Documenting a Lawful History: How to Show a Cypriot Antiquity Left the Island Lawfully

Lawful and illicit in the record explains what each kind of history leaves on paper and what each document proves, and collecting Cypriot antiquities today sets out the law and the warning signs a buyer should know. What follows is the method: how an owner, an heir or a buyer assembles the evidence that a Cypriot antiquity left the island lawfully, in what order to look, where each kind of evidence is kept, and what to write down when nothing has survived. Most Cypriot antiquities abroad left Cyprus lawfully, through the partage of excavated finds, the Cyprus Museum's own saleroom and the licensed dealers, over more than a century, and most of them have since lost their paper. A careful file can recover a good part of that history, and an honest file that records its gaps is worth more than a complete story nobody can check. The photograph at the head of this page shows a page of the typed list that a British collector drew up in August 1972 when he lent his Cypriot antiquities to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. A dated museum loan file of this kind fixes a group of objects in a named collection at a known date, and it is the sort of document a family should look for.

What the law and the market ask for

Four date-lines govern how a Cypriot antiquity is treated outside Cyprus, and a file should be built to meet them.

The first is 1970. The UNESCO Convention of that year is not retroactive and binds states, not people, but museums and the trade have adopted it as the minimum. The American museum directors' guidelines, for example, ask that a work be documented outside its country of probable modern discovery before 17 November 1970, or shown to have been lawfully exported after that date [11]. The second is 1974. The Turkish invasion turned the date into a second threshold for Cypriot objects in particular, because the looting in the occupied north began that year; an undocumented Cypriot piece is now presumed to have left after it, as the page on the 1974 presumption explains.

The third is the American designation date. Under the bilateral agreement first signed with Cyprus in 2002, designated Cypriot material may enter the United States only with an export certificate from the Republic or with evidence that it left Cyprus before the date it was designated: 12 April 1999 for Byzantine ecclesiastical and ritual material, 19 July 2002 for pre-Classical and Classical archaeological material, and 13 July 2007 for coins of Cypriot type [6; 7; 8]. The restrictions were last extended in 2022 [9]. The regulation spells out what the evidence is. The importer declares under oath that, to the best of his knowledge, the object left Cyprus on or before the designation date, and the seller provides a statement giving the date of export, "or if not known, his belief", together with "the reasons on which the statement is based" [5]. Those reasons are the file this page describes. Objects already in the United States before the designation dates are unaffected.

The fourth is the European Union's import regulation. Regulation (EU) 2019/880 applies only to cultural goods created or discovered outside the EU customs territory [10]. An antiquity found in Cyprus, a member state, is outside its scope, and Cyprus relies instead on the Union's return directive to reclaim objects unlawfully removed from its territory. For the goods the regulation does cover, archaeological objects more than 250 years old need an import licence, and certain other categories of older and more valuable goods need an importer statement: a signed declaration that the goods were exported lawfully from the country where they were created or discovered, with a standardised description of them [10]. A Cypriot piece entering the EU from Britain or the United States needs neither document, but the regulation's questions (where was this found, when did it leave, under what law) are the ones a buyer anywhere now asks.

The major auction houses have no published rule refusing everything without a pre-1970 history. Archaeologists have criticised them for offering stock without one [12], and Christie's has sold Cypriot sculpture whose recorded history begins in 1977 and in 1989 [13]. What they ask for is a history they can check: names, dates, sale references, documents. Objects without one go to cheaper regional and online salerooms, which is also where the Department of Antiquities finds most of the objects it asks to have withdrawn; the economics of looting gives the price gap, and policing and monitoring the withdrawals.

The evidence, strongest first

Not all evidence weighs the same. The order below runs from documents issued by the state at the moment of export, which the Department of Antiquities can check against its own copies, down to family memory, which is valuable but cannot be checked in the same way. Several weaker kinds that agree with one another are stronger than any one alone.

The ranking concerns export and title, not findspot. A licence proves that a consignment left Cyprus lawfully; it does not prove that the pots in it were dug lawfully, and the difference between provenance and provenience runs through every row of the table.

