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Stolen Fragments: Black Markets, Bad Faith, and the Illicit Trade in Ancient Artefacts
In 2012, Steve Green, billionaire and president of the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores, announced a recent purchase of a Biblical artefact—a fragment of papyrus, just discovered, carrying lines from Paul's letter to the Romans, and dated to the second century CE. Noted scholar Roberta Mazza was stunned. When was this piece discovered, and how could Green acquire such a rare item? The answers, which Mazza spent the next ten years uncovering, came as a the fragment had come from a famous collection held at Oxford University, and its rightful owners had no idea it had been sold.
The letter to the Romans was not the only extraordinary piece in the Green collection. They soon announced newly recovered fragments from the Gospels and writings of Sappho. Mazza's quest to confirm the provenance of these priceless fragments revealed shadowy global networks that make big business of ancient manuscripts, from the Greens' Museum of the Bible and world-famous auction houses like Sotheby's and Christie's, to antique shops in Jerusalem and Istanbul, dealers on eBay, and into the collections of renowned museums and universities.
Mazza's investigation forces us to ask what happens when the supposed custodians of our ancient heritage act in ways that threaten to destroy it. Stolen Fragments illuminates how these recent dealings are not isolated events, but the inevitable result of longstanding colonial practices and the outcome of generations of scholars who have profited from extracting the cultural heritage of places they claim they wish to preserve. Where is the boundary between protection and exploitation, between scholarship and larceny?
The letter to the Romans was not the only extraordinary piece in the Green collection. They soon announced newly recovered fragments from the Gospels and writings of Sappho. Mazza's quest to confirm the provenance of these priceless fragments revealed shadowy global networks that make big business of ancient manuscripts, from the Greens' Museum of the Bible and world-famous auction houses like Sotheby's and Christie's, to antique shops in Jerusalem and Istanbul, dealers on eBay, and into the collections of renowned museums and universities.
Mazza's investigation forces us to ask what happens when the supposed custodians of our ancient heritage act in ways that threaten to destroy it. Stolen Fragments illuminates how these recent dealings are not isolated events, but the inevitable result of longstanding colonial practices and the outcome of generations of scholars who have profited from extracting the cultural heritage of places they claim they wish to preserve. Where is the boundary between protection and exploitation, between scholarship and larceny?
272 pages, Hardcover
First published September 24, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
April 20, 2025
A thoroughly enjoyable account of the corrupt world of papyrus trade, told with scrutiny, rage and intrigue.
I enjoyed the level of detail Mazda provides for each woven narrative of multi handed dodgy dealings of her case studies, as well as the context of cultural appropriation, imperialism, classist and racist snobbery, and academic gate keeping which underpin the Papyrus world. The picture we are left with of Oxford university is not flattering, but chiefly Dirk Obbink is cast as its main villain.
I was particularly gripped by the multilayered tracing of the provenance of the New Sappho fragment, which exposed not only how incredibly uncertain we are about what constitutes Sappho’s body of work, but how far people will go to cover up the illicit origins of a valuable work.
At times I felt that Mazza’s worthy righteousness implied a majority of Classicists become complicit in corruption in their lack of rigorous pursuits of provenance. Whilst I’m sure this is often the case I think there is an interesting philosophical conundrum in questioning how far one would be willing to go to pursue academic discovery, which I felt is under-explored.
Mazza’s conclusion delivers a powerful polemic of her colleagues who fail to question problematic provenance in the interests of publication. She clearly has a high moral standard which I admire, but I can’t help feeling as thought not everyone is quite as corrupt or cynical as the end made us think …
I enjoyed the level of detail Mazda provides for each woven narrative of multi handed dodgy dealings of her case studies, as well as the context of cultural appropriation, imperialism, classist and racist snobbery, and academic gate keeping which underpin the Papyrus world. The picture we are left with of Oxford university is not flattering, but chiefly Dirk Obbink is cast as its main villain.
I was particularly gripped by the multilayered tracing of the provenance of the New Sappho fragment, which exposed not only how incredibly uncertain we are about what constitutes Sappho’s body of work, but how far people will go to cover up the illicit origins of a valuable work.
At times I felt that Mazza’s worthy righteousness implied a majority of Classicists become complicit in corruption in their lack of rigorous pursuits of provenance. Whilst I’m sure this is often the case I think there is an interesting philosophical conundrum in questioning how far one would be willing to go to pursue academic discovery, which I felt is under-explored.
