Firmans and Partage: The Lawful Export of Antiquities from Ottoman Cyprus, 1860s to 1905

From the 1860s until 1905 the lawful way for a Cypriot antiquity to leave the island ran through three instruments: a personal Imperial firman giving its holder leave to dig, the rights of the owner of the land the object was found in, and, from 1874, a division of every licensed find in thirds between the Government, the finder and the landowner, with export allowed for the private shares. The consuls at Larnaca used the firmans; the excavators bought or leased the land; and after 1878 the British administration kept the Ottoman regulation of 1874 in force for more than a quarter of a century, so that the British Museum, the Cyprus Exploration Fund and the German and Austrian museums all took their shares under it. This entry describes how each instrument worked in practice, with the cases that tested it. It goes further into the Ottoman and early British years than the legal export of Cypriot antiquities, which sets out the whole sequence of laws to 1996. The digging that supplied the same collections is described in its twin entry, tomb-digging in Ottoman Cyprus. The photograph at the head of this page shows the sea front at Larnaca, where the consuls lived and the crates were shipped, in 1878 (John Thomson, Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0).

Firmans to consuls and missions before 1869

Before 1869 the Ottoman Empire had no general regulation on antiquities. Leave to search for them was given individually, by an Imperial firman issued in Constantinople [1]. A firman carried real authority on the ground. In 1862 Edmond Duthoit, the draughtsman of the French mission of Melchior de Vogüé and William Waddington, used his to obtain an inscription built into the wall of a peasant's house and to overrule the local cadi's objections to his excavating and removing stones at Soloi [1]. The mission's work at Golgoi and its other sanctuary sites went to the Louvre.

The firman was a diplomatic favour, and it went to the consuls whose embassies pressed for it. Cesnola, as American consul, had his "renewed year after year" [4, p. 339]; the American minister at Constantinople, George Boker, wrote to him that he sometimes had to "pinch the tail of the American eagle" to make the Porte do what Cesnola required [3, p. 66]. The French consul Tiburce Colonna-Ceccaldi "applied for and obtained a firman to excavate" [3, p. 82]. The British consul could not. Lang applied officially to the British Embassy and privately to Mr Pisani, "but the answer was that as the Porte itself had the intention of forming a museum no firman could be obtained", and the Embassy, "sacredly respecting Turkish rights", accepted the refusal [4, p. 338]. Lang dug at Idalion all the same, and when the governor said he ought to stop him for want of a firman, replied "that he needed a firman to stop me, which he had not" [4, p. 339]. Alessandro Palma di Cesnola, the younger brother, applied for one in the 1870s, "never received a positive answer; so I continued digging without it" [5, p. xviii].

Landowners' rights and the regulation of 1869

In March 1869 the Porte issued its first general regulation, the Règlement sur les objets antiques, of seven articles. Requests to excavate went to the Minister of Public Instruction, and any request made by a foreign power required a special Imperial decree. Export of finds from authorised excavations was forbidden, with the exception of coins, but the finds could be sold within the Empire, to private persons or to the State. The same year the antiquities collection at Constantinople was formally established as the Imperial Museum [1].

Article 3 of the 1869 regulation decided how most collections in Cyprus were made. It stated that every antiquity found on private property belonged to the owner of the land [1]. Whoever owned the field owned what was in it, so the excavators bought fields. Cesnola, told that he must send half his collection to Constantinople, hurried to Athienou to buy the land on which his diggers had found antiquities; as landowner, he could not be required to give up half of his finds [1]. Lang bought the field at Dali in which his sanctuary of Idalion was found [8, pp. 71-72]. At Dali Cesnola bought and leased ground before his firman arrived, and his firman obliged him to leave the excavated fields as he had found them, though they had become his property by purchase [3]. The landowner's right was the hinge of the system. The villager who sold his field, or sold what he dug from it, was disposing of what the regulation called his.

Cesnola's exports and the Ottoman attempts to stop them

The new regulation reached Cesnola within two years. In January 1871 he reported to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Turin that the Turkish authorities had begun to object to his excavations, and the same year the Governor-General told him that his licence allowed him to excavate but not to export. After four years of freedom to dig and to export, he was now told that his firman required him to send half his collection to the museum in Constantinople [1]. Nicholas Stanley-Price reads the "four years" as the interval between Cesnola's arrival in 1865 and the regulation of 1869, and the "half" as a term of Cesnola's own firman, not of the regulation [1].

