- 4 December 2009
- 1 Comments
- Culture, Diplomacy, persepolis artifacts
This post originally appeared on the Huffington Post:
Auctioning Ancient Iranian Artifacts: Implications for US Cultural Policy
By Touraj Daryaee
A bombing in Jerusalem. A troubled foreign country tried in absentia in U.S. courts. Priceless archeological artifacts threatened. It sounds like it could be the plot of Dan Brown’s next novel, but this time the situation is a real one that could have tragic consequences for America’s cultural policies and standing in the world community.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been sued successfully by the victims of an attack on Israel and awarded, on paper, some 375 million dollars. To pay for this judgment, the next step might be to seize Iranian national assets, but nowhere near that amount is available inside the U.S. Instead, the plaintiff’s lawyers have proposed that ancient Iranian art treasures, currently housed in American museums, be confiscated and auctioned off. The institutions threatened by this include the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Harvard University, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, and the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.
This issue has very important implications for the United States. First of all, one can imagine how much dislike, distrust, and suspicion would be incurred by a Western power dragging another culture’s ancient heritage to the auction block. America’s museums are national institutions that are often trusted to hold and display the cultural materials of other societies around the world. They are not bank accounts or slush funds to be raided whenever money is needed.