Monday, March 18, 2024, 11:30 AM – 1 PM EDT

Cynthia Patterson

Professor Emerita of Greek History

"Ambition Gone Awry? The Michael C. Carlos Museum and the Antiquities Market"

In May of 2023 I was contacted by Stephanie Lee, a reporter for the Chronicle of Higher Education who was writing a story of the collecting practices of University museums. Lee's story ended up focusing on the Michael C. Carlos Museum and, in particular, on the dramatic and ostentatious growth of its Greek and Roman collection through purchases, at galleries and auctions, that showed little concern for current professional ethical guidelines on the collecting of antiquities or for the museum's own stated principles of collecting.

The MCCM has now (since August 2022) an excellent new director who has initiated a new effort to acknowledge past mistakes and repatriate objects that can be shown to have been illegally exported from their country of origin. I think, however, that it is necessary to look carefully and openly at what happened in the past, acknowledging the pervasiveness of the problem, in order to restore trust as our museum, a wonderful campus resource, goes forward with its work.

I have often been told that the MCCM was only doing what all other museums, including University museums, were doing. Although I do not accept this as an ethical argument, I think that it is important to establish a context for the Carlos' enthusiastic embrace of the antiquities market. In the first part of my talk, I briefly provide some context and comparison by considering recent discussions (news stories and academic articles) about the antiquities collections at Princeton University, Fordham University and Kenyon College (Cornell University and Haverford College if time). And in the second part of the talk, I turn to the Carlos' Greek and Roman collection, with a basic narrative of how it grew, illustrated by a number of case histories. Similar problems exist in the Egyptian and Near Eastern collections, as will be briefly noted [if time] in a few examples including the Ivory Inlay, that was returned to Iraq in March 2023 after it had been shown to have been looted from the Baghdad Museum and was collected by the FBI.

My conclusion emphasizes the need for a University museum to uphold the highest ethical standards for collecting antiquities and also - this is important -- for teaching with collected antiquities. That should be our ambition at Emory. Remembering our University motto, we should promote the ambition of the "wise heart" and revise campus banners [“Ambition and Heart”] accordingly.