Cesnola got his collection out by diplomacy. In Anna Marangou's account, he held the Russian consulship as well as the American, and when the order against export was found to name only the American consul, he had his cases loaded for Alexandria and London under the other title [8, pp. 158-160]. The sculptures from Golgoi left the island soon after the Russian scholar Johannes Doell catalogued 7,919 of Cesnola's objects in 1870; a selection was exhibited in London in November 1872, part was sold to European museums and collectors, and the greater part was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1874. In all, Cesnola took about 35,000 objects from the island [7, p. 101].

The Ottoman authorities objected to the export, but they did not try to recover the objects, and the purchase in New York was public. Cesnola's consular standing made local resistance costly. When the kaimakam of Larnaca arrested two of his diggers for digging without a firman, and later his consular guard, the American minister obtained the kaimakam's dismissal, a twenty-one-gun salute to the American flag and the Governor-General's removal, with two American warships in the bay [3, pp. 56-59]. Alessandro di Cesnola's digging drew a diplomatic complaint from the Ottoman to the Italian Government in 1877, not a prosecution [1].

The regulation of 1874 and the division in thirds

On 24 March 1874 the Règlement sur les antiquités, of 36 articles, replaced the regulation of 1869. It had been drafted, according to Salomon Reinach, by Philipp Déthier, director of the Imperial Museum [1]. It was stricter on ownership and more liberal on export. Article 3 declared that every antiquity discovered under the ground belonged to the Government, and then divided the finds of an authorised excavation: one third to the Government, one third to the finder and one third to the landowner; a landowner who was also the finder took two thirds [1]. Permits came from the Sublime Porte with the approval of the Minister of Public Instruction (Article 8). The division was made in kind or by value, on the basis of an inventory of every find kept in duplicate in a register submitted to the Minister (Article 14). Export from any part of the Empire was allowed with the Minister's permission; if the Government wanted an object for the Imperial Museum, it paid the price agreed with the owner, and the rest could be exported [1]. Digging without a permit was punished by seizure of all the finds and a fine of one to five Turkish pounds, or three days to a week in prison (Article 7) [1].

Under Déthier's successor, Osman Hamdi Bey, the Ottoman Government repealed the liberal export terms in 1884 and forbade all export [1]. By then Cyprus was under British administration, and the 1874 regulation stayed in force there.

Under British administration, 1878 to 1905

Under the Convention of 1878 Cyprus remained formally Ottoman, and the Ottoman law in force on 13 July 1878, the day the occupation began, continued to apply. The British passed no antiquities law of their own before 1905 [1]. In July 1878 Charles Newton of the British Museum advised that the Government should reserve the right to explore all ancient sites, and that it was "cheaper to excavate than to buy antiquities"; in August the High Commissioner, Sir Garnet Wolseley, banned all excavation [2]. The ban applied to "everyone, Europeans, foreigners and the island's inhabitants", and it lapsed when Wolseley left in May 1879 [1]. Alessandro di Cesnola, who kept digging near Enkomi, was tried at Larnaca in October 1878 strictly under Article 7: his finds were confiscated and he was fined £4, which Wolseley remitted [1; 2]. Max Ohnefalsch-Richter, who arrived in 1878, waited two years for his first permit [1].

From 1879 the 1874 regulation was applied, at first with permits limited to learned institutions such as the British Museum and the South Kensington Museum, and then to private individuals as well [1]. The Government's printed conditions of 14 December 1883 repeated the law in their Article 6: "Division of treasure to be according to the law: 1/3 to Government, 1/3 to owner of land, 1/3 to excavator". Samuel Brown, the government engineer, applied on 14 July 1885 to dig on private land at Ayia Paraskevi near Nicosia, "subject to the usual conditions", proposing to spend £10 with Ohnefalsch-Richter as superintendent; he was approved on 17 July and signed the conditions on 27 July [6]. The Government's third was meant to stock the Cyprus Museum, founded on 15 June 1882 [1].

In practice the excavator's share was usually two thirds. As David Hogarth explained, the excavator paid the landowner cash, with a promise of compensation for damaged crops or walls, and in return leased the land and took a renunciation of all claims to the finds. In 1885 Ohnefalsch-Richter, styling himself Superintendent of Excavations for the Cyprus Museum, persuaded the Larnaca banker Charles Watkins to buy both the landowner's rights and the Government's at Idalion, "as a result only a few duplicates had to be given to the Cyprus Museum" [1]. The landowner could also sell his share separately. The Archbishop of Cyprus, as landowner at Tamassos, sold his share of the finds of 1889 through the Larnaca collector Evstathios Constantinides to the High Commissioner, Sir Henry Bulwer, most of whose collection went to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge [6].