Mazza’s conclusion delivers a powerful polemic of her colleagues who fail to question problematic provenance in the interests of publication. She clearly has a high moral standard which I admire, but I can’t help feeling as thought not everyone is quite as corrupt or cynical as the end made us think …
June 16, 2025
incredibly good
May 19, 2024
The book is a few things. It is a true crime book about the illegal removal of artifacts, specifically ancient writings on papyrus, from the nations in the Near East where they are from. This is historical, in the ways that colonial explorers laid claim to what was not theirs to take, but also modern, and the lack of good provenance to this class of artifact in general. It includes secondary thefts, such as the one from Oxford, but there is as much that is unethical while not outright illegal.
The picture here is pretty sorry. I get the impression that there is no such thing as a legitimate market or trade here, with how many stolen fragments there are; how many presumptive gatekeepers wiling to look the other way.
It is also a memoir. The author was involved in these investigations, instigating or inspiring some. The author's work is usually in a scholarly capacity rather than a criminal justice one, but even still this earns her threats against her person. The interesting part about this, other than the author's from the trenches perspective on events, is all the different points of interaction, opposition, and alliance that the author makes.
The artifacts in question have historical value, religious (Christian) value, and material value. The author is a classics scholar, but her progression through the story of what happens has her in constant interaction with these people, also with their own interests in the artifacts. The surprising alliances and heel-turns make for the drama of the book, rather than the solve of the crime itself.
It is also a polemic. I am on record as loving a good polemic, but this is more contempt than attack, going so far as character attacks. And no, making a joke about something being an ad hominem does not make it less of an ad hominem, it just shows that you know what you are doing. Mixing baseless attacks with well-sourced ones only makes the latter weaker.
I struggled to read this book, and I struggled to understand why that was. The prose is crisp and the events follow logically. The author explains all the concepts that 'civilians' need to have explained. But the disparate levels of attention break the feeling of a through-line to all of the chapters and different events.
At first, I wrote this off as being the weakness of the memoir style, but in the epilogue, it clicked. It is a polemic, and the target of the polemic is the author's fellow scholars. They do not have a voice in the book, which I think is a weakness. This is not a both-sides-ism. Taking the author's facts as given, the opposing argument is colonialism with extra steps. But leaving it out of the text, mostly, makes it feel like a stronger and more sympathetic argument. And what I think is happening is that the author's presumed audience is someone already in that mindset, probably not outright, but willing to overlook illegal and unethical behavior in the interest of their own academic curiosity and self-aggrandizement. Then the book has a structure, showing all the wrongs that arise and how they create real harm.
This is a good supplementary book. I would read it in conjunction with the material of your particular interest: the Hobby Lobby scandal, art crime, colonialism and the question of the West, et cetera. As a standalone it is fine, but shows the perils of writing about something that you were a part of.
My thanks to the author, Roberta Mazza, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Redwood Press, for making the ARC available to me.
The picture here is pretty sorry. I get the impression that there is no such thing as a legitimate market or trade here, with how many stolen fragments there are; how many presumptive gatekeepers wiling to look the other way.
It is also a memoir. The author was involved in these investigations, instigating or inspiring some. The author's work is usually in a scholarly capacity rather than a criminal justice one, but even still this earns her threats against her person. The interesting part about this, other than the author's from the trenches perspective on events, is all the different points of interaction, opposition, and alliance that the author makes.
The artifacts in question have historical value, religious (Christian) value, and material value. The author is a classics scholar, but her progression through the story of what happens has her in constant interaction with these people, also with their own interests in the artifacts. The surprising alliances and heel-turns make for the drama of the book, rather than the solve of the crime itself.
It is also a polemic. I am on record as loving a good polemic, but this is more contempt than attack, going so far as character attacks. And no, making a joke about something being an ad hominem does not make it less of an ad hominem, it just shows that you know what you are doing. Mixing baseless attacks with well-sourced ones only makes the latter weaker.
I struggled to read this book, and I struggled to understand why that was. The prose is crisp and the events follow logically. The author explains all the concepts that 'civilians' need to have explained. But the disparate levels of attention break the feeling of a through-line to all of the chapters and different events.
At first, I wrote this off as being the weakness of the memoir style, but in the epilogue, it clicked. It is a polemic, and the target of the polemic is the author's fellow scholars. They do not have a voice in the book, which I think is a weakness. This is not a both-sides-ism. Taking the author's facts as given, the opposing argument is colonialism with extra steps. But leaving it out of the text, mostly, makes it feel like a stronger and more sympathetic argument. And what I think is happening is that the author's presumed audience is someone already in that mindset, probably not outright, but willing to overlook illegal and unethical behavior in the interest of their own academic curiosity and self-aggrandizement. Then the book has a structure, showing all the wrongs that arise and how they create real harm.
