A shake up of senior staff of the British Museum was completed with last week’s departure of deputy director Sir Jonathan Williams. Director Hartwig Fischer resigned in August after a scandal broke over the theft of 1,500 items from the ancient Greek and Roman collection. Of the missing or stolen pieces, 351 have been recovered and more than 300 have been identified.

The targeted artifacts date from between 15th century BC and the 19th century AD and include gold jewellery, semi-precious gemstones, Greek pottery, and fragments from sculptures. They were not missed as they were held in a vault rather than on display in the hallowed halls of the museum.

The museum has appealed to the public to be on the lookout for stolen items and has enlisted the help of dealers involved in the trade of antiquities and art. The museum relies for tracing “hot” pieces on the London-based Art Loss Register, the largest database in the world of stolen art and antiquities. It has listed 700,000 stolen or missing items. The organisation checks provenance of items on behalf of auction houses, dealers, and potential buyers and aids national authorities and cultural bodies in the hunt for stolen and missing items.

In July, curator Peter John Higgs was sacked, allegedly over the 1,500 missing and 350 damaged treasures. All or most belonged to the one million unregistered items in the British Museum’s massive collection of eight million pieces. Higgs had worked at the museum for more than 30 years and was appointed acting keeper of his department last year. He advertised the stolen artifacts on e-Bay or sold priceless items at cheap rates to dealers. Higgs has insisted on his innocence and has refused to cooperate with the police in tracing stolen artifacts.

Dutch antiquities dealer Dr. Ittai Gradel notified the museum of thefts in February 2021, but his intelligence was not taken seriously and acted upon, necessitating changes in the management. He knew first-hand what was going on as he bought, retained, and has returned 350 of the missing artifacts.

The BBC revealed that Gradel wrote a letter to deputy director Williams telling him of a “disturbing discovery I have made, involving theft from the British Museum, apparently by one of your curators.” He revealed that he had bought jewellery online and said, “at least one, possibly all of these gems in fact came from the British Museum collections.”

Having had no response, Gradel wrote to the director, Dr. Fischer, to ask if the thefts were being probed. In July of that year, Dr. Williams replied that there had been a “thorough investigation” and dismissed suspicions of thefts by museum personnel.

The BBC quoted Dr. Gradel as saying, “They failed to take my warnings seriously, they refused to listen, they had no questions to ask of me, they never wanted to include me in their so-called ‘thorough investigation.’ They never contacted me for any additional information or assistance, it is unbelievable.” The scandal has severely damaged the British museum and its management.

Despite the “thorough investigation,” it was not until it was discovered that one registered and catalogued artifact was not to be found in the Greek and Roman vault that a search was conducted of the vault and the Greek and Roman jewellery and gemstone collection from which the missing and damaged items had been extracted.

Williams stepped down after publication of an independent investigation into the missingor damaged items which are valued at millions of dollars. Museum officials believe gold settings for 350 semi-precious gemstones are unlikely to be found because they may have been sold for scrap. At least 140 pieces were scratched by tool marks.

A third of the recommendations of the probe have been completed or are in train, including documentation and digitization of the entire collection within five years. This should have been carried out long ago but the museum’s curators and managers never imagined a person who valued treasures of the past would destroy, steal and sell them for a pittance.

The museum’s interim director, Sir Mark Jones., said: “No one can pretend this has been an easy period for the museum, but I have the utmost admiration for the commitment of the staff to building a stronger future for the museum we all care so deeply about.”

Opened om 1753, the museum exhibits around 80,000 items while the vast majority are consigned to storage. Therefore, these items offer an unscrupulous insider opportunities for plunder, particularly of those which are unregistered and uncatalogued. Art recovery experts told the BBC that museum thefts are common and stolen items can be sold on the black market or, if made of precious metals, melted down.

The collection of the British museum covers two million years of history across the globe and comprises loot from all six continents, including massive Assyrian statuary from Iraq, ancient mosaic floors from Greece and Rome and the marble sculptures — known as the “Elgin marbles” — looted from the Parthenon in Athens in the 19th century by British diplomat Lord Elgin who claimed to have bought them from Greece’s Ottoman rulers.

Revelations of the thefts from the Greek and Roman collection have prompted the Greek government to renew its longstanding demand that the sculptures must be returned so they can be displayed in the museum devoted to the rest of the sculptures which remain in Greece. However, the 1963 British Museum Act bans the board of trustees from returning any item in the vast collection largely assembled during Britain’s colonial past unless it is damaged or duplicated and not attracting public interest. To get round the law, it has been suggested that the museum could loan the sculptures to the Athens museum on a permanent basis.

A row erupted when during a recent visit to London Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said he would raise the issue of the return of the sculptures with his British counterpart Rishi Sunak who promptly cancelled their meeting at which they were meant to discuss illegal migration. Sunak clearly jumped on his high horse over the sculptures as his office replied to Mitsotakis in a statement which said, “These were legally acquired at the time, they’re legally owned by the trustees of the museum. We support that position and there’s no plan to change the law.”

Photo: TNS