Beyond the UNESCO Convention: The Case of the Troy Gold in the Penn Museum

Four years ago the Penn Museum dealt with a repatriation request by Turkey regarding a collection of Early Bronze Age gold that the museum had acquired in 1966 (Bass 1966). The negotiations regarding the fate of the gold lasted for 11 months, until September of 2012, and I realized how significantly repatriation requests had changed in the 21^st century. The UNESCO convention certainly entered into our discussions, but I found that it was regarded by Turkey as essentially irrelevant, and new models had to be advanced in the quest for a solution.

Let me first summarize the process by which the “Trojan Gold” in the Penn Museum was acquired, and I will refer to it by that name. The assemblage in question consists of 24 pieces of gold jewelry dating to ca. 2400 BC, and it was offered to the museum for purchase in 1966 by George Allen of Hesperia Fine Arts, a Philadelphia art dealership that has since ceased to exist (Fig. 1). Allen had acquired the gold from Robert Hecht, who had purchased it from another dealer, George Zakos. The first letter relating to the offer of sale refers to the jewelry as having been found at Troy and describes it as similar in style to Heinrich Schliemann’s Treasure of Priam. One month later, the museum agreed to purchase the jewelry for $10,000.

George Bass then entered the picture. Prof. Bass is now an emeritus professor of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M University; in the 1960s he was an assistant professor at Penn and a curator in the Mediterranean Section of the Penn Museum. At the time of the purchase, Bass informed the Turkish Ministry of Education (the fore-runner of Turkey’s Ministry of Culture) that the Penn Museum was considering the acquisition of the jewelry, and he subsequently showed the assemblage to Burhan Tezcan, then Turkey’s Deputy Director of Antiquities.

Bass described the chain of events in an email to me in June of 2009:

In 1966, or soon thereafter, the late Burhan Tezcan was in Philadelphia and looked at the displayed hoard. I had many friends in the Ministry, and always tried to keep the Ministry informed of anything I knew archaeologically—what I am trying to say is that Turkey made no claim on the gold. Back then there was no scientific way to prove the provenience of any find, and thus the hoard could have come from Poliochni on the Greek island of Lemnos as easily as from Troy. Indeed, I questioned the authenticity of the hoard in the articles I wrote at the time, wondering if someone had added Sumerian jewelry to a hoard of authentic or forged ‘Trojan’ jewelry to enhance its value.

Fig 1.

The Early Bronze Age assemblage of gold jewelry, Penn Museum.

(Photo courtesy of the Penn Museum.)

In his publications, Bass highlighted the difficulty in pinpointing the provenance of the jewelry, and was not convinced that all of the objects were from the same site (Bass 1966; Bass 1970). He noted their strong similarities to the Early Bronze Age jewelry of Troy in northwest Turkey, Poliochni on Lemnos (Greece), Ur (southern Iraq), and, in some respects, Mochlos on Crete.

The Penn Museum’s purchase of this assemblage prompted a series of discussions that ultimately led to the formulation of the Pennsylvania Declaration, a document that was intended to prohibit future acquisitions by the museum of unprovenanced antiquities (Pezzati 2010). As George Bass noted at the end of his 1970 article in the American Journal of Archaeology: “More and more hoards will lose their historical value unless illegal excavation and antiquities smuggling can be stopped. The curators, board of managers, and director of the Penn Museum have just voted unanimously to purchase no antiquities in the future unless their place of origin and legality of export are certain” (Bass 1970, 341).

Since that 1970 AJA article, the Troy Gold has been published and exhibited in a variety of museums, including the Metropolitan in New York, the...