Looting of Afghanistan Many art pieces and artifacts from Afghanistan were looted during several wars; scores of artworks were smuggled to Britain and sold to wealthy collectors. "There are also fears that the bulk of the collection once in
Kabul Museum, ... is now in smugglers' or collectors' hands. The most famous exhibits were the
Begram ivories, a series of exquisite Indian panels nearly 2,000 years old, excavated by French archaeologists in the Thirties (1930s)". In November 2004, much of the missing collection numbering 22,513 items was found safely hidden. Over 200 crates had been moved downtown for storage at the end of the Soviet occupation including the Bactrian gold and Bagram Ivories. Some 228 of these treasures, including pieces of Bactrian Gold and many of the Bagram Ivories, were exhibited at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., from 25 May 25 to 7 September 2008.
Looting of Cyprus Following the
invasion of Cyprus in 1974 by
Turkey and the occupation of the northern part of the island, churches belonging to the
Cypriot Orthodox Church have been looted in what is described as "one of the most systematic examples of the looting of art since World War II". Several-high-profile cases have made headline news on the international scene. Most notable was the case of the Kanakaria mosaics, 6th-century AD frescos that were removed from the original church, trafficked to the US and offered for sale to a museum for the sum of US$20,000,000. These were subsequently recovered by the Orthodox Church following a court case in Indianapolis. The northern part of the island is where the church and art looting was concentrated. It is rumored that the Turkish-Cypriot leaders did not feel an obligation to preserve the artifacts and monuments in the north because they felt that the Greek-Cypriot government had oppressed them for too long. Some believe that this has been done to 'Turkify' the northern region of the country and erase the characteristics of the Cypriot predecessors, while people like
Aydin Dikmen have been working to make money off of cultural heritage artifacts by selling them in international markets. It was one of the most systematic examples of the looting of art since
World War II.
Non-Christian places of importance Many non-Christian sites have been affected by the looting and destruction of northern Cyprus. During the time of the invasion, work on archaeological sites was halted. While the projects on the Greek-Cypriot southern area were started again after a short period of delay, the projects in the Turkish north were never started again. Many of the houses and workshops associated with archaeological projects in the north were looted, so the work that had been done was lost to the researchers. Many areas on the island of Cyprus were damaged by bombing and machine gun fire, and because of these issues, the pavement mosaics of the House of Dionysos in Paphos suffered extensive damage. The fighting not only was destroying Byzantine and Christian cultural heritage, but it was even destroying culture that had been in existence for far longer. There have been appeals filed with UNESCO, ICOM, and ICOMOS to help with the preservation of the remaining cultural heritage on the island, and a representative of UNESCO was appointed to help by 1976. At least 55 churches have been converted into mosques, while another 50 churches and monasteries have been converted into other structures to serve the Turkish-Cypriots'. We also have documentation of another transaction where Dikmen worked with art collectors in the United States;
Dominique de Menil, of the
Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, bought two 13th-century frescoes from Dikmen on behalf of the Church of Cyprus in 1983. The search for the looted art of Cyprus continues, and there seems to be more and more evidence of Dikmen's presence in other transactions of international looted art. Many think that Dikmen is just a middle man who is working on behalf of more knowledgeable and rich patrons, but the mystery is still not solved. constituted institutionalized revenge, while the American military's role in the stealing of Europe's treasures mostly involved individuals looting for personal gain. disappeared in the Soviet Union and later in Russia, including but not limited to Gutenberg Bibles and Impressionist paintings once in German private collections. According to
Time magazine, the Soviets created special "hit lists ... of what the Soviet Union wanted" Germany's collections lost 180,000 artworks, which, according to cultural experts are "being held in secret depots in Russia and Poland". The stolen artworks include sculptures by
Nicola Pisano, reliefs by
Donatello,
Gothic Madonnas, paintings by
Botticelli and
Van Dyck and
Baroque works rendered in stone and wood. In 2007, Germany published a catalog of missing artworks to document the extent, prevent the resale, and speed up the return of the war booty. Berlin's State Museum alone lost around 400 artworks during World War II. The German state (Land) of
Saxony-Anhalt still maintains a list entitled
Beutekunst ("Looted Art") of more than 1000 missing paintings and books believed confiscated by the US or the Soviet Union.
