Max Ohnefalsch-Richter: Excavator, Dealer and the Divided Finds of British Cyprus

Max Ohnefalsch-Richter (1850 to 1917) dug more of Cyprus than anyone after the Cesnola brothers, and almost all of it was dug under permit. From September 1880 to the mid-1890s he excavated sanctuaries and cemeteries for the British administration, the British Museum, the new Cyprus Museum, the Berlin museums and a string of private patrons, and the finds were divided under the Ottoman regulation of 1874, which the British kept in force until 1905: a third to the Government, the rest to the excavator and the landowner, with export of their share allowed. His own share and his patrons' left the island openly, by the hundred and the thousand, for London, Berlin, Paris, Leipzig, Vienna, Karlsruhe, Toronto and the auction room. He also bought and resold antiquities, some of them from village diggers, and his methods were poor even by the standards of his day. This entry sets out his place in the lawful trade: the law he dug under, whom he dug for, where the finds went and what record survives. His life is told in the article Max Ohnefalsch-Richter: the excavator who recorded Cyprus and scattered it and on his people page, and is not repeated here. The photograph at the head of the page shows a statue base inscribed in Phoenician and in the Cypriot syllabary, from the sanctuary of Apollo-Reshef at Frangissa near Tamassos, which he excavated in 1885 for Colonel Falkland Warren; it is now in the British Museum (photo: Zunkir, CC BY-SA 4.0).

The legal frame: the regulation of 1874 and the division of finds

When Britain took over the administration of Cyprus in July 1878 the island remained formally Ottoman, and the Ottoman Règlement sur les antiquités of 24 March 1874 stayed in force. Its terms, and the firmans and divisions that came before it, are set out in firmans and partage. Every find from a licensed dig was divided in thirds between the Government, the excavator and the landowner, and the excavator's share could be exported. The Ottoman Government withdrew that liberty in 1884, but the British held that a law passed after the occupation did not apply to Cyprus, and the 1874 division remained the law of the island until the Antiquities Law of 1905 came into operation on 25 August that year [1; 12].

Ohnefalsch-Richter arrived in 1878 as a newspaper correspondent, in the year Sir Garnet Wolseley banned all excavation. According to Salomon Reinach, he asked Wolseley many times for a permit and waited two years before he got one [1, p. 291]. The ban lapsed when Wolseley left in May 1879, and from September 1880, in Neville Stanley-Price's summary, "many of the excavations were undertaken by Ohnefalsch-Richter. He excavated officially for the Cyprus Government and for the British Museum, and later, following its founding, for the Cyprus Museum. He also excavated for private individuals who had secured a permit from the High Commissioner." Ohnefalsch-Richter himself recognised that this "sometimes led to a conflict of interest" [1, p. 291].

In practice the excavator's share was two thirds. As David Hogarth explained, the excavator paid the landowner cash, with a promise of compensation for damage, and in return leased the land and took a renunciation of all claims to the finds [1, p. 292]. Ohnefalsch-Richter took the system one step further. In 1885, as the self-styled Superintendent of Excavations for the Cyprus Museum, he persuaded the Larnaca banker Charles Watkins to buy up at Idalion "not only the rights of the proprietor of the land, but also the rights of the Government. As a result only a few duplicates had to be given to the Cyprus Museum" [1, p. 292]. Léon Fivel, writing on his dealing, sets out the same rule and its consequence: an authorised excavator was entitled to own a collection, or several, and to sell them [8, p. 29].

The channel narrowed in 1887. In a minute to the Cyprus Museum Committee of 16 June, the High Commissioner, Sir Henry Bulwer, held that private excavations served "only speculative and commercial purposes", and ruled that permits would henceforth go only to foreign museums and recognised antiquarian institutions [1, p. 291]. Ohnefalsch-Richter's later work on the island was done for such bodies, above all the Berlin museums.

The excavations and where the finds went

The record of his digs is the "Chronicle of Excavations Undertaken in Cyprus Since the British Occupation" that he and John Linton Myres printed at the head of the Cyprus Museum catalogue of 1899, arranged site by site with the name of the patron for each season [2]. Much of it rests on his own reports. The main campaigns, with the share each patron took, are these.

