Month: February 2025

Just one talking head, actually: mine. Next month I’ll be giving three talks. The first (at Bryn Mawr on March 3) and third (at Ohio State on March 20) are on the Tell el-Maskhuta hoard. The hoard has been a pet project of mine for the last year, though thanks to my heavy teaching load and my refusal to turn down any invitation to write anything, I’ve not been able to work on it very steadily. Nevertheless, I now have a draft catalog of the hoard, as well as preliminary discussions of its deposition and discovery. I don’t have any articulated conclusions about the hoard yet, but I’ve already formulated a few in my head, which means it’s definitely time to take this show on the road.

My second talk (on March 6) will be at the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters in Copenhagen as part of the conference ‘Carving the Individual: Self-Representations in Rock-Cut Monuments in the Parthian, Roman, and Sasanian Near East (2nd c. BCE-3rd c. CE).’ As you may have surmised, I’ll be talking about Arsacid rock reliefs. I’m a little diffident about this topic, in no small part because these reliefs are difficult to make sense of. Rather than identifying specific individuals, I’ll focus instead on patterns, which may attest to shared concerns or elements of identity across the western Arsacid Empire.

Of course, the real reason I’m going to Denmark is the bread. I will lecture on any topic if it will get me to some Danish bread.

I just finished reading Roberta Mazza’s new book, Stolen Fragments: Black Markets, Bad Faith, and the Illicit Trade in Ancient Artefacts (Redwood Press, 2024), which she modestly describes as “a personal memoir about my profession and how it does a dangerous dance with collectors, dealers, auction houses, criminals, and those walking a fine line between what’s legal and what’s not” (7). It is riveting. Many a night I fought valiantly against the effects of my somniferous medications in order to read more about the sordid and often stupid actions of the Green family and the precipitous downfall of Dirk Obbink, previously renowned for his papyrological scholarship and funny name.

The merits of this book are numerous; I list some of them below in no particular order:

• One of the most important features of the book is the discussion of how dealers and collectors forge or otherwise obfuscate provenance. While the specific techniques described are relevant only to papyrus, the methodologies and aims surely apply to all antiquities. It makes it nigh on impossible to take any undocumented statement of provenance seriously.
• The chapter on Grenfell and Hunt and the origins of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri is a lucid description of late 19^th century archaeology and the colonialist and Eurocentric attitudes that informed it. I would readily assign this to students if I were ever to teach a class on papyri.
• Prof. Mazza exhibits real sympathy for many of her characters, including some embroiled in the Hobby Lobby scandal. The real villains of the piece are Obbink, Scott Carroll, Christie’s and the papyrus dealers on eBay. The Museum of the Bible is depicted as out of its depth rather than sinister, although Steve Green comes across (rightly in my view) as an evangelical huckster, for whom faith is a gateway to profit. She also excoriates her “academic colleagues who are still explaining that they publish unprovenanced and illegal papyri and other manuscripts ‘because scholarship comes first'” because “you are publishing undocumented, when not patently illegal, antiquities not for the sake of scholarship but in order to get your name out there” (216).
• The book is free of innuendo and ad hominem attacks. Prof. Mazza sticks to facts she can verify (there are nineteen pages of endnotes); when she makes assumptions, she is clear about them and they are very reasonable.
• I feel like I learned something about Prof. Mazza as a person, even though she is not the focus of the book. I have never met her personally (I’m sure we have some friends in common, though). I think I’d like her.

If I had written this book (and, to be clear, I couldn’t have), I would have used a title like The Papyrus Chase or The Great Gospel Robbery or The Taking of Mark 1-7. But despite this, I recommend this book unreservedly!