Poland is also in possession of some collections that Germany evacuated to remote places in Eastern Germany (the so-called "
Recovered Territories" that are part of Poland since 1945) as well as in
occupied Poland. Among those there is a large collection from Berlin, which in Polish referred to as
Berlinka. Another notable collection in Polish possession is
Hermann Göring's collection of 25 historic airplanes (
Deutsche Luftfahrt Sammlung) – ironically, it contains two Polish planes captured by Germans during their invasion of Poland (including a
PZL P-11c of
Army Kraków). Poland refuses to return those collections to Germany unless Germany returns some of the collections looted in Poland and still in its possession in exchange.
Berlin's Gemäldegalerie the
Kulturforum lost 441 major paintings, among them seven works by
Peter Paul Rubens, three
Caravaggios and three
Van Dycks. The looted artworks might still be in "secret depositories ... in Moscow and St Petersburg". Veteran
BBC foreign correspondent
Charles Wheeler, then Berlin correspondent of the BBC's German Service, received a small painting as a wedding present in 1952 from an East German farmer, given in return for some potatoes. The portrait of
Eleonora of Toledo (1522–1562), the daughter of the Neapolitan viceroy and wife of the first Duke of Florence,
Cosimo di Medici I, which he found from the Commission for Looted Art in Europe, had been looted from the Gemäldegalerie. The gallery had photographed the picture by
Alessandro Allori (1535–1607) before closing down and, in 1939, putting its collection in secure storage areas, which Soviet troops broke into at the war's end. Wheeler covered the process in ''It's My Story: Looted Art'' for
BBC Radio 4, contacting the Commission for Looted Art, the identification of the painting's rightful owner in Germany and the hand-over in Berlin. On 31 May 2006 the commission, the
Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, representing the Berlin state museums, announced the return of the painting. The
Eberswalde Gold Treasures and German
Merovingian Art Treasures were taken from Berlin to Soviet Russia. British troops and the
Naval War Trophies Committee also looted artworks from Germany, including several pictures by marine artist
Claus Bergen ("Wreath in the North Sea in Memory of the Battle of Jutland", "The Commander U-boat", "Admiral Hipper's Battle Cruiser at Jutland" and "The German Pocket Battleship Admiral Von Scheer Bombarding the Spanish Coast"), Carl Saltzmann ("German Fleet Manoeuvres on the High Seas") and Ehrhard ("Before the Hurricane at Apia Samoa" and "During the Hurricane at Apia"). The pictures were looted from
Naval Academy at
Flensburg-
Mürwik, as documented by a 1965–66 Ministry of defense file in the
UK National Archives. The trophies were sent to British museums, five remain in the
National Maritime Museum in London (NMM), and one picture ("Before the Hurricane at Apia") was lent to HMS Calliope in 1959, lost, and formally written off in 1979. The National Maritime Museum admitted in January 2007 that "the documentation at the NMM and the National Archives is not complete"; according to spoliation guidelines, the pictures should be regarded as having been "wrongly taken". '' by
Raphael, looted by the Soviets after World War II and returned to the
Dresden Gallery (
Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister) in
East Germany in 1955. On 25 August 1955, the Soviet functionaries handed over to the representatives of
East Germany 1240 paintings from the
Dresden Gallery, including the
Sistine Madonna and
Sleeping Venus, which had been saved and restored by the Soviets after the
Battle of Berlin. According to
Irina Antonova, famous long standing Director of the
Pushkin Museum, more than 1,500,000 items of cultural value (including the frieze reliefs of the
Pergamon Altar and the
Grünes Gewölbe treasures) were restituted to German museums at the behest of the Soviet government in the 1950s and 1960s. "We have not received anything in return," Antonova observed in 1999. The reasons for the
Soviet looting of Germany and the subsequent Russian attempts are revealed in an interview that Irina Antonova gave to the German
Die Welt newspaper; the interview specifically focuses on the Russian notion of looting, using the historical example of Napoleon as a direct reference for the Russian justification of the Plunder of Germany: "Three quarters of all the Italian art in the Louvre came to Paris with Napoleon. We all know this, yet the works remain in the Louvre. I know the place where Veronese's large painting used to hang in the monastery of Vicenza. Now it's in the Louvre where it will stay. It's the same with the Elgin Marbles in London. That's just the way it is." At the 1998 conference, Eizenstat was "impressed ... almost overwhelmed" when
Boris Yeltsin's government promised "to identify and return art that was looted by the Nazis and then plundered by Stalin's troops as 'reparations' for Germany's wartime assault." Alarmed by these negotiations, the
State Duma of the
Russian Federation promulgated a
law (15 April 1998) whereby "the cultural valuables translocated to the USSR after World War II" were declared national patrimony of the Russian Federation and each occasion of their alienation was to be sanctioned by the Russian parliament. The preamble to the law classifies the remaining valuables, such as
Priam's Treasure, as a compensation for "the unprecedented nature of Germany's war crimes" and irreparable damage inflicted by the German invaders on Russian cultural heritage during the war. Following the law adopted by the State Duma on 17 April 2002, the
Hermitage Museum returned to
Frankfurt an der Oder the looted medieval stained-glass windows of the Marienkirche; six of the 117 individual pieces, however, still remain missing.
