THE NAME WAS ONE WORD SHORTER

In 2015, a New York gallery sold a pair of 4,700-year-old gypsum figures as part of the "Rihani Family Collection." Prosecutors later traced looted antiquities to a smuggler named Hassan Rihani and seized them. Earlier this year, an auction house tried to sell the same two figures again — this time as "the R. Family Collection."


Investigators recognized them anyway.


The two objects — a male and a female worshiper, hands clasped, eyes wide, carved between 2750 and 2600 BCE — are among the earliest known sculptures of the human figure in the round. This July, Manhattan prosecutors seized both under warrant and folded them into a single week's haul: 59 antiquities, worth more than $600,000, returned to Italy, Iraq, and Indonesia.


The Met, Public Domain — Standing male worshiper, Sumerian, Early Dynastic I–II (ca. 2900–2600 BCE), excavated 1933–34, Tell Asmar. Reference image only.

The Met, Public Domain — Standing male worshiper, Sumerian, Early Dynastic I–II (ca. 2900–2600 BCE), excavated 1933–34, Tell Asmar. Reference image only.


Italy received the largest share — 48 objects, including a terracotta vessel attributed to the Troilos Painter, described by the Met's own website as the only known surviving example of its hybrid form. It had been smuggled by a dealer named Fritz Burki and later entered the museum's collection. Iraq received nine objects, including the two Sumerian worshipers. Indonesia's share was harder to categorize as merchandise at all: two preserved human skulls belonging to the Dayak people of Borneo, seized in 2024.


The Met, Public Domain — Standing female worshiper, Sumerian, Early Dynastic IIIa (ca. 2600–2500 BCE), excavated 1960–61, Nippur. Reference image only.

The Met, Public Domain — Standing female worshiper, Sumerian, Early Dynastic IIIa (ca. 2600–2500 BCE), excavated 1960–61, Nippur. Reference image only.


The unit responsible, Manhattan's Antiquities Trafficking Unit, is led by former classics scholar and Marine colonel Matthew Bogdanos. Since its founding, the unit has convicted eighteen people and recovered nearly 6,400 objects worth more than $490 million, returning over 6,000 to 38 countries. Bogdanos was recently awarded a $100,000 prize for his work; he donated it all to charity.


None of that scale explains the detail that lingers longest: how little effort it took to try selling the same stolen statues twice. Dropping "Hassan" from the collection's name cost nothing and took no skill at all.


Shortening a smuggler's name to a single initial took less effort than carving the statue did, 4,700 years ago. Was that laziness, or a bet that no one would still be looking? source : artnet


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A NAME FOUND INSIDE A SCRIBBLE NOBODY HAD READ YET

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  The room had been excavated in 2010 by the National Geographic Explorer William Saturno. Sixteen years later, someone was still staring at one faint patch of paint on its east wall, trying to work out what it said. The building is a small masonry structure at Xultun, a Maya site in the jungle of northeastern Guatemala, 340 kilometers southwest of Guatemala City. Its interior walls are covered with portraits of seated and kneeling men, each labeled with the title taaj — "obsidian," a term for a class of scribes and scholars — and with more than fifty faint mathematical notations scattered across the plaster like a scratch pad nobody bothered to erase. One cluster, designated Text 19, sat below a larger, already-deciphered inscription: eleven small hieroglyphs, ten centimeters tall in total, easy to miss even for people who had been staring at this room for years. The Met, Public Domain — Chakalte', "Relief with enthroned ruler" (770 CE), Maya, La Pasadita, Guat...
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THE PAINTING THAT HUNG UNDER THE WRONG NAME FOR A CENTURY

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  For most of the twentieth century, a Jesuit residence in Dublin had a dark, dramatic painting of a betrayal hanging quietly in its dining hall. The priests who ate beneath it believed it was the work of a minor Dutch follower of a more famous Italian master. It hung there through decades of dinners, unremarkable, misattributed, until a restorer finally looked closely enough in 1990 to recognize what it actually was: a lost original by Caravaggio himself, "The Taking of Christ," painted around 1602 and missing from the historical record for nearly two hundred years. That kind of disappearance was not unusual for him. Caravaggio was, by multiple accounts, the most electrifying Italian painter to work since Michelangelo — whom he was not related to, though he shared the name — and he was almost completely forgotten within years of his own death. Paintings were quietly reassigned to other artists' catalogues. His name barely survived the century he died in, and it would tak...
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The Silence and the Sales Curve: Lee Bae's Charcoal Enters a Cistercian Abbey

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  Paris, around 1990. Lee Bae, a painter newly arrived from Cheongdo, South Korea, has no money for oil paint or canvas. Rent alone strains what little he has. He needs a material he can afford, and at a modest shop — by most accounts a gas station or a neighborhood supermarket — he finds an inexpensive bag of ordinary barbecue charcoal, the kind sold for grilling, not for art. He buys it anyway. Nothing about the material asks to be looked at — it is fuel, ash-black and cheap. But he opens the bag, turns a lump over in his hand, and does not put it down. That small act of thrift, a poor painter buying what he could afford instead of what he wanted, becomes, over the following decades, one of the more improbable turns in contemporary art. Charcoal is wood that has already died once — burned, blackened, reduced — yet it does not simply end there. Lee Bae found in it a material that had passed through fire and come out the other side, still capable of holding form, still capable of b...
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