In 1970 the Museum of Fine Arts Boston turned 100 years old, and it pulled out all the stops to celebrate. That included galas, special exhibitions, and several exciting acquisitions that went on display throughout the year.

The most exciting of all was an ancient treasure hoard, a gift from financier Landon T. Clay, which was billed as “only the fourth hoard of its kind to appear since Schliemann excavated the gold of Troy.” It consisted of more than 22 pounds of 18-karat gold split across 137 pieces of jewelry weighing over 22 pounds, including bracelets, studs, necklaces, pendants, and a spectacularly photogenic collar made of hammered gold discs.

Not only was the hoard beautiful, it was also archaeologically significant. Though the ornaments were aesthetically unified, “simple and even severe in design,” they did not appear to have a common origin. Some had spiral designs suggesting they had come from Anatolia or Mesopotamia; others resembled Mycenaean ornaments from the Cyclades; and one item was rather distinctively Egyptian.

That would be a 3″ inscribed cylinder seal. The hieroglyphs indicated its owner had served two Fifth-Dynasty Pharaohs, Menkauhor Kaiu and Djedkare Isesi, as “Inspector of Tenant Farmers of the Pyramid called Netjer” and “Master of Secrets and House Official of the Palace”, respectively. That meant the seal, and by association the other artifacts, dated to to around 2400 BCE.

That these items from different cultures had been gathered in a single place suggested that a network of thriving trade routes and cultural exchange had existed centuries before the start of recorded history.

Reporters immediately drew comparisons between the MFA Boston’s hoard and the Dorak treasure, which James Mellaart had briefly glimpsed a decade earlier. Partly that was because it was a collection of riches beyond compare that had the potential to completely rewrite our understanding of the ancient Near East. But mostly it was because, despite the hype, it was entirely useless archaeologically.

The hoard’s anonymous seller had not been able to provide any information about the artifacts’ origins, and without that there was no way to draw meaningful conclusions about them.

No one doubted that the artifacts themselves were genuine. The museum’s resident experts, archaeologist Dr. Emily Dickinson Townsend Vermuele and art historian Dr. W. Stevenson Smith, had spent several years examining and authenticating the hoard and concluded the artifacts were genuine. I see no reason to doubt their judgment, as at the time they were both among the top experts in their respective fields. Dr. Vermeule had just received tenure at Harvard and, well, Dr. Smith was dead so forget about him.

Despite the complete lack of provenance, Dr. Vermeule began speculating wildly about things she could not and did not know. In museum press releases she stated “the gleaming objects were found all together in a coastal tomb somewhere in the eastern half of the Mediterranean” and had been “entombed with a dead princess.” These claims are purely vibes based – suggesting that the owner was female because the items are largely feminine-coded, that she was a princess because they were gold, and that she was Mediterranean was from the stylistic cues.

Her wildest speculations, of course, involved that damn seal.

One can only speculate how the seal got loose. Perhaps the court sent some kind of diplomatic or commercial ambassador to the still unexplored countries bordering the great green sea. Was the courier murdered or married abroad, to pass his large gold seal on to the family of a royal princess in a coastal kingdom of those still barbaric but energetic lands?

(“Fine Arts Museum given treasure of ancient gold.” Boston Globe, 3 Jan 1970)

What she did not mention was that the cylinder seal was more problematic than enlightening. It was of a substantially different character than the rest of the hoard; indeed, the only common feature it had with the other items was that it was made of solid gold. That could imply that the original owner had mostly been interested in it for aesthetic reasons, or purely due to the fact that it was made from precious metals.

It might also suggest that a more recent a more current owner might have done the same thing, i.e., that the entire hoard was not a single contiguous unit, but a “dealer’s bag” of disparate artifacts that had been grouped together to make them more salable. That would explain why the hoard seemed to consist of a mish-mash of styles and cultures, and would not require us to rewrite everything we knew about prehistory. In that case the seal would have been a recent addition, intended to suggest an antique date for the other items and make them seem more valuable.

