The Cyprus Museum Saleroom: The State's Own Sales of 'Duplicate' Antiquities, 1920s to 1991

For about sixty-five years the Cyprus Museum sold antiquities from its own stock. The law allowed it to dispose of "duplicates", objects of a kind already represented in the collection, and from the late 1920s it did so across a counter in the Museum courtyard, to cruise passengers, residents, collectors and institutions abroad, until the practice was abolished in 1991 [1, p. 288]. It was a lawful channel run by the state itself, and every object sold through it left with a sale recorded by the Museum and, if it was taken abroad, an export permit. The early years under Rupert Gunnis, the Governor's aide-de-camp who made the sales a success between 1926 and 1932, are told at length in the article how the Cyprus Museum sold antiquities. This page is the reference treatment of the channel across its whole life, including the decades from 1935 to 1991 that the article covers only briefly, and it sets out the case the saleroom's critics made against it. The wider history of lawful export is in the legal export of Cypriot antiquities. The photograph at the head of this page is a page of Gunnis's diary for 7 July 1927, recording an afternoon at the Museum "arranging the antiquities to sell to the Americans on July 25th" (Henry Moore Institute Archive, Leeds, Rupert Forbes Gunnis Archive).

The legal basis: "duplicates" in the laws of 1905 and 1935

The Museum had disposed of unwanted material occasionally since its foundation in 1882, by gift to museums abroad, by exchange and by advertised sale [1, p. 281]. The Antiquities Law of 1905 gave the practice a statutory form. Section 42(4) empowered the Museum Committee to "sell, exchange, or otherwise dispose of duplicate specimens of antiquities, when it is in the interest of the Museum", provided the Committee was satisfied "that they really are duplicates" [1, p. 283]. Section 33 allowed a private owner to export an antiquity only if the Committee had inspected it and was satisfied "that there are in the Museum exhibits of the same kind and quality" [1, p. 282]. The sale money went into the Cyprus Antiquities Fund created by the same law [1, p. 284].

Neither section defined a duplicate. Stanley-Price calls the condition "vague, and ultimately subjective" [1, p. 283], and notes that the term has rarely been defined anywhere, even in arguments for a lawful market in antiquities [1, p. 281]. In practice a duplicate was whatever the curator of the day judged the Museum did not need. That vagueness is the source of both the channel's usefulness and the criticism of it.

The Antiquities Law of 1935, which gave the Department of Antiquities its powers and cut the excavator's share to half of what remained after the Museum's choice, did not end the Museum's sales. It referred in terms to the "duplicate antiquities exposed for sale at the Cyprus Museum" [1, p. 288]. From then on the seller was the Department, through the Museum, and the sales ran on under the colonial law and, after 1960, under the Republic. The government file on the subject, "Duplicate antiquities, sale of", runs from March 1937 to February 1954 [1, p. 288].

What the saleroom sold

The stock was the commonest material in the Museum's stores: pottery above all, with lamps and glass. When Gunnis began selling in 1927 there were about 500 objects for sale, "mostly Iron Age and Hellenistic glass"; he raised the number to about 2,000, all of them labelled [1, p. 286]. That is the size of the stock on offer, not a yearly sale. A handwritten "List of duplicates" of March 1928 has about 418 numbered items [1, p. 286]. Joan du Plat Taylor's guide to Nicosia told visitors that "the SALE ROOM in the courtyard may be visited where duplicate pottery may be purchased" [1, p. 288], and in February 1935, with building work in the courtyard, the duplicates were set out in the entrance hall for a crowd of cruise passengers [1, p. 288].

Where the stock came from matters for the argument below. Some of it was material from authorised excavations, including the Museum's own. Stanley-Price adds that the Museum went on selling "surplus" antiquities that were "often the result of seizures of illicitly excavated material that was considered redundant for the national collections" [1, p. 288]. Part of what the state sold lawfully had been dug unlawfully and then confiscated.

What buyers wanted shaped what was sold. Olga Tufnell, one of the volunteer sellers, wrote in 1930 that the American passengers "won't take anything with a break in it, and the flat bowls to be used as ashtrays went best" [1, p. 287]. The saleroom was a source of intact, ordinary, decorative pieces, the same kind of material that dominates the licensed dealers' exports and the auction market for Cypriot pottery today.

