"Our Complicity in this Classical Looting": Contesting the Past at Sardis, 1922-1925

Fikret Yegül, University of California, Santa Barbara

During the turbulent years that followed the end of World War I the American Society for the Excavation of Sardis and its field team of excavators removed 58 crates of antiquities from the site as a “gift” to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This unfortunate and untimely event undertaken just as the Turks asserted the control of their home territories and in defiance of the legal agreement that existed between the Ottoman State and the American excavators, caused much concern and unhappiness between the two sides. It was eventually solved by sharing this material after long and sometimes acrimonious negotiations. Described pithily by one frustrated United States State Department officer as “our complicity in this Classical looting,” the disagreement illustrates not only the conflicting policies of an excavation through the difficult, transforming years of peace and war, but the perceptions of its wealthy and patriotic sponsors for whom concept of cultural patrimony only operated in enriching American museums and excavations on foreign soil was another form of business investment.