The other thing the lack of provenance suggested was the individual elements of the hoard had been looted. That, certainly, was the conclusion of an article that ran in the Times of London on January 30, 1970. The article also revealed that the collection had been previously offered for sale to the British Museum, the Berlin Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, but that those storied institutions had passed due to those concerns. It then went on to quote several unnamed British archaeologists who called the decision to acquire the hoard highly unethical, and suggested that the acquisition would only serve to legitimate the sale of smuggled goods and encourage more looting.

The article could not have been more perfectly timed. It dumped the MFA exhibition into the middle of a vicious argument raging throughout intellectual circles about looting, the ownership of cultural history, the ethics of archaeology, and the social responsibilities museums owed to their communities and the world.

As usual the Turks were out in front, insisting that the hoard must have been looted from their country and demanding a full disclosure of everything the museum knew. “The Boston Museum must certainly know where the treasure comes from. We are asking that the information about its origin be made known to us.”

They were followed by Dr. Spyridion Marinatos, Director of the Greek Archaeological Service, who called the hoard “a grotesque forgery” and declared, “This is not a question of where the gold was excavated, but it is a question of where it was manufactured.” (That stung a little — Dr. Vermeule and Dr. Marinatos had worked together on several digs in Crete.)

Even James Mellaart felled compelled to chime in, claiming the hoard was “a dreadful blow to international archaeology” and emphasizing that without accurate knowledge about the circumstances or location of the find it was functionality useless to scholars. (Which was really rich, coming from Mellaart.)

The MFA found it self in a very precarious position. It was already in hot water due to the recent acquisition of a portrait of Eleanora Gonzaga attributed to Raphael. The Italian government claimed the portrait been illegally exported from the country and was suing to reclaim it. The museum could ill-afford another scandal.

Which would explain a lot about their response.

Delay, Deny, Defend

Initially the museum ignored the criticism, hoping that it would all blow over. When it did not blow over, it was forced to formulate an actual response. That effort was spearheaded by the museum’s resident expert, Dr. Emily Dickinson Townsend Vermeule, and its curator of classic art… who happened to be Dr. Vermeule’s even more WASP-ily named husband, Cornelius Clarkson Vermeule III.

Cornelius Vermeule initially attempted to deny the very existence of the controversy…

All the excitement about early Bronze Age gold jewelry and its Egyptian cylinder seal seems based on jumbled speculation on every ‘treasure’ that has entered a public collection since the French revolution…

(“Museum denies its gold find is Dorak treasure.” Boston Globe, 5 Feb 1970)

He blamed the furor on “a couple of journalists in London” trying to create a scandal out of nothing to further their careers.

At the same time Emily Vermeuele attempted to delay public discussion of the matter until after the opening of the exhibition. She promised she would reveal all she knew about the hoard in the “very near future.” When that information arrived, it said nothing about where the hoard had come from. Instead it focused on matters that had never been question: whether the artifacts were genuine and whether they were actually gold.

In coded language the Vermeueles admitted that there was no way to know whether the artifacts had been looted or even to trace their origin. Museum director Perry T. Rathbone was even more forthright: “No one knows where this gold comes from and I don’t think they ever will.”

Strangely that did not satisfy anyone, so the MFA announced that the full story would be revealed in articles the Vermueles were writing for the Illustrated London News and Horizon. These articles took several months to appear and merely repeated the existing facts. Because, of course, there were no new facts to add.

The MFA then proposed to invite international experts to a symposium about the hoard… which is to say, not action, just more talk. The intent seemed to be that by having numerous experts publicly disagree about the nature of the problem and what needed to be done the museum would look like it was being responsible without actually having to commit itself to making any changes to how it operated. (The symposium does not seem to have actually taken place, by the way.)

And then the museum started trying to deflect the blame for its poor decisions to other parties.

Cornelius Vermuele heavily implied that other museums had declined to purchase the hoard not because of its lack of provenance and concerns about looting but because of its price; which, given that the museums involved were three of the largest museums in the world, is laughable at best.

Then he tried to claim it wasn’t about funds but internal politics. The idea seemed to be that because the hoard contained artifacts from multiple cultures that meant different departments would have to collaborate and share budgets, which was difficult at other less integrated institutions. This too, does not hold up to scrutiny. This sort of thing happens all the time.

