Displaying items by tag: artifacts

The renowned Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York purchased a collection of 4,000-year-old Egyptian artifacts found a century ago by a British explorer, averting a plan to auction the antiquities that had drawn criticism from historians.

The Treasure of Harageh collection consists of 37 items such as flasks, vases and jewelry inlaid with lapis lazuli, a rare mineral. Discovered by famed British archaeologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie, the relics date to roughly 1900 B.C., excavated from a tomb near the city of Fayum. Portions of the excavated antiquities were given in 1914 to donors in St. Louis who helped underwrite the dig.

In accordance with a 10-year partnership with the city of Arras and the Nord Pas de Calais region, the Château of Versailles is to loan some of its artwork and artifacts to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Arras, Art Daily has reported.

Initiated by the regional council, the partnership aims to disperse Versailles’ vast cultural heritage for public display in other parts of France.

The Smithsonian Institution is now actively seeking volunteers to aid in the digitization of its collection. Through a new website launched today, the public can sign up for various transcription projects which will take thousands of hand-written artifact labels and make them available digitally for researchers.

Among the hundreds of thousands of documents that need transcribing are the labels attached to 45,000 bumble bee specimens in the collection of the National Museum of Natural History. The museum hopes digitizing that information will aid scientists studying the current global bee decline.

The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is already under pressure this week for loaning out its most popular pieces. Now, human rights group Edo United for Homeland Empowerment is renewing controversy over a series of Benin artworks in the collection of the MFA and demanding their return to the state of Nigeria. Over two years ago, the National Commission for Museums and Monuments in Nigeria called for the return of the same 32 artifacts, which were part of a collection donated by Robert Owen Lehman and are now housed in the museum’s Benin Kingdom Gallery.

“To protect cultural heritage is a basic requirement of human civilization,” the organization said in a statement from president Frank Ekhator, vice president Dickson Iyawe, and secretary Omolayo Omoruyi-Ukhuedoba.

A Greek police officer was among nine people arrested for the suspected smuggling of ancient artefacts, including a statue valued at about one million euros, police said Thursday, AFP reported.

The 49-year-old officer was employed by the department in charge of the protection of the country's antiquities.

The Reading Room at the heart of the British Museum’s Great Court was hailed as one of Britain’s most majestic sights following its completion in 1857.

Now the institution is considering reinventing the majestic dome, with its famous benches extended outward like spokes in a wheel, as a space to display some of the most important artefacts marking civilisation’s development.

The Museum is considering new uses for the Reading Room, which opened to the public in 2000 after its restoration, including a permanent exhibition space which might showcase a “brief history of the world”, through a limited number of important pieces held in the Museum collection.

Ever since Rachel Lambert Mellon died in March at the age of 103, the art world has been wondering what would become of the vast treasures of art and objects that she and her husband, Paul Mellon, had collected and lived with.

On Tuesday, Sotheby’s announced that it had landed the sale of the estate of Mrs. Mellon, winning it over its rival Christie’s. The auctions, starting in November, will be among the most highly anticipated sales from a fabled family collection, with more than $100 million of art, jewelry, furniture and decorative objects. Proceeds will benefit the Gerald B. Lambert Foundation, a charitable entity established by Mrs. Mellon, known as Bunny, in memory of her father. The foundation supports the Oak Spring Garden Library, Mrs. Mellon’s celebrated collection of rare books, manuscripts, works of art and artifacts relating to horticulture, landscape design and natural history.

Another group of sacred Hopi masks was gaveled away at a Paris auction Friday, over the objections of tribe members and the U.S. Embassy in Paris, Agence France Presse has reported.

In Hopi tradition, the masks don’t merely represent spirits, but embody them, making it a sacrilege to collect and display them, or otherwise use them outside the ceremonies for which they were made.

An appeal to a Paris court on Thursday failed, the news agency reported, and the Eve auction house went ahead with the sale, which also included Navajo artifacts. However, only nine of the 29 masks were sold, for an average price of about $20,800. A 19th century mask fetched the highest price, $51,000.

Spain is to return to Colombia 691 indigenous artefacts seized in a police operation 11 years ago.

Most of the ceramic items are of huge cultural and archaeological value, and date back to 1400BC.

They had been smuggled out of South America by a man linked to the drug gangs before being recovered in Spain, the embassy in Madrid said.

Following a court order in Spain, the items were handed over to the Colombian authorities.

They were put in the Museum of America in Madrid and will be returned to Colombia in the next few months.

Eight Nigerian artifacts that were probably stolen decades ago and illegally sent to the United States have been returned to the West African country by the Museum of Fine Arts, according to museum officials, who said Nigerian authorities planned to announce the transfer on Thursday.

The decision to return the artworks, including a 2,000-year-old terra-cotta head, was the culmination of an 18-month pursuit through dusty records and old gallery brochures, untangling an art-world mystery that spanned several continents. Along the way, the MFA discovered that one item, a brass altar figure, had probably been stolen from the royal palace in Benin City as recently as the 1970s.