Andrei Vorobiev, the former Academic Secretary of the Museum, confirmed in 2005 the assumption that they are still in Russia (in the Pushkin Museum.) According to the Hermitage, "As a gesture in return, the
German company
Wintershall paid for the restoration of a church destroyed during the Second World War, Novgorod's Church of the Assumption on Volotovoe Pole". It disappeared in 1945 from a protective bunker in Berlin to which it had been transferred from the
Berlin State Museums and reappeared in September 1993 at the
Pushkin Museum in
Moscow. A silver collection consisting of 18 pieces was plundered by the
NKVD after World War II from the German Prince of
Anhalt, who suffered under both the Nazis and Bolsheviks alike, before he was posthumously rehabilitated. In a so-called "good will gesture", the collection was returned to the descendants of the Prince by the Ministry of Culture even though the Russian prosecutor originally refused the request of the children of the rehabilitated prince.
Lev Bezymenski, a Russian officer and translator who became a controversial historian and professor at
Moscow's military academy, died on 26 June 2007 at age 86 in Moscow. He was a military intelligence officer of the
1st Belorussian Front under Marshal
Georgy Zhukov, participated in the interrogation of German
Generalfeldmarschall Friedrich Paulus, and translated the message confirming Adolf Hitler's death for Stalin. After the
Red Army captured Berlin in 1945, he investigated
Adolf Hitler's death and headquarters. In his many articles and books (Bezymenski, L. Stalin and Hitler (2002), Bezymenski, L. (1968). The Death of Adolf Hitler: Unknown Documents from Soviet Archives. Harcourt Brace. ), he failed to mention that he looted several containers filled with around 100
gramophone records from the
Reich Chancellery, recordings performed by the best orchestras of Europe and Germany with the best soloists of the age. The collection stolen by Bezymenski, who himself was Jewish, Bezymenski understood the political implications of his actions and "kept quiet about the records during his lifetime for fear that he would be accused of looting." The collection still remains in Russia.
Baldin Collection In another high-profile case, Viktor Baldin, a Soviet army captain in World War II and later directed the
Shchusev State Scientific Research Museum of Architecture in Moscow, took 362 drawings and two small paintings on 29 May 1945 from Karnzow Castle in Brandenburg which had been stored there by the
Kunsthalle Bremen. Russian Culture Minister
Mikhail Shvydkoi estimates the worth of the Baldin Collection at USD 1.5 billion. From the entire collection of the Kunsthalle, more than 1,500 artworks are still missing; in 1991 and 1997, the Kunsthalle published printed catalogues of the works of art from the lost during the evacuation in the Second World War.
Looting of Indonesia During the
colonization of Indonesia by the Dutch which span for three and a half centuries, many cultural objects were taken either due to purchase, looting, spoils of war, or excavation. The looting of Indonesian art continued after the country gained independence from the Netherlands, as missionary projects and individual excavations remained common till the 1970s. An investigation made in the late 1970s revealed most of the objects obtained by the missionaries were not ethically sourced. In 2020, the Dutch government returned around 1,500 objects to Indonesia from the
Nusantara Museum in Delft. This reparation project began in 2016 whereby the museum initially offered 12,000 objects for repatriation to Indonesia, which the culture director-general subsequently reduced. Additionally, the Lombok Treasure that consists of more than 200 cultural objects from
Lombok has also been returned to Indonesia since the 1970s. Due to an agreement made by the Indonesia and the Netherlands in 1975, at least half of the Lombok Treasure is still held and displayed in many Dutch museums. The Netherlands currently have 8 Hindu-Buddha heads that are speculated to be taken from
Borobudur. There are calls for their return, but the institutions have yet to give an affirmative response, and there are debates regarding who it should be returned to, or whether they should be returned at all.