Where to look for each kind of evidence

A Department licence is a long printed form headed "Licence to Export Antiquities", with a serial number at the top, the objects written in by hand, and a signature for the Director of Antiquities. The form in use in the 1960s gave permission to export antiquities "bearing the above number, examined and passed for export by me and sealed in my presence" [16], so the licence, a number on the object and a lead seal were three parts of one act. Licences were issued to the exporter and stayed with whoever kept the family papers: look in desks, files of receipts, envelopes kept with the objects, and frames. A photocopy counts. The Department keeps copies of the old licences, and "each time an object appears accompanied by an export license from Cyprus, this can be confirmed" [1, p. 37]. It confirmed in this way a Red Polished jug offered at Bonhams in 2014 with a copy of a licence of 20 October 1964, and traced the licence to a jug "bought for the price of eight Cyprus pounds by an American national from an authorised antiquities' dealer" [1, p. 37]. Two cautions apply. Licences describe objects briefly, sometimes only as a type, and a licence may name the dealer rather than the buyer: the Kolokasides licence of 1953 reproduced on this site was taken out in the dealer's name for a client. Ask the Department to search under both names. The site's guide to export licences, seals and labels shows what each document looks like.

The Cyprus Museum sold "duplicate" antiquities from the 1920s until the practice was abolished in 1991 [3]. Look for a small handwritten card label on the object or in its box, a receipt, or an inked number of the form "S.R. 3477/65", which records an entry in the Museum's sales register and its year; a Bichrome amphora in the Drakopoulos collection carries that number. How the Cyprus Museum sold antiquities gives the history of the saleroom.

A small lead disc stamped C.M., for Cyprus Museum, on a cord or wire through a handle, is the physical trace of the inspection the licence describes. Photograph both faces in raking light, with the cord and the point where it passes through the handle, and any number on the pot nearby. Do not cut it off, re-tie it or clean it. A seal ties the object to the licensed channel; it is strongest when it can be matched to a licence. Where a seal has been removed, the groove or stain of its cord on a handle is still worth photographing.

Objects from lawful excavations carry their own documents. The Swedish Cyprus Expedition of 1927 to 1931 took its share of the finds to Stockholm under the division of 1930, and its objects carry site and tomb numbers that match the published volumes and the registers of the Medelhavsmuseet, whose collection is published online. The Cesnola collection bought by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1874 and 1876 carries accession numbers in the 74.51 series, searchable in the Met's online collection, and the Met's surplus was sold at the Anderson Galleries in New York in two sales of 1928, whose catalogues are online [14]. The British Museum's excavations of the 1890s, paid for by the Turner bequest, produced finds that were later distributed to British museums and colleges; the museum's curator Thomas Kiely has reconstructed those excavations from their notebooks, and the British Museum's online catalogue gives their registration numbers. A number on a pot becomes evidence only when it is matched to the register or the volume it came from.

A dated lot in a printed sale catalogue fixes an object in public at that date. The nineteenth-century London catalogues of the Cesnola and Lawrence-Cesnola sales survive, some annotated with buyers' names. Old catalogues are held by the major art libraries, such as the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and many are online on the Internet Archive and in the auction houses' lot archives. A lot sticker or a sale number on an object is the key to the right catalogue: search for the sale, then for the lot, then compare the description and any illustration with the object.

When a museum sells, its register and the number painted on the object carry the history forward. A Cypriot tankard sold at Christie's in 2016 had passed from the Cesnola collection to the Met, from the Met to a Toledo collector, and from him in 1916 to the Toledo Museum of Art, whose number 1916.120 it carried [15]. A museum's registrar will usually confirm whether a number is theirs and when the object left.

Private dated documents are the commonest survivors and the most often thrown away. Look for photographs of the objects in a house, dated on the back or datable by the people in them; letters home mentioning a purchase; a museum loan file like the one illustrated above; insurance schedules, which often itemised valuables; wills and probate inventories, including those of earlier generations, since an old probate inventory listing "Cypriot pottery" is itself a dated record; and shipping or removal inventories. For families whose link to Cyprus was military service or a colonial or United Nations post, service records establish the dates on the island; in Britain the records of deceased service personnel can be requested from the Ministry of Defence [18]. The guide for executors explains how to search an estate before a house clearance, and the guide to pieces brought home from Cyprus explains who bought what, and when.

