232 carnegie institution 



Laws as to Exports of Antiquities. 



The time is past when private or piibhc museums can be enriched 

 with works of art and curiosities by excavations. These now have 

 to be conducted on a more ideal basis, for the advantage of the science 

 of archeology and not as a commercial speculation on the part of 

 the digger. In retired districts of classical lands some of the inhab- 

 itants have had much experience in finding and opening tombs for 

 the sake of the treasures or trifles which were buried with the dead, 

 and think this occupation to be more remunerative than agriculture ; 

 but all exportation of antiquities from the lands of ancient culture is 

 now contrary to law. At the opening of the nineteenth century, 

 when Greece was still in the hands of the Turks, Lord Elgin, by 

 gifts and diplomatic arts, secured permission to "draw, model, re- 

 move, and excavate" any of the old buildings at Athens, and made 

 large use of the right to remove, taking all that he wanted of the 

 sculptures of the Parthenon, the frieze of the temple of Unwinged 

 Victory, one of the Caryatids, a column and a long piece of the 

 frieze of the Erectheum, the statue of Dionysus from the choragic 

 monument of Thrasybulus, etc. Not much later, in 1811, two 

 young Englishmen and two Germans stole the sculptures from the 

 temple of Aphaea on >^gina, which are now the chief ornament of 

 the Glyptothek, iu Munich, and in the next year the same party, 

 with one or two more, by a heavy bribe persuaded the Vizier of Pelo- 

 ponnesus to allow them to remove the sculptures from the temple at 

 Bassse, which were sold to the British Museum for ;^ 60, 000. Mr. 

 Hamilton Lang conducted excavations for antiquities on Cyprus in 

 1870 during two months without a firman from the government, and 

 the sculptures are in the British Museum. About the same time 

 General di Cesnola opened hundreds of tombs before he was obliged 

 to seek the permission of the government ; then he obtained a firman 

 for the excavations which furnished the treasures for the Metropoli- 

 tan Museum. Probably under the influence of the Cyprian excava- 

 tions, attention having been called to the value of antiquities. Dr. 

 Schliemann, in 1871, was obliged to promise to give to the Turks a 

 share of the objects found by him at Troy, and difficulty was made 

 in renewing the firmans. He conveyed away the most splendid of 

 the gold treasures found at Troy, but later gave to the Turkish gov- 

 ernment $10,000 for its share of this treasure. From 1863 to 1874 

 Mr. J. T. Wood, an English architect, was engaged in excavations 

 at Ephesus. He was allowed in 1863 to export all antiquities which 