This is a good supplementary book. I would read it in conjunction with the material of your particular interest: the Hobby Lobby scandal, art crime, colonialism and the question of the West, et cetera. As a standalone it is fine, but shows the perils of writing about something that you were a part of.
My thanks to the author, Roberta Mazza, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Redwood Press, for making the ARC available to me.
November 8, 2025
Outstanding! Despite the irritating way the mainly American reviewers here have misread this as an account about a rich American family who... no. Not everything is about America. With genuine insight and plenty of wit, this book demands we acknowledge world culture and history and while rich Americans (or, more properly, creepy rich men anywhere, including a few blackguardly academics) are driving the illicit trade in ancient artefacts, Roberta Mazza's wonderful book is actually about the artefacts.
Indeed, she illustrates the ongoing struggle to implement laws against the theft of irreplaceable papyrus fragments by a thrilling tale of greed and entitlement, so of course we have to meet these dubious rich men and learn of their particularly Western brand of grandiosity. However, I feel I have to restate that the artefacts are the focus. Her acerbic humour (she knows but never implies that she is smarter than them all) and obvious expertise in her research area of papyrology have nobodies like me shaking my fist at the commodification of history and assuming the role of armchair detective. The pacing and intrigue are borrowed from the best but the unfolding story would be interesting enough without them. It is true that my non-scientific brain struggled at times to keep up with the many names, terms and dates, but I didn't mind because the narrative proper is so strong.
There is so much of worth in this book for anyone who appreciates ancient history (or wants to learn more). Mazza's enthusiasm is undeniable and I can't say I've enjoyed anything more in a long time.
Indeed, she illustrates the ongoing struggle to implement laws against the theft of irreplaceable papyrus fragments by a thrilling tale of greed and entitlement, so of course we have to meet these dubious rich men and learn of their particularly Western brand of grandiosity. However, I feel I have to restate that the artefacts are the focus. Her acerbic humour (she knows but never implies that she is smarter than them all) and obvious expertise in her research area of papyrology have nobodies like me shaking my fist at the commodification of history and assuming the role of armchair detective. The pacing and intrigue are borrowed from the best but the unfolding story would be interesting enough without them. It is true that my non-scientific brain struggled at times to keep up with the many names, terms and dates, but I didn't mind because the narrative proper is so strong.
There is so much of worth in this book for anyone who appreciates ancient history (or wants to learn more). Mazza's enthusiasm is undeniable and I can't say I've enjoyed anything more in a long time.
November 21, 2024
The story behind the book is interesting - would that it was told in a more clear way, and with consistent tone and approach. As is, the book comes off, if you've ever seen it, as the meme of Charlie from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia standing before a bulletin board with pages pinned haphazardly to it and ropes desperately trying to connect the dots, Charlie looking transfixed but overwhelmed in an attempt to explain it all. The book can read at times like this, as it's nearly impossible to keep all the connections in mind, particularly given occasional side bars and polemics. The approach ranges from chronological story telling, to mystery writing, to crime story, to personal travelogue and day book, rudimentary history text, morality tale, and scolding rebuke which in the end reads as adolescent rant. Please note that the author has a compelling story to tell, and I'm glad I read this for the "big picture" perspective I and other readers will take away. It's an intriguing story - I just wish the telling was clearer and more consistent in form, function and style.
October 7, 2024
The story is pretty amazing, the prose somewhat less so. There are an awful lot of cliches, and really basic ones (the author "goes through a lot of ups and downs," like that), and some odd phrasing choices--she keeps saying "contextually" when she means "to provide context for this assertion," which is just odd. But the scholarship, and the deep knowledge of and passion for preservation of antiquities within their original context, is deep. Her biggest point is essentially that the bad old days of people like Lord Elgin and Howard Carter more or less straight-up stealing things from architecturally rich regions (more of the same in Lawler's Under Jerusalem, with the one difference there that Israel became strong enough to assert itself) have continued and actually kind of been democratized, unfortunately, by sites like eBay, where anyone who can steal antiquities can put them up for sale, secure in the knowledge that the platform may bestir itself a tiny bit if poked repeatedly, but probably not, and anyway you can just hop back on five minutes later with a new username. (She reproduces some very weird interactions with these shady sellers, which have a black-comic absurdity.) Add to this a bunch of surprisingly craven academics--I mean, their purview is literally the history of religion, so you'd think...--whose main goal is publishing a scrap (and some became brokers and amassed what sound like fairly considerable fortunes, certainly for academics), and you've got a neocolonial economic structure worsened by the security issues of post-2011 Egypt in particular.