Family testimony should be written down now, with names, places and dates, and say how each part of it is known: "my mother told me", "the letter says", "the photograph shows". Then test it. A story that a grandparent bought a Bichrome juglet from a licensed dealer in Nicosia while posted there in 1958 fits what the licensed trade sold, which was mostly Iron Age pottery, lamps, glass and small terracottas. A story attached to a complete plank figure or a large Bronze Age scenic vessel fits less well, because the licensed channel rarely released such things, and the evidence needed rises with the rarity of the object. Testimony is not proof, but a precise, dated account that agrees with the object and with the family's documented years in Cyprus carries real weight.

Matching an object to an old photograph

A photograph is the commonest link between a document and an object, and the most often misused. The Department identifies stolen objects in exactly this way: a Cypro-Archaic horse-and-rider offered by a London gallery was recognised when "its photograph and dimensions were checked against the DoA archives and a match was made" [1, p. 36]. The same method serves a lawful history. The registration cards of the private collections declared on the island in 1963 to 1973 carry "a description and photograph of every single item" [2, p. 233]; a Kolokasides bowl offered in 2016 came with "an old typed card with attached photo stating acquisition details", which the Department verified against its archive [1, p. 38].

To match an object to a photograph, reproduce the old view as closely as possible: the same side, the same angle, the same light. Then compare the features unique to one object: chips and breaks, the line of an old repair, a patch of lost slip or paint, a misfired spot, the exact spacing of painted bands, the position of a number or label. Shape and decoration alone are not enough, because a workshop made the same jug many times. Measure height and rim diameter and compare them with anything written on the photograph or its card. Keep the old print and the new photograph side by side in the file, with a note of the features that match, and if only generic features can be compared, say so.

When nothing survives

For most lawful exports, nothing survives. That is normal, and the reasons are known. Licences were issued to the exporter, a tourist, a soldier, a civil servant or a dealer abroad, and stayed in a drawer when the objects passed to a niece or a neighbour. Seals and labels were cut off because owners thought them unsightly. The provenance research behind the Malios collection in Leipzig found that export permits "were often lost" [4, p. 7]. The official archive has gaps of its own: Stanley-Price shows that in 1926 to 1932 the official who ran the Museum's sales approved his own export requests "while omitting to keep a carbon copy of them on file" [3], so even a search of the state's records can come back empty for an object that left lawfully.

A file for an object with no paper is still worth making. It has four parts. The first is the object itself: photographs of every side, the base and every mark, with measurements, and an identification of its ware, shape and period, which places it among the classes the licensed trade released or outside them. The second is the custody record: every owner known, with the years and how each is known, ending with the honest statement of where the record stops ("bought at a house sale in Sussex in 1994; earlier history unknown"). The third is the context: when the family was in Cyprus, if it was, and on what documents that rests. The fourth is the list of places already searched and what was found, so that the next owner does not repeat the work. A file of this kind cannot prove a lawful export, but it shows that nothing about the object points elsewhere, and it allows the Department or a buyer to check every statement in it.

An undocumented ordinary pot is common, rarely valuable, and more often the residue of generations of ordinary ownership than of a looted tomb. The categories that need particular care are different: church art of any kind, and objects whose type points to the cemeteries and sanctuaries of the occupied north with no record before 1974. For those, the next step is to ask before doing anything else, and the guide on returning or donating Cypriot antiquities explains how a voluntary return to Cyprus is made.

What to avoid

The first thing to avoid is inventing or improving a history. A file must say only what the evidence shows. It is tempting to turn "probably bought in the 1960s" into "acquired in Cyprus in 1962", or to give a grandparent's posting a convenient date. Histories drift even in good faith. The Brew collection (see the Brew plank figures) was described in two sale catalogues of 2019 as "acquired 1970s–1980s", when its own documents, a lamp inscribed "Paphos 1965, J.A. Brew" and the 1972 Ashmolean loan list shown at the head of this page, put it in the 1960s. Write the earliest date that can be proved, and mark everything else as belief.

The second is buying a provenance. Some sellers offer, for a fee or as part of a sale, a collection history, a typed certificate or a loose document that does not belong to the object. A licence for "one base ring juglet" can be moved to any of a thousand juglets; a loose lead seal can be tied to another pot. Neither adds anything if it cannot be shown to belong to this object, and both destroy the credibility of everything else in the file when the mismatch is found. The Department holds the counterfoils and the registration photographs, and the auction houses and researchers who watch the market read paperwork closely. In the United States, the seller's statement of the date of export and the reasons for it accompanies an importer's declaration made under oath [5].

