Osman Hamdi Bey

Osman Hamdi Bey directed the Imperial Museum in Constantinople when the Ottoman law of 21 February 1884 banned the export of antiquities, a ban the British administration of Cyprus declined to apply. He had been named Director in 1880, after the death of Philipp Dethier, and charged Salomon Reinach with classifying and cataloguing the collection^1,2.

The Ottoman law of 1874 had been liberal about export. Nicholas Stanley-Price writes that under Hamdi the new law of 1884 strictly forbade all export of antiquities¹. Reinach, writing in 1884, says that he was on familiar terms with Hamdi in February 1882, that he saw Hamdi intended to change the 1874 law in a "draconic" sense, and that the regulation issued in 1884 was drawn up by Hamdi, submitted to a commission, and banned both excavation without government leave and all export. He adds his own opinion that Hamdi was moved by dislike of Europe and a wish to imitate European forms³.

In Cyprus the law was not applied. In the late 1880s and 1890s authorised foreign excavators exported most of what they found from the island. The Ottoman Foreign Minister then asked, through Austen Henry Layard, that all export from Cyprus be stopped under the 1884 law, and Walter Sendall replied that the law came after the British occupation and so did not apply there¹. Hamdi himself does not appear in that exchange.