The variety of gadgets allegedly taken from the British Museum’s assortment by the senior curator Peter Higgs is believed to complete greater than 1,500 separate artefacts, in keeping with an inside investigation carried out by the museum and reportedly seen by The Each day Telegraph.
Higgs, the museum’s curator of Greek collections, Greek sculpture and the Hellenistic interval, was final week named by The Each day Telegraph and The Instances newspapers because the prime suspect behind the disappearance of a bunch of artefacts held within the museum’s assortment, a lot of which he’s alleged to have bought on eBay, usually for a tiny percentile of their estimated worth. One Roman object, relationship again greater than two millennia and valued at as much as £50,000, was allegedly bought for £40 on the e-commerce website.
Higgs is alleged to have eliminated gadgets from the gathering, with out detection and for a few years, with artefacts from the gathering showing on eBay way back to 2016. The whole variety of artefacts allegedly taken by Higgs is regarded as “nearer to 2,000”, a supply informed The Each day Telegraph.
Higgs was dismissed earlier this yr and has not as but been arrested, though the Metropolitan police have confirmed they’re investigating. Higgs’s household has denied the allegations in opposition to him.
The sheer variety of artefacts taken from the museum’s assortment will heap additional stress on a beleaguered senior management staff, together with Hartwig Fischer, the museum’s outgoing director.
Chatting with The Economist newspaper, Christos Tsirogiannis, a Unesco-affiliated antiquities trafficking skilled, who heads the Working Group Illicit Antiquities Trafficking of the Unesco Chair on Threats to Cultural Heritage, says the British Museum theft is “in all probability the worst case up to now…Nobody expects that to occur in a museum.”
The web worth of the artefacts allegedly stolen by Higgs is regarded as within the tens of tens of millions of kilos, with some relationship again 3,500 years.
Higgs, who operated beneath a pseudonym on eBay, was recognized after a person discovered his Paypal account linked to his Twitter feed, on which he had written each his actual title and his job title on the museum. He was traced when allegedly making an attempt to promote gadgets from the gathering that had been correctly catalogued, which means they had been traceable within the stock.
Higgs was quoted in a Sunday Instances investigation into the British Museum in 2002, throughout which a reporter for the paper gained an apprenticeship on the museum to be able to expose the lax safety beneath which the gathering is held. Referring to the archives, Higgs informed the paper: “It’s chaos down there.”
Previous to this story rising, the British Museum had been on the centre of a sequence of restitution debates over contested artefacts, most notably the Parthenon Marbles, the Benin Bronzes and the Ethiopian Tabots. Again and again, its management has defended its assortment in opposition to such restitution claims by arguing that the museum is able to conserving and defending artefacts uniquely nicely.
On the museum’s web site, beneath a web page titled ‘Governance’, it states: “The Museum’s intention is to carry a group consultant of world cultures and to make sure that the gathering is housed in security, conserved, curated, researched and exhibited.”
A spokesperson for the British Museum informed The Artwork Newspaper: “We can’t be commenting on any particulars of the thefts whereas they’re topic to a police investigation.”
