Glossary Collecting and the antiquities trade
Museum duplicates
Also called: Sales Register
Objects judged surplus to a museum because it held similar examples; the Cyprus Museum sold such duplicates to the public until 1991.
Museums of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries routinely called common excavated objects 'duplicates' and gave, exchanged or sold them. The British Museum distributed Cypriot duplicates to British museums and universities in the 1890s, and the Metropolitan Museum sold duplicates from the Cesnola collection between 1916 and 1928.
In Cyprus the law of 1905 allowed the Museum Committee to sell duplicates, and from 1926 Rupert Gunnis ran a sale room in the Cyprus Museum courtyard, selling mostly pottery and glass to visitors who took them home under export permits. Later sales went through a Sales Register whose numbers, such as SR 3477/65, still identify objects abroad. The sales were abolished in 1991.
Full entry: The Legal Export of Cypriot Antiquities
Related terms
- Deaccession
The formal removal of an object from a museum's permanent collection, usually followed by its sale, exchange or transfer.
- Export licence
An official permit allowing an antiquity to leave its country of origin; in Cyprus, issued by the Department of Antiquities from 1935.
- Partage
The division of excavated finds between the host country and the excavators, the system by which many Cypriot antiquities lawfully went abroad.
- Lead export tag
A small lead seal wired to an antiquity by the Cypriot authorities to mark it as approved for lawful export.