Looting of Iraq More recently, the term is used to describe the
looting in Iraq after the American-led invasion, including, but not limited to, the
National Museum of Iraq. Following the looting during the chaos of war, the British and American troops were accused After the U.S. troops entered Baghdad on 9 April 2003, at least 13,000 artifacts were stolen during the looting by Iraqis, including many moved from other sites into the National Museum for safekeeping. U.S. troops and tanks were stationed in that area but, concerned with defending themselves from attack and without orders to stop the looting, "watched for several days before moving against the thieves." custom officials in the United States intercepted at least 1,000 pieces, but many are still advertised on eBay or are available through known collectors and black markets. "U.S. troops, journalists and contractors returning from Iraq are among those who have been caught with forbidden souvenirs." The U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs maintains a list and image gallery of looted artworks from Iraq at the Iraq Cultural Property Image Collection. Despite public announcements and temporary efforts by the Iraqi and American administrations, the situation in Iraqi Museums and archaeological sites did not improve.
Donny George, the curator of Iraq's National Museum, the first person who raised his voice and alarmed the world about the looting in Iraq after the American invasion and publicly stated his opinion about the "ongoing failure of Iraqi leaders and the American military to protect the sites", In August 2021, some 17.000 artworks from ancient Mesopotamia were returned to Iraq from museums in the U.S. They had been looted after the
US-led invasion of Iraq and, despite their illegal provenance, had been sold on the international art market. One of these items, the so-called the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet, a historical stone slab with inscriptions, had been bought in 2014 through international auction house
Christie's for more than $1.6 million by a museum in Washington, D.C.
Looting of Italy The looting of Italian art was not limited to Napoleon alone; Italian criminals have long been, and remain, extremely active in the field, and Italy's battle to recover the antiquities it says were looted from the country and sold to museums and art collectors worldwide is still ongoing. The Italian government and the
Art Squad of the
Carabinieri, Italy's military police force, made special efforts to "[crack] the network of looters, smugglers, and dealers supplying American museums," collecting "mountains of evidence—thousands of antiquities, photographs, and documents—seized from looters and dealers in a series of dramatic raids." According to the BBC, Italian authorities have for several years insisted on the return of stolen or looted artworks from wealthy museums and collectors, particularly in America. Italy has successfully fought numerous lawsuits that have resulted in the repatriation of many items of looted art and antiquities from many famous American institutions, including the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the
J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the
Cleveland Museum of Art, the
Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the
Princeton Museum of Art, the
Toledo Museum of Art, and the private collection of
Leon Levy and his wife,
Shelby White. As the result of lawsuits filed by the Italian and Turkish governments, as well as the work of investigative journalist
Peter Watson and archaeologist
Vernon Silver, both the Metropolitan Museum and the J. Paul Getty Museum have been repeatedly exposed as two of the world's biggest institutional recipients of looted and stolen Mediterranean artefacts, and the museums benefited from the illegal antiquities trade, both through direct acquisition, and via donations and bequests from major private collectors. A significant number of Met and Getty acquisitions over a period of at least 40 years were everntually shown to have been sourced from a major international illegal antiquities trading network that centred on Italian art dealer
Giacomo Medici. From the late 1960s, Medici rose to become the central figure in a large criminal conspiracy, acting as the middleman between gangs of
tombaroli (tomb robbers) - who systematically looted tens of thousands of important artefacts from Italian and other Mediterranean archaeological sites, as well as stealing objects from museums, churches and private collections - and an elite group of American and British dealers who helped Medici to "launder" his contraband and sell it to major buyers like the Met, the Getty and leading American private collectors. Medici typically paid the
tombaroli small sums for the looted and stolen goods, and then smuggled them out of Italy to Switzerland, where they were restored. Taking advantage of the lax attitudes and practices of 'cooperative' auction houses - notably Sotheby's in London - Medici built up an elaborate network of front companies and elite antiquities dealers and galleries, including the British dealer
Robin Symes, Rome-based American dealer
Robert E. Hecht, and Hollywood dealer and producer
Bruce McNall. A major investigation by the TPC (the art crimes division of the