Bulwer narrowed the channel in a minute of 16 June 1887. Private excavation, he wrote, served speculative and commercial purposes, not knowledge; the excavation rights given to the Cyprus Museum were held in trust for the public; and permits would henceforth go only to foreign museums and recognised antiquarian institutions [1]. Under that policy the Cyprus Exploration Fund dug from 1888 at Palaepaphos and elsewhere, and the British Museum's Turner Bequest expeditions worked through the 1890s at Amathus, Enkomi and other sites, all under the 1874 regulation, which the administration applied strictly [1]. Landowners were compensated and trenches backfilled under Article 24; when the Fund asked to begin at Limnitis before finishing at Polis, it was reminded of Article 19, which forbade digging in two places at once; and in 1896 the French scholar Paul Perdrizet was refused leave to continue a dig at Larnaca because the permit was in the name of his sick colleague Fossey and Article 18 forbade its transfer [1]. When the Ottoman Foreign Minister, citing the law of 1884, asked through Sir Austen Layard that all export from Cyprus be stopped, the High Commissioner, Sir Walter Sendall, replied that a law passed after the British occupation did not apply to the island [1]. The 1874 division remained the law of Cyprus until the Antiquities Law of 1905.

The evidence against: the lawful channels were porous

Three objections can be made to describing these channels as lawful. The first is that the Ottoman state itself did not regard every export as lawful. Cesnola was told in 1871 that his licence did not cover export, and his first collection left under a consular manoeuvre rather than a permission [1; 8, pp. 158-160]. After 1884 the Ottoman Foreign Ministry asked for all export from Cyprus to stop, and the British answer rested on the date of the law, not on its merits [1].

The second is that the state's share was easily emptied. A system in which a banker could buy the Government's third along with the landowner's, so that "only a few duplicates" reached the Cyprus Museum, protected very little [1]. The museum had been founded in 1882 to receive that share, and it was many years before it could acquire, inventory and display a collection [1].

The third is that the lawful channels were fed by digging that was not lawful. Thomas Kiely and Robert Merrillees observe that Bulwer's restriction of permits "did not stop illicit digging, the acquisition of antiquities by private collectors, or their exportation under licence" [6]. The younger Cesnola went on digging after the ban of August 1878, and a court condemned it [2]. The consuls' collections of the 1860s were made from the tomb-digging described in the twin entry, and Samuel Hardy's count of the Louvre's Cypriot holdings acquired before the 1960s, discussed there, finds about two thirds without an excavation record or an innocent account of their finding.

Each objection is accurate, and each concerns something other than the legal title of the objects. Cesnola's first export breached a ruling of the Governor-General, but it was made in the open, the Ottoman Government did not pursue the objects, and the Metropolitan Museum bought them publicly [7, p. 101]. Sendall's answer to the Porte applied the rule under which Britain administered the whole island, that Ottoman law stood as it was on 13 July 1878 [1]. Watkins's buy-out was a purchase permitted under the regulation, and the Cyprus Museum's weakness was a matter of funding, not of law. The illicit digging Kiely and Merrillees describe was a separate trade that ran beside the permits; objects from it entered the lawful channels when the Government licensed their export, and the Government seized them when it caught the diggers, as the younger Cesnola's case shows [2]. What the regulation of 1874 did was give a defined share of every licensed find to a private owner and let him export it. The objects that left that way left with title, under a law the Ottoman and then the British administrations applied, and their registration numbers in London, Cambridge, Berlin and Vienna record when they arrived.

What this means for an object on the market today

An object that left Cyprus under a firman or through the division of finds before 1905 belongs to one of the largest bodies of lawful Cypriot exports. Where it can be traced to a named excavation and a museum's register, its history is usually firm; much of the British Museum's share was later given on to museums across Britain, so an object may have passed through more than one public collection before reaching the market. Where an object is said to come from Cesnola, Lang, the Lawrence-Cesnola sales or one of Ohnefalsch-Richter's clients, the claim needs the same proof as any other: a label, a sale catalogue, a register entry or a museum accession number that matches the object. Such proof settles its title and its export. It rarely settles where the object was found, because most of this material was recorded by site, if at all, and not by tomb. How a documented old history is checked is set out in collecting Cypriot antiquities today, and examples of objects whose ownership is documented at every step since the 1880s are in the legal export of Cypriot antiquities.