Who bought: tourists, residents and institutions

The first customers in number were cruise passengers. Gunnis's first sale, in February 1927, made £3; on 10 March 1927 he recorded a "great sale to Americans, 100 at a time. Made £60" [1, p. 286]. The Mantovani tourist agency warned the curator when groups were coming [1, p. 286]. By 1931 an average of about 5,200 cruise passengers a year landed in Cyprus for the day [1, p. 287], and on one Sunday in 1930 some twenty volunteers sold to 300 passengers from the Homeric and took £75 10s in an hour and a half [1, p. 287]. A visitor's account of 1938 called the Cyprus Museum a "wholly admirable museum where genuine objects dating from the pre-Christian era can be obtained at reasonable prices" [1, p. 288].

Residents and collectors bought too, and so did institutions. The Swedish collector John Ahlstrand bought most of his collection from the Cyprus Museum in 1953, alongside pots from the licensed dealers George Petrakides of Larnaca and Petros Kolokassides of Nicosia and pieces exported under licence; two of the vases had been sold to the Museum by Petrakides before the Museum sold them on to Ahlstrand. The collection was acquired by the Medelhavsmuseet in Stockholm in 1994 [4]. Robert Merrillees, writing of the decades up to the 1960s, puts the Museum's two roles side by side: it "had no compunction in buying artefacts from the public and was still selling them to institutions and private individuals" [3, p. 423]. The Museum's buying is set out in the state as buyer.

Stock and revenue, 1922 to 1934

The Cyprus Gazette published the Antiquities Fund's accounts each year, and Stanley-Price tabulates them [1, p. 285]. Sales were almost nothing until 1926, when the Museum Committee asked the curator to list duplicates for sale to museums and tourists [1, p. 286]. They then outstripped every other source of income except the government grant, and fell again after 1930, when Porphyrios Dikaios took over the curatorship and restrained them, and when the world depression cut tourism [1, pp. 286, 288].

Selected years from the Cyprus Antiquities Fund accounts [1, p. 285]. For scale, Gunnis's salary as aide-de-camp was £300 a year [1, p. 286].

Dikaios warned in 1931 that "our stock of duplicates cannot last always: on the contrary it is soon going to be exhausted" [1, p. 288]. It did not run out. In Stanley-Price's words, "there were always sufficient 'duplicates' available for sale" [1, p. 288], partly because seizures and excavations kept adding to the stores.

The Sales Register under the Republic, to 1991

After 1960 the channel continued under the Department of Antiquities of the Republic, and its record was a Sales Register. One of its numbers survives on an object on this site: a Bichrome amphora carries, in ink on the shoulder, the number S.R. 3477/65 and, on string round the handles, a lead seal stamped C.M., for Cyprus Museum. It was bought from the Museum and exported from the island under licence in 1969, and its catalogue page describes the marks. The suffix "/65" probably records the year of entry; no published key to the register's numbering has been found to confirm it.

In January 1983 the Director of Antiquities, Vassos Karageorghis, described the register to Ellen Herscher in an interview printed in the Journal of Field Archaeology: "The Department of Antiquities itself has a Sales Register of items available at nominal prices: it encourages exports to universities, museums, and similar institutions, for educational purposes, not as souvenirs" [2, p. 364]. In the same answer he set out the other lawful routes of the time: objects "legally acquired and duly registered by December 31, 1973", and not needed by the Museum, could be exported with a permit, and chance finds the Museum did not want "can also be disposed of" [2, p. 364]. By then the stated purpose had changed. The saleroom of the 1920s had sold to tourists to raise money for excavation; the register of the 1980s offered material at nominal prices to teaching collections.

The sales were abolished in 1991, according to information from Despina Pilides, a former Curator of Antiquities, given to Stanley-Price [1, p. 288]. The comparable saleroom of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, opened in 1902 with its own entrance from the street, had closed in 1979 [1, pp. 282, 288]. Licensed export of privately held antiquities from Cyprus went on until 1996; it is covered in licensed dealers and registered collections and in the legal-export leaf.

The evidence against the saleroom

The strongest objections were made at the time, by people who knew the Museum well.

Jeffery, 1925. George Jeffery, Curator of Ancient Monuments, agreed with the Governor that illicit digging was not widespread, but wrote that "the buying and selling of antiquities at the Museum tends to keep alive a commercial interest in such things, and a desire to supply the market" [1, p. 273]. On his reading the Museum's trade encouraged the illicit trade rather than displacing it. Stanley-Price notes that the Museum's sales were in fact very few when he wrote [1, p. 273].

