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archaeologists therefore condemn any activity that damages, destroys, or renders irretrievable the history of an object or its archaeological context. That rationale is echoed in the Society for Classical Studies’ Statement on Professional Ethics and the American Society of Papyrologists’ Resolution Condemning the Illicit Trade in Papyri. Such public documents are important for attempting to limit and qualify the scholarly imperative to acquire, preserve, study, and publish the material culture of antiquity. Indeed, there are good reasons for such restrictions: cultural heritage continues to be destroyed instead of professionally excavated, and the material culture of antiquity continues to be looted and sold on the antiquities market rather than properly studied in context.

      Such concerns are especially germane to papyrology because of its historical weakness in archaeological matters. A brief example is again illustrative: although the cartonnage from which the famous Lille Stesichorus originates was excavated by Jouget and Lefebvre in 1901, for example, the location of the find remains unclear (Meillier: 1976: 339; Turner 1971: 124). There is more we would like to know about this text that, sadly, cannot now be ascertained: such gaps in paperwork or record-keeping are all too common when dealing even with legally acquired papyri. A further consideration raised by this text involves the excavated object itself: the physical reality of mummy cartonnage is that extracting papyrus from it long came at the cost of destroying the cartonnage. Papyrologists and archaeologists are unlikely to agree on which item is more important, but the dismantling of cartonnage is no longer especially common in responsible collections.

      Between the institutional collections whose acquisition histories are relatively transparent and the black market, therefore, lies a considerable grey area to which the various ethics statements respond. Practically the only check the academic community can place on the free market in antiquities is to be diligent in the course of conducting research in the present, by demanding proof of an object’s provenance before authenticating or publishing it, and by reporting that provenance in full after verifying it to the best of one’s abilities. No matter how exciting a new text may be for the addition it potentially makes to the corpus of lyric, it is also inherently problematic, and therefore should be presented with a high bar to clear before receiving a scholarly audience. The academic argument concerning the preservation and dissemination of knowledge must be reconciled to an ethical one that reflects an unsavory reality: one’s participation in activities that destroy data or knowledge—wittingly or unwittingly, directly or indirectly—effectively encourages them. Profit is a powerful incentive for criminals, and when a scholar identifies, authenticates, or publishes an object that was acquired in contravention of the law or outside of a controlled archaeological excavation, both the value of that object and the incentive for the perpetrator(s) to continue are thereby increased. Such practices are antithetical to the scholarly imperative to recover, study, preserve, curate, and disseminate knowledge of antiquity.

      Further Reading

      Note

      1 * Andrew Bresch and Amber Leenders assisted in the research for this article.

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