Bodhisattva, won't you take me by the hand...

sorry

Jesus Fuck. If it is, indeed, a real artifact, then it is going cheap.

I am suspicious though.

I've been trying to buy Bubble Bobble for weeks now, to no avail.

I freakin' love eBay. You can buy *anything* on eBay- it's not just old grandma crap anymore. I've been buying belly button jewelry lately- the prices are right, the selection is great, and some buyers will give you a break on shipping if you buy more than one things from them.

Seriously, eBay is glutted with fake antiquities, and with recent crackdowns and linking of the trade with terrorist money, fewer and fewer real items ever come up for bid.

As far as repatriation of antiquities is concerned, and I think that's the issue being brought up here, where do we stand? With any movement of peoples, plunder occurs, particularly in antiquity, when items from many world culture were distributed all over the world.

This isn't necessarily applicable to the Cambodia trade, where as I understand, temples and ruins of historical significance are looted and defaced by men with picks, chisels, and dynamite, and some of these items are even sold on eBay. This is a crime and a shame. Provenance is key, though, and in a public market like eBay, most sellers cover their asses, knowing they can prove an item's provenance, or prove that it's a fake manufactured for the tourist trade (which most are -- particularly Chinese and Southeast Asian items, where economics and a tradition of forgeryproduce a glut of fake items).

Elsewhere, we run into serious logical and logistical problems when repatriating items. If an 3,500 year-old Anatolian terracotta figure is brought to the Bosporus in antiquity, then removed by a French soldier in Napoleon's army, taken to France, and eventually inherited by someone in Idaho, where would you repatriate it to? It becomes confusing, especially when you consider the imitative nature of early cultures, and the possibility that the terracotta piece in question was never in Anatolia at all, but was manufactured in outposts or tribes elsewhere, swayed to worship a greater goddess than their own. So it's in the style of something from 1,500 BCE Anatolia, but could actually have been made an any number of areas, claimed by many different modern political entities.

And that's just a start. Would we repatriate buddhist artifacts to Taliban-era Afghanistan? Would we return marble statues, kept safe indoors for centuries, to a country that promises to rebuild the outdoor temple from whence it came and place it there, open to the acid rain that is guaranteed to destroy it in a hundred years?

And who are the inheritors of ancient cultural legacies? There weren't a lot of people back in Sumeria, when they first invented the sixty-second minute, the rule of law, and monotheism, all of which are at the root of Western, and increasingly world, culture. And those people have been lost, eventually subsumed or invaded by other local cultures and civilizations, who eventually moved around, killing and assimilating, even until the modern day. Don't their artifacts belong to us all?

I say many of these items should be repatriated, but that many others, far older than the families or institutions who own them now, belong to humanity's cultural trust, and that their value as pieces of history, made by humans much smaller and mysterious than us, is much more valuable kept safe for the future than is the political clout any current regime could gain from their repatriation.

Would we repatriate buddhist artifacts to Taliban-era Afghanistan?

That's a great question and was on my mind in a general sense. There was a time when the Khmer Rouge might have destroyed religious art anyway. And many of Cambodia's beautiful temples have already been nearly decimated.

Great answer, Hugh.

I think Guy Pearce's character in Two Brothers plunders Cambodian artifacts in the 1920s w/ dynamite as you mentioned.

BTW, off-topic, I thought of you and warbaby when I just posted this. (Hint, hint, got a quick answer? Thanks, even if not!)

Sorry, I'm vague about how to find that stuff and my work proxy isn't helping.