Three features of the table matter for the lawful trade. First, the Government's third was taken on most digs and went to the Cyprus Museum, founded on 15 June 1882 to receive it [1, p. 292], so that many of his sites are represented in Nicosia as well as abroad. The Idalion sanctuary dug for Watkins, the case of the bought-out Government share, still sent about 200 objects to the Museum [3, p. 98]. Second, the landowner's share was a separate lawful stream. At Tamassos the landowner was the Archbishop of Cyprus, who sold his share of the 1889 finds through the Larnaca collector Evstathios Constantinides to Bulwer, most of whose collection went to the Fitzwilliam Museum [5]. Third, the patrons' shares were dispersed in their turn. Warren's Frangissa finds went largely to Canada and passed in 1958 to the Royal Ontario Museum, where Hans-Günter Buchholz identified more than 350 objects from the sanctuary [4]. The Marion collection was sold in Paris in 1887 under a printed catalogue [13], with the Louvre among the buyers, and the only publication of the cemetery was compiled from Ohnefalsch-Richter's notes by Paul Herrmann in Berlin the next year [14].

The Cyprus Exploration Fund and the Berlin museums

The Cyprus Exploration Fund, formed in London in 1887 and backed by the British School at Athens, the Hellenic Society and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, was the first institution to work under Bulwer's rule [11]. Its directors were Ernest Gardner and David Hogarth, and Ohnefalsch-Richter, who believed he had caused the Fund to be started and had the Cyprus Museum's support to represent it, was passed over. The episode is told in the article. For the trade its effect was that his later work, and his later exports, went to Germany.

The Berlin museums paid for his campaigns at Tamassos in 1889 and 1894 and on the eastern acropolis of Idalion in 1888 and 1894 to 1895, the seasons of 1894 and 1895 for the Prussian Secretary of State for Public Instruction and, at Tamassos, for the fund named after Rudolf Virchow [2]. These were institutional permits of the kind Bulwer had ruled for, and the excavator's share went directly into the collections of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Matthias Recke, writing on German collections of Cypriot antiquities, judges that Ohnefalsch-Richter had, in translation, "undoubtedly the most important part" in the acquisition of Cypriot antiquities by German collections, and that he and the dealers who resold his material, Helbing in Munich and Lederer in Berlin among them, were the main source of the trade within Germany [7].

The sales of 1895 and 1896 and the Weisbach collection

Beside the patrons' shares ran his own stock, and its sale is the best-documented episode of his dealing. Melitta Brönner reconstructed it from his letters in Berlin and the acquisition file in Leipzig. He "collected or purchased antiquities as a sideline, which he then sold again as opportunities arose, in order to secure his financial circumstances", and in 1895 and 1896 these dealings were "an important part of his enterprise" [6, p. 220]. In the spring of 1895 he sent circular offers to museums from Nisou near Dali, among them the University Museum in Philadelphia and the French scholar Théophile Homolle, whose papers preserve six typed lists of lots [8, p. 29]. He spent the winter of 1895 to 1896 in London, where "selling antiquities in London did not, however, yield large profits, as evidently not very many were actually sold" [6, p. 221].

In 1896 he hired a pavilion at the Berlin trade exhibition, the Gewerbeausstellung, to sell the rest. Recke records that he was at times short of stock and sold good pieces below their value, and that much of what was in German private collections of Cypriot antiquities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was probably bought there [7]. In early July 1896 the Berlin banker Valentin Weisbach relieved him of his debts, and after the exhibition closed in October the unsold antiquities passed to Weisbach. A 44-page handwritten catalogue in Leipzig lists them in priced "collections", and on that document Weisbach "may well have paid a total of 35,433.95 marks for them" [6, p. 223]. The collections were named Elite Collection A and B, Gute Collectionen A and B and Typen Collectionen A to F, each of just under 200 to 250 objects, a grouping Brönner explains as a way "to enable quick action whenever an opportunity for sale arose" [6, p. 224].

Weisbach gave the collection to the Museum für Völkerkunde in Leipzig in December 1898 [6, p. 223]. One set, the Gute Collection B of 243 objects, went with Virchow's help to the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum in Mainz [6, p. 224]. What survives of the Leipzig holding has been in the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte in Berlin since 1992 [6, p. 227]. After the Weisbach purchase, Recke notes, no further sales by Ohnefalsch-Richter, to museums or to private buyers, are documented [7].

The scholarly record: Kypros, die Bibel und Homer and the Cyprus Museum catalogue

What sets his finds apart in the trade is the paper that came with them. His Leipzig doctoral thesis on the cult places of ancient Cyprus appeared in 1891. In 1893 he published Kypros, die Bibel und Homer in Berlin, with an English edition, Kypros, the Bible and Homer, in London, in two parts, a text volume and an atlas of plates, illustrated largely with objects from his own excavations, many of them then unpublished, together with plans of the sanctuaries [10]. Its comparative argument, from Cyprus to the Bible on one side and Homer on the other, has not lasted; its plates and plans remain a working tool for identifying objects and the deposits they came from. In 1899 came the Catalogue of the Cyprus Museum with Myres, whose Chronicle of Excavations is still the starting point for anyone tracing an object found in Cyprus between 1878 and 1899 [2].