Carabinieri) beginning in the 1990s, which eventually resulted in Medici's conviction, recovered tens of thousands of looted artefacts, and extensive documentary evidence, including thousands of sequential photographs that showed the journey of these looted objects from excavation, through restoration, to their final placement in museum collections, as well as a crucial handwritten 'organigram' (organisational chart) that named and linked all the members of Medici's operation. TPC investigations also revealed that Medici used front companies to anonymously sell and then buy back many items, often multiple times, in order to manipulate the market, as well as allowing him to acquire the all-important Sotheby's provenances. In February 2016, TPC officials announced that a raid on Robin Symes' warehouse in the Geneva Freeport had uncovered a huge collection of 17,000 looted antiquities, nearly all of which are thought to have been sourced from Medici, and which Symes secretly placed there ca. 2000 in order to conceal their existence from the executors of the estate of his former lover and business partner, Christo Michelaides, who died in 1999. , a 2,500-year-old Greek vase, stolen from an Etruscan tomb and smuggled from Italy, returned to Italy by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2006 In 2006, the Metropolitan Museum of Art finally agreed to relinquish ownership of a 2,500-year-old Greek vase known as the
Euphronios Krater, a
krater painted by
Euphronios, after the TPC was able to establish that the object had been looted from an Etruscan tomb and smuggled out of Italy by the Medici gang. The Met also surrendered 15 pieces of Sicilian silver and four ancient vessels in exchange for long-term loans of other antiquities. According to the
New York Times, the case, "of its kind, perhaps second only to the dispute between Greece and Great Britain over the Elgin marbles," "became emblematic of the ethical questions surrounding the acquisition of ancient art by major museums." The Metropolitan Museum has been involved in several other major controversies involving antiquities believed or proven to have been looted or stolen, including: • the
Cloisters Cross, a large
Romanesque cross carved from walrus ivory, said to have been carved in England, but possibly made in Germany. It was initially offered to the
British Museum in 1961 by its then owner, a shady Yugoslav 'collector' called
Ante Topić Mimara, who is now widely believed to have acquired as part of a huge collection of art and antiquities that he stole at the end of WWII from the Central Collecting Point in Munich, the Allied clearinghouse for the repatriation of material looted by the Nazis. The British Museum eventually declined to buy the cross because Topić Mimara would not provide proof that he had full title to the object, but immediately after the British Museum's option expired in 1963, the cross was purchased for the Met by curator
Thomas Hoving for GBP£200,000. The Cross is currently still in the collection of the Met, at its
Cloisters Museum annexe. • the
Morgantina treasure, a 16-piece hoard of 3rd century BCE Roman silver, valued at US$100 million. Acquired in the early 1980s, it was later shown to have been looted from an important archaeological site in Morgantina, Sicily. After another protracted lawsuit, the Met was also forced to relinquish the treasure, and it was repatriated to Sicily in 2010. Peter Watson and
Cecilia Todeschini authored
The Medici Conspiracy, a book that uncovers the connection between looted art, the art and antiquities markets, auction houses, and museums. was forced to return 40 artifacts, including a 5th-century BC statue of the goddess
Aphrodite, which was looted from
Morgantina, an ancient Greek settlement in Sicily. The Getty acquired the statue in 1988 for US$18 million The Getty resisted the requests of the Italian government for nearly two decades, only to admit later that "there might be 'problems' attached to the acquisition." In 2006, Italian senior cultural official Giuseppe Proietti said: "The negotiations haven't made a single step forward"; only after he suggested the Italian government "to take cultural sanctions against the Getty, suspending all cultural cooperation," did the Getty Museum return the antiquities. According to the
New York Times, the Getty confirmed in May 2007 that the statue "most likely comes from Italy". Evidence against both emerged in a 1995 raid of a
Geneva, Switzerland, warehouse that contained many stolen artifacts. In September 2007, Italy dropped the civil charges against True. The court hearings against True ended in October 2010, and against Hecht in January 2012, as under Italian law the
statute of limitations, for their alleged crimes had expired. The warehouses were registered to a Swiss company called Editions Services, which police traced to an Italian art dealer,
Giacomo Medici. The Carabinieri stated that the warehouses contained 10,000 artifacts worth 50 billion
lire (about $35 million). In 1997, Giacomo Medici was arrested; his operation is believed to be "one of the largest and most sophisticated antiquities networks in the world, responsible for illegally digging up and spiriting away thousands of top-drawer pieces and passing them on to the most elite end of the international art market." Medici was sentenced in 2004 by a Rome court to ten years in prison and a fine of 10 million
euros, "the largest penalty ever meted out for antiquities crime in Italy." According to the
New York Times, the Getty refused for several years to return the antiquities to their rightful owners. Yet another case emerged in 2007, when Italy's art-theft investigation squad discovered a hidden cache of ancient marble carvings depicting early gladiators, the lower portion of a marble statue of a man in a toga and a piece of a column. Italian Culture Minister
Francesco Rutelli used the case to underline the importance of these artifacts for Italy. In 2021, the US began returning $10m worth of antiquities stolen from Italy, comprising 200 artefacts including a statue unwittingly bought by
Kim Kardashian.