The third is removing marks, splitting groups and cleaning. A label soaked off, a seal cut away or a group of objects bought together on one licence and divided among heirs can each break the only link between an object and its paper. Keep groups together until each piece has its own copy of the shared documents, and record which original is held by whom.

A checkable gap is better than an uncheckable story for a practical reason. A gap invites the Department, a museum or a buyer to fill it, and sometimes they can: the Department confirmed the 1964 licence and the Kolokasides card from its own files [1, pp. 37–38]. A story that cannot be checked invites only doubt, and a story that is checked and found false ends the object's chances of a public sale, a loan or a museum gift.

Meanwhile, illicitly: the paperwork of laundered objects

The other side of the record shows why the market reads paper so closely. Looted objects need a history before they can reach a serious buyer, and the people who move them supply one. The Department's own survey of online sales lists the forms these histories take: "ex private collection", "American private collection, acquired in London in the mid 1990s", "Japanese private collection, acquired from Japanese market in 1985", "ex private collection, Switzerland, acquired 1980s", and others of the same kind [1, p. 36]. Many of these may be true and merely incomplete; Alphas's point is that "most cases do not even reach the 1970 UNESCO threshold" [1, p. 36]. Some are invented. The horse-and-rider from the Hadjiprodromou collection, registered in Famagusta before 1974 and stolen after the Turkish invasion, was offered in London for £2,500 as "Ex German private collection of Mr. H. Wagner, Berlin. Previously on the European market and purchased at auction in the 1970s/1980s" [1, p. 36]. The history named a collector, a city and a decade, and it covered a theft.

A second method is to give a looted object a real sale history. A Cypro-Geometric kernos from the same collection was photographed in Turkey on its way west, "surfaced in Sotheby's July 1982 auction under 'Various Properties'" and was sold again at Sotheby's in 2014 [1, p. 37]. Each sale added a published reference, and neither was evidence of a lawful history. The Hadjiprodromou page sets out the rest of the case. The third method is outright forgery. No forged Cypriot export licence has been published, but the method is known elsewhere in the Mediterranean: the gilded coffin of Nedjemankh, bought by the Metropolitan Museum in 2017, came with forged papers that included a supposed Egyptian export licence of 1971, and was returned to Egypt in 2019 [19].

The signs that separate a laundered history from an honest incomplete one follow from these cases:

• a collector named without dates, an address or any document, often in a country with no link to Cyprus;
• a round decade ("acquired in the 1970s") placed just early enough to pass a threshold, with nothing earlier;
• papers that describe a type of object rather than this object, or that are only ever shown as photocopies of uncertain origin;
• a history that begins with an auction sale and goes no further back, especially for a rare class;
• a mismatch between the object and the story, such as a fine Bronze Age piece attributed to a casual 1960s purchase;
• reluctance to let the object be photographed, published or shown to the Department.

None of these proves a theft, and an honest family history can show one or two of them. What a laundered history lacks is the material that can be checked at source: a licence number the Department can find, a museum number in a register, a dated private document that matches the object. That is why the method on this page asks for checkable evidence rather than more detail. The Department's limits are also real: proving that a suspect object was looted "is very difficult and in most cases impossible, unless the objects have been recorded in official archives in the past" [1, p. 36], so a clean result proves only that no record of theft was found. Lawful and illicit in the record sets out where each kind of paper can mislead.

What to do next

The Republic's law today forbids dealing in antiquities in Cyprus and allows export only for exhibition, study and a few official purposes [17]. It does not reach back to undo the exports made under the earlier licences, and an object that left the island lawfully before 1996, and has not been stolen since, can be owned and sold abroad under the rules of each country. Pieces declared to the Department can, in specific circumstances, be sold, and what any piece can do next depends on its record.

In every case the next step is to get in touch. This site helps owners, heirs and buyers document Cypriot antiquities: it identifies objects, reads labels, seals and numbers, searches the published record, and explains the options, including when and how to ask the Department of Antiquities to check a licence or a seal. Send photographs of the object and of every mark and paper through identify, or contact us directly. When the answer to whether a piece is declared, sellable or returnable is "it depends", contact us, and we will work through it with you.