Beyond the books there are his letters to patrons and museum directors in Berlin and Leipzig, the Leipzig acquisition file of 1898 with its priced lists and mounted photographs [6, p. 223], the circular sales lists of 1895 in Homolle's papers [8, p. 29], the Paris sale catalogue of the Marion finds [13], and the registers of the museums that took the patrons' shares. Few nineteenth-century exporters of Cypriot antiquities left a record of this kind, and modern scholars have used it to put dispersed deposits back together, as Hermary did for the Watkins sanctuary at Idalion [3] and Buchholz for Frangissa [4].

Illicit digging in the same years

Ohnefalsch-Richter's permits ran beside a village trade that the permits did not touch. Robert Merrillees and Thomas Kiely note that Bulwer's restriction of 1887 "did not stop illicit digging, the acquisition of antiquities by private collectors, or their exportation under licence" [5]. The dealing side of Ohnefalsch-Richter's own business drew on that trade. Fivel, who published the 1895 circulars, writes that he never set up as an official dealer and worked as a private individual "in the semi-legality of the period", buying lots from a local "collector", that is, in Fivel's words, a clandestine digger or his intermediary [8, p. 29]. One letter of March 1895 offers the contents of a tomb he had bought for cash from one of his suppliers; the next, of 2 April, offers "a very important tomb" from near the village of Pyla. The 1899 Chronicle describes the Bronze Age cemetery at Pyla in one line: "plundered by peasants in 1895" [8, p. 29; 2]. Fivel draws two conclusions: that the British administration, for all its strictness, could not prevent such plundering or the dispersal of what it produced, and that it was still better for the objects to reach Ohnefalsch-Richter than "the improvised dealers of Larnaca or Limassol, who left no trace" [8, p. 29]. The village digging of the British period as a whole is described in illicit digging under British rule.

Criticism of his methods and his dealing

The strongest case against treating his finds as a model of the lawful trade is made by Merrillees. He calls Ohnefalsch-Richter's "archaeological field techniques, note taking and analytical work" "on the whole dire", and judges him "less of a pioneer than a poseur"; what gives him his place in Cypriot archaeology, Merrillees writes, is "the vast quantity of antiquities he dug up and disposed of by sale, exchange and donation", and because he "off-loaded his acquisitions as soon as he could", they "are now scattered all over Europe as well as North America and Australia, without necessarily retaining details of their source or context" [9]. Bulwer's own minute of 1887 described private excavation of the kind Ohnefalsch-Richter had run for Watkins and Warren as serving "speculative and commercial purposes" [1, p. 291]. The Watkins arrangement of 1885 emptied the Government's share by agreement [1, p. 292]; the 1895 lists show him reselling tomb groups from clandestine digging [8, p. 29]; and the grouping of his stock into interchangeable "collections" for sale [6, p. 224] separated many objects from their find-spots. Each of these points is accurate. None of them concerns the legal title of the objects his patrons and the Museum received. The excavations were licensed, the division was the law, the export of the excavator's and landowner's shares was lawful until 1905, and the sales were made in the open, in Paris, Vienna, London and Berlin, to museums and named buyers. The objection that holds is the distinction this section keeps throughout: lawful export is not the same as lawful excavation. For the tomb groups he bought from village diggers in 1895, the export record is lawful and the digging was not.

An object with an Ohnefalsch-Richter history today

An object that left Cyprus through one of his licensed excavations between 1880 and 1895 is among the best-documented lawful Cypriot exports. The dig, the year and the patron can usually be found in the 1899 Chronicle [2]; the division of finds was the law of the island [1]; the share often reached a museum that registered it, in London, Berlin, Paris, Karlsruhe, Toronto or Cambridge; and the pieces sold from his own stock in 1896 can be followed through the Leipzig file to Mainz and Berlin [6]. Three cautions apply. An old label reading "Cyprus, Ohnefalsch-Richter" may mark an object he excavated or one he bought from a digger, and only the Chronicle, the sales lists or a museum register can tell them apart. Pieces sold before and during the Berlin exhibition went to private buyers who are mostly unnamed, so an object with that history in a German private collection may have a long and lawful past that is now hard to document [7]. And much of the British Museum's share of the early excavations was later given on to other museums in Britain, as firmans and partage notes, so an object can carry an Ohnefalsch-Richter origin and a later museum history together. The documents to look for are a reference to the Chronicle or to Kypros, the Bible and Homer, a Leipzig or Berlin inventory number, a Froehner sale lot for Marion, or a museum's own register of the share it received. With one of them, the object's export history is as firm as any from nineteenth-century Cyprus; how to assemble such a file is set out in documenting a lawful history.