Looting of South East Asia During their occupation of
Indochina, the French government removed various statues and other objects from the region. During its existence, the
Khmer Empire was regularly raided by its neighbours, which resulted in its cultural heritage being distributed widely across the region. The major historian of the Khmer Empire, Lawrence Palmer Briggs, regularly mentions these raids—for example, the sack of
Angkor in 1430–31 by the
Siamese, who carried off their loot to
Ayutthaya, after which "people fled from the 'great and glorious capital' of Khmer civilisation, as if it were ridden with plague". Consequently, the cultural heritage of the region was already widely spread by the time the French founded their protectorate in Indochina in 1864. Briggs describes
Preah Khan Kompong Svay as "shamefully looted" in the late 19th century by
Louis Delaporte, "who carried the spoils away to French museums (thus beginning the systematic looting of Cambodian temples for the benefit of public and private collections of Europe and America)". He also describes how French tourists well into the 20th century carried off many statues. Therefore, by the early 20th century, it was rare to find Khmer objects in situ and local and foreign collectors, particularly in France, had built up collections of Khmer objects. Many objects from the region were exported to Europe and elsewhere and ended up in museums such as the
Guimet in Paris. During the second world war, whilst France was occupied by Nazi Germany, the Indochina region was controlled variously by the Japanese, locally, and after the war, the French regained control. There followed a period of 35 years of disruption and warfare, including Dien Ben Phu and the Vietnam war. Thereafter Cambodia fell under the control of the notorious Khmer Rouge regime. Some objects left the country during that period, either to save them from destruction or for looting purposes. Reports have suggested that where objects have been moved, local officials and armed forces (both before and after the periods of turmoil) were responsible. In 1992, a report in
The Christian Science Monitor described art experts' concerns about a "rampant degradation of archeological sites and an accelerating trade in stolen artifacts sweeping Southeast Asia" as a consequence of war in Cambodia and instability in the region. Statues were being stripped from
Angkor Wat and other sites by smuggling rings often working in collusion with military and political officials, including a major network in
Chiang Mai run by a former government minister. Many of the objects they purchased were later donated or sold to museums. In the 2000s, evidence that the artefacts had been looted persuaded a number of major museums around the world to return the objects to Cambodia. Among the objects sold or donated to major museums by Latchford are a number of rare ancient
Khmer statues, reportedly looted from the temple site of
Koh Ker in Cambodia, and at least two Indian seated
Kushan Buddhas, looted from the ancient Indian city of
Mathura. One of the seated Buddhas was originally offered—via Manhattan dealer
Nancy Wiener—to Canada's
Royal Ontario Museum, but they ultimately declined to buy it, owing to its dubious provenance. In 2000, it was bought by the
National Gallery of Australia, but subsequent investigations exposed the seated Buddha as a looted artwork, and it has since been repatriated to India. Other U.S. museums reported to have received looted Asian artefacts from Latchford include the
Denver Museum of Art, the
Kimbell Museum in Ft. Worth, Texas, and the
Norton Simon Museum. In 2013, the Met announced that it would repatriate to Cambodia two ancient Khmer statues, known as "The Kneeling Attendants", which it had acquired from Latchford (in fragments) in 1987 and 1992 and gifted to the Met "in honor of Martin Lerner", the Met curator of South and Southeast Asian art. A spokesperson for the Met stated that the museum had received "dispositive" evidence that the objects had been looted from Koh Ker and illegally exported to the United States. In 2015, the
Cleveland Museum of Art voluntarily returned to Cambodia a 10th-century sculpture of the Hindu monkey god
Hanuman, after a curator from the museum uncovered evidence that it had been looted—the statue's head having appeared on the market in Bangkok in 1968 during the
Vietnam War and its body having appeared on the market in 1972 during the
Cambodian Civil War. The museum's director said, "Our research revealed a very real likelihood that it was removed from a site enormously important to the kingdom of Cambodia during a terrible time and its return was completely consistent with the highest legal and fiduciary standards." Tess Davis, an archaeologist and lawyer for the Antiquities Coalition, praised the museum's decision, but said, "The Hanuman first surfaced on the market, while Cambodia was in the midst of a war and facing genocide. How could anyone not know this was stolen property? The only answer is that no one wanted to know."
