since if we do so it becomes clear just how much it is a product of its time, which was a period of accelerating decolonization; of continued belief in the merits of communist forms of government; and a deep-seated dislike of anything hinting of any form of elitism (cultural, racial, social, sexual, etc.), such as a perceived belief that items of one nation state's cultural heritage might be better off in another nation's care. In addition, the predilection for state over private ownership, held by so many of the nations that contributed to the drafting of the Convention, made the general tone of the document one greatly in favor of state control. Actually, I always believed that the Convention was only intended to protect state owned heritage objects (!), that misconception was probably because I never properly read it, or understood what I was reading. In fact, the vast majority of the controllable items enumerated in the Convention are actually privately owned; as such, it is clear that the majority of the writers of the Convention must have clearly intended to prevent the legitimate owners of a wide variety of material from from being able to freely dispose of their own property as they saw fit. The reason for this being a clear reaction against the capitalist world and private property in general. For example, in Article 1b, if a family retained the personal archive of a relative who was a "...national leader, thinker, scientist...<or> artist" and if they wished to dispose of it, perhaps because of financial need, they could be, and probably would be, banned from exporting it to a foreign institution ready to pay a higher price than a domestic one would be. In 1a, collectors of 'rocks' and fossils face controls; in 1e, collectors of coins or gems over 100 years old, are targeted; 1f, puts controls on "objects of ethnological interest", without explaining what they are; 1g covers a vast array of "property of artistic interest" (without any limitation of date), as 1g(i), pictures, paintings and drawings produced entirely by hand or 1g(iii). original engravings, prints and lithographs; 1h covers "rare manuscripts and incunabula, old books, documents and publications of special interest (historical, artistic, scientific, literary, etc.) singly or in collections" - what might be included within the rubric old books? A first edition of Historia Numorum from 1887? A set of the five volumes of van Loon's Histoire Metallique, 1732-1737? A specially bound set of offprints by Friedrich Imhoof-Blumer? A first edition of Harry Potter? Many of the participants in the process of writing the Convention, especially those from the developed nations of the West must have clearly viewed the categories of Article 1 as being ones from which truly important items of cultural property might be chosen, rather than the all-inclusive terms they have apparently become. They also must have viewed the Convention as a way of protecting heritage, rather than being a way of doing political favors to a foreign country without spending any money, which is exactly what has happened. More about that in the future.[/QUOTE]

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