The most American part of the story, which as an Italian she may not quite grasp, is what feels like a series of Charles Portis characters, evangelical midwestern businessmen who made a mint selling something remarkably banal and also, if done well, enormously remunerative, say, reconditioned furniture, and then, in their later years, turn that pile of cash into a sincere testimonial to their deep and abiding faith. (The Greens, who run Hobby Lobby, being the most notable, but far from the only example of the phenomenon. Sheldon Adelson, across the aisle, would seem to be another example.) The one example that most immediately brought that to mind was Craig Lampe. Lampe, she writes, "had funded the World Bible Society and also a Bible Museum--in his case, a showroom at the Hampton Inn and Suites in Goodyear, Arizona, where a display of Bibles and biblical artefacts in his possession (and eventually available for sale) was used to illustrate the history of the Bible." 10/10, no notes.
So, not the most engaging book I've read on the topic (that would be Ariel Sabar's), but also incredibly well-informed and deeply passionate about her area of expertise--which, by the way, seems to have produced quite a few more well-subscribed magazines and blogs than I would have expected.
The most American part of the story, which as an Italian she may not quite grasp, is what feels like a series of Charles Portis characters, evangelical midwestern businessmen who made a mint selling something remarkably banal and also, if done well, enormously remunerative, say, reconditioned furniture, and then, in their later years, turn that pile of cash into a sincere testimonial to their deep and abiding faith. (The Greens, who run Hobby Lobby, being the most notable, but far from the only example of the phenomenon. Sheldon Adelson, across the aisle, would seem to be another example.) The one example that most immediately brought that to mind was Craig Lampe. Lampe, she writes, "had funded the World Bible Society and also a Bible Museum--in his case, a showroom at the Hampton Inn and Suites in Goodyear, Arizona, where a display of Bibles and biblical artefacts in his possession (and eventually available for sale) was used to illustrate the history of the Bible." 10/10, no notes.
So, not the most engaging book I've read on the topic (that would be Ariel Sabar's), but also incredibly well-informed and deeply passionate about her area of expertise--which, by the way, seems to have produced quite a few more well-subscribed magazines and blogs than I would have expected.
April 27, 2025
A brilliant book! She does an amazing job bringing out literal breaking-news with clarity and zip. All the great stories are covered here--the problem of looted antiquities in the Museum of the Bible, the fake dead sea scrolls, the dark web markets in antiquities, the Obbink papyri catastrophe. It's just a wonderfully adept summary of some of the craziest stories in the field! I found her call for restitution to be as clearly put as might be possible, while also opening up some new questions that I'll be mulling over. The question of access to papyri, when they are so forbidding, when libraries are so underfunded, and when jobs for humanities scholars are decreasing, is one that I really am curious about. I wonder if some of our rhetoric on restitution doesn't rely on the material conditions of an age gone by, especially for American scholarship and global museum culture, and whether things will change in an era of digital humanities scholarship and decentralization of cultural instutitions.
November 5, 2024
An intensely written, brisk account of the well-publicized Hobby Lobby scandal, if slightly inconclusive, because some cases are still ongoing. As others have commented, this book is quite one-sided, inasmuch as academic research is depicted as a high-minded sector, one that is sometimes instrumentalized by non-academics whose goal is to take advantage of tax breaks by donating to museums. However, as the author describes very clearly, some academics really are not high-minded at all. Without undermining her case (I share her disgust with this form of illegal trade), there are a few mitigating aspects to the context. On the one hand, there is the deregulated online market, on the other hand, a no-less deregulated academic Internet, with specialists sleuthing in real time across the globe. I find that to be the most positive thought that I took from this book : the technology being used to pillage or defraud is also the one that is bringing abuses to light. Recommended.
June 4, 2025
As an academic myself I am constantly frustrated hearing not only the life stories of undergrads but academics talking about themselves so this was a bit painful to read and since I already knew the outline of the story reading about what the author had for lunch where while meeting a player in the drama was distracting and unwelcome. For someone who was not aware of the basic story and doesn’t mind irrelevant details it will probably read much better.
June 15, 2025
An in depth dive into the fraudulent activities of certain organizations to procure ancient documents, real or otherwise, through whatever means necessary. Mazza paints a detailed picture of why these illicit and unethical practices matter. Regardless of politics or religion, the study of history must be safe from the interference of private organizations. A must read for those interested in textural criticism, history, and how the quest for power and money corrupts every human endeavor.
February 7, 2025
Highly recommend the review by Brent Nongbri from his blog Variant Readings which brought the book and the story of the Greens (Hobby Lobby) to my attention.
https://brentnongbri.com/2024/10/04/r...
https://brentnongbri.com/2024/10/04/r...
July 17, 2025
Absolutely THRILLING. Should be a spy film. Accessible and engaging.
July 27, 2025
Todd hickey recommendation, junior year
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