He suggested the MFA had been chosen over other potential purchasers because as a smaller museum they were less catty and gossipy and less likely to play politics… Or, reading between the lines, that they were less likely to the seller ask awkward questions like the ones they were now having to answer.

It was even claimed that the museum’s decision to acquire the hoard had been made with great reluctance, again due to the same looting and forgery issues. (It was later revealed that the great reluctance was because Rathbone thought the horde was “too archaeological” and “not artistic” enough.

The Vermeuele’s final argument was that the damage had already been done.

It would have been far more scandalous for it to continue its peregrinations, with a prominent American museum bidding for the cylinder seal alone and private collectors wanting bracelets and hair-rings for their wives…

The loss of archaeological context with which the group came equipped, was guaranteed by the greed of whoever dug it up and peddled it around; and this loss is nothing to that which would have ensued had the collection been dispersed into scattered pieces…

(“An Aegean Gold Hoard and the Court of Egypt.” Illustrated London News, 21 Mar 1970)

This argument is circular and self-defeating. If the archaeological context had already been lost, there was no way to prove the hoard was contiguous and therefore it was valueless and there was no particular reason to keep it all intact. But then it gets better…

One can only hope that the site, with its new regional style, will be discovered and possibly excavated in the near future instead of continuing as a playground for brigands, and that the ministers of education in eastern Mediterranean countries will increase their support of their antiquities services and their education of their people in the importance of not breaking into ancient monuments and sites, so that such historical data for the interconnection of cultures in the Early Bronze Age will not be lost again.

(“An Aegean Gold Hoard and the Court of Egypt.” Illustrated London News, 21 Mar 1970)

This is basically declaring that this entire scandal is not the museum’s problem. It is, in fact, somebody else’s problem. With a dash of victim blaming in for good measure… i.e., “It’s not our fault you can’t hold on to your looted artifacts.”

Just to make it abundantly clear: these are bad arguments, even if you don’t care about looting. And the museum was making them with a tone of sneering condescencion.

Nobody Learned Anything

And yet they worked.

The big problem was that looting was too baked into the modality of museums. That meant other museums were actively incentivized to stay quiet about the practice; after all, there wasn’t a museum in the world that didn’t have dozens if not hundreds of pieces of questionable provenance in their collections. As a moral matter curators undoubtedly knew they were in the wrong; as a practical matter they tied themselves into intellectual knots trying to absolve themselves of any guilt.

This meant that the museum community tacitly had the MFA’s back, allowing its terrible and disingenuous arguments to stand. Then all the museum had to do was sit back and wait for the press to eventually tire of the lack of developments and move on to other stories — and indeed there could be no developments, because as a practical matter there was nothing to discover and the museum just kept repeating the same things over and over.

Besides, any individual who might actually have to suffer consequences for actual wrongdoing -– Rathbone, Clay, the Vermeules –- tended to be both wealthy and socially connected in ways that meant they would never suffer more than a slap on the wrist for their misbehavior. A slap that would never come because again, it would require individuals and organizations to hold the malefactors to standards they could not or would not hold to themselves.

In the end the furor died down and the public turned out in droves for the centennial celebration, with more than ten times the usual number of visitors passing through the museum during its opening weeks. Portions of the hoard are still on display.

Years later the anonymous seller was outed as Greek antiquities dealer George Zacos. Zacos had died in 1983, but was tied posthumously to the sale of numerous looted artifacts. No one seems to have seriously dug into his connection to Boston’s hoard.

The Eleanora Gonzaga brouhaha eventually forced Perry Rathbone out of the museum, and Cornelius Vermeule III became its new director.

Emily Vermeule continued to go on digs and teach at Harvard and raise her kids. She eventually became Boston’s local version of George F. Will, writing pretentious long-winded editorials comparing her beloved Red Sox to the heroes of Greek myth.

(And, if the name Vermeule seems familiar, that’s because their odious son Adrian Vermeule is America’s leading proponent of abandoning democracy and replacing it with a theocratic Christofascist dictatorship.)

The MFA Boston would sporadically find itself back in the controversy over looting, with many of those instances involving purchases made by Landon T. Clay. It conducted itself with a lot more decorum and a lot less sneering during those scandals.

So I guess that at least counts as a mildly positive outcome. Yay.