Buckler, 1933. W. H. Buckler, writing to George Hill, accepted the argument from income but held that the sales supplied "food for gossip as to the integrity of diggers and especially of officials", and recommended abolishing them as "unworthy of the government's prestige" [1, p. 290]. J. L. Myres told the Archaeological Joint Committee in London in 1932 that selling the results of excavation "does not seem quite a function of a Museum" [1, p. 290].

Hill, 1934. Sir George Hill, Director of the British Museum, inspected Cyprus with Sir Charles Peers in 1934. He found the sales "not altogether dignified", while accepting that many great European museums did the same, and he warned of the risk of selling what were not really duplicates, "a real danger, as past experience has shown" [1, p. 290].

The Marion pottery. Hill probably had in mind pottery from the official excavations at Marion in 1889, catalogued by Myres, which the Museum had disposed of as duplicates and which was offered at Sotheby's in December 1933 [1, p. 290]. Myres had found that whole tomb groups were missing from the Museum. He told the Colonial Office that disposal of duplicates "appears to be the official remedy for overcrowding", and compared it to a Record Office that "periodically scrapped the documents that are not on crested notepaper" [1, p. 290]. The consignor at Sotheby's was Gunnis [1, p. 290], who had been able to sign export permits for Museum sales and, according to a later Director, used them for a large quantity of antiquities exported for himself [1, p. 292]. That story is told in the article and is not repeated here.

Stanley-Price's verdict. The modern historian of the saleroom concludes that the drive to sell more duplicates raised the Museum's income but did not undermine the illicit market: "authorised sales of 'duplicates' have not been effective in suppressing the illicit market for antiquities", in Cyprus as elsewhere [1, p. 295]. He adds that the effect is harder to judge in Cyprus because one of the sales' strongest advocates used them for his own benefit [1, p. 295].

These objections stand. They concern the channel's effect on illicit digging and the loss of excavated groups, not the lawfulness of the sales. Every sale was made by the Museum under the law in force, and the objects left with the state's permission. The Marion case shows that "duplicate" could cover material that should have been kept together; it does not show that the buyers acquired anything unlawfully. The record of illicit digging under British rule, and of the Ottoman tomb-digging that preceded it, shows that the village habit of opening tombs ran before, alongside and after the saleroom, with or without it.

Labels, seals and receipts: the marks of a saleroom object

An object sold by the Museum can carry the Museum's own evidence of the sale. Four kinds of mark are known:

• Labels. Gunnis had trilingual labels written in Greek, English and Turkish on Government House invitation cards, each giving a date [1, p. 286]. No surviving example has been published, so a small handwritten card in those languages is something to look for rather than a known type.
• Sales Register numbers. A number in the form "S.R. 3477/65", written on the object, is the Museum's record that it sold the piece.
• Lead seals. Objects passed for export were sealed with a small lead disc on a cord or wire, usually stamped C.M. The Department of Antiquities has confirmed objects carrying such a tag, among them a Bichrome bowl sold by the licensed dealer Petros Kolokasides with its "Cyprus Museum lead export tag attached to the handle" [5].
• Receipts and export licences. Ahlstrand's papers included receipts from the Government of Cyprus Antiquities Office [4]. The Department keeps copies of old export licences, so "each time an object appears accompanied by an export license from Cyprus, this can be confirmed" [5].

Seals and labels are often removed. A cord stain on a handle, or a number half cleaned away, can be the only trace left. The site's article on export licences and labels shows how to read them.

What this means for an object on the market today

The saleroom is one of the reasons so many ordinary Cypriot pots, lamps and glass vessels have a lawful history outside the island. From the 1920s to 1991 the state sold them openly, with a record of each sale and an export permit for each object that left. An object with an S.R. number, a C.M. seal, a Museum receipt or a matching export licence left the island lawfully, and the Department of Antiquities in Nicosia can check a licence or a sales number against its archive.

Those marks show lawful title and lawful export. They do not show where an object was found, and, as the saleroom's own history shows, some stock came from confiscated illicit digging and some from broken-up tomb groups. An object with no mark is not by that fact illicit: most sold pieces have lost their labels and seals, and the paper often stayed with the first buyer. The documents that support a lawful history, and their limits, are set out in lawful and illicit in the record.