British Museum recovers almost half of missing items
Over the last year, the British Museum in London has been embroiled in a scandal over a suspected 1,500 stolen items missing from its collection. Now, they’ve announced that a total of 626 pieces have been found.
Last summer, it was reported the museum had fired Dr. Peter Higgs, their ex-senior curator for the British Museum’s Greek and Roman antiquities department, over suspected stolen artefacts. Suspicion was raised as around 1500 items went missing from their store room over the course of a period of 20 years.
The majority of the missing pieces were ancient gems and pieces of jewellery from Greece and Rome, which would have sat in Higgs’s department. Some of the pieces found their way onto eBay, being sold by a user called Sultan1966, who is alleged to be Higgs. One piece of Roman jewellery, reportedly worth £50,000, was offered for a starting price of just £40.
However, the museum’s recovery programme is investigating new leads that might help locate a further 100 missing pieces. A 24-page document filed against Higgs also includes documents detailing the sales of objects similar to those missing from the museum.
“Few expected to see this day, and even I had my doubts,” the museum’s chair, George Osborne, said in a press statement. “When we announced the devastating news that objects had been stolen from our collection, people understandably assumed that was it—we were unlikely to ever see more than a handful of them again. That’s usually the history with thefts like this.”
But the museum’s team refused to give up on the historic artefacts. The statement continued, “Through clever detective work and a network of well-wishers, we’ve achieved a remarkable result: more than 600 of the objects are back with us, and a further 100 have been identified—in total, almost half the stolen items that we could recover.”
However, the damage goes further than the missing items. A further 500 objects were also found to be damaged. Of these, around 350 have had gold removed that will very likely never be recovered.
The museum’s chair has said that it’s a “great result” but the hunt still isn’t over. The British Museum launched a public appeal as part of its recovery program last September, encouraging members of the public to get in touch if they have any possible information about the missing items. However, as activist art companies like The Unfiltered History Tour have pointed out, the British Museum is populated with stolen items, many of which are caught up in disputes with their country of origin.
This is a developing story.