Looting of Poland displayed in the
Moscow Kremlin. The throne was looted after the collapse of the
November Uprising in the 1830s. In the 1920s, the
Soviet government
returned it to Poland, yet it was deliberately destroyed by the Germans during
World War II. The
Załuski Library, the first public library in Poland, was founded by two brothers,
Józef Andrzej Załuski, crown referendary and bishop of Kiev, and
Andrzej Stanisław Załuski, crown chancellor and bishop of Cracow. The library was considered one of the most important libraries of the world, featuring a collection of about 400,000 printed items, manuscripts, artworks, scientific instruments, and plant and animal specimens. Located in Warsaw's
Daniłowiczowski Palace, it was looted in the aftermath of the
second Partition of Poland and
Kościuszko Uprising in 1794 by
Russian troops on orders from Russian Tsarina
Catherine II; the stolen artworks were transported to
St. Petersburg and became part of the
Russian Imperial Library, which was founded one year later. Although some pieces were returned by the
Soviet Union in 1921 and were burned during the
Warsaw Uprising against German forces, other parts of the collection have still not been returned by Russia. Polish scientists have been allowed to access and study the objects. The
Polish Crown Jewels were removed by the
Prussians in 1795 after the
Third Partition of the
Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. After the collapse of the
November Uprising, literary and art treasures were removed from Poland. Poland regained some of the artefacts after the
Treaty of Riga — the furnishings of the
Warsaw Castle and the
Wawel Castle. During the Second World War, Germany tried to destroy Poland completely and exterminate its population as well as culture. Countless art objects were looted, as Germany systematically carried out a plan of looting prepared even before the start of hostilities (see also
Nazi plunder). Soviet troops afterward contributed to the plunder as well.
Looting of Latin and South America The looting of Central and South America by the
conquistadors is one of the best-known plunders in the world. Roger Atwood writes in
Stealing History: Tomb Raiders, Smugglers, and the Looting of the Ancient World: "Mayan stonework became one of those things that good art museums in America just had to have, and looters in the jungles of southern Mexico and Guatemala worked overtime to meet the demand." (See: Maya stelae#Looting) Looting in Mesoamerica has a long tradition and history. Graves are often looted before the archaeologists can reach them, and the artifacts are then sold to wealthy collectors in the United States, Japan, or Europe. Guillermo Cock, a Lima-based archaeologist, says about a recent find of dozens of exquisitely preserved Inca mummies on the outskirts of Peru's capital city,
Lima: "The true problem is the looters," he said. "If we leave the cemetery it is going to be destroyed in a few weeks."
Looting of Spain Peninsular War During
Napoleon's invasion of Spain,
Joseph I planned to host the best art of Spain in a museum, so he ordered to collect all possible art works. In 1810, 1000 paintings were looted in Seville by the French Army. Most paintings came from religious buildings. Over 180 paintings were stolen by Marshal Soult, including some of Murillo.
El Escorial in Madrid also suffered from looting, were many precious artworks were amassed by the occupant army. When Joseph I was leaving Spain, he abandoned more than 200 paintings from the
Spanish royal collection. Some of these paintings were
gifted to the Duke of Wellington by Ferdinand VII. The best known looted piece is
The Immaculate Conception of Los Venerables. It was looted by Marshal Jean-de-Dieu Soult in 1813 and taken to France. Later, in 1852, it was bought by the Louvre. Vichy Regime made an exchange of artwork with Spanish Government and returned to Spain.
Looting of Africa The looting of African art primarily came about as a result of the
Scramble for Africa, which saw many European powers colonize the African continent. A notable example of looted African art is the
Benin Bronzes, sacked from the
Kingdom of Benin (now southern
Nigeria); thousands of these bronze artworks were taken from the Benin royal palace by the British during the
Benin Expedition of 1897. Other looted African artefacts include the
Rosetta Stone, a key to translating
hieroglyphs, which was rediscovered during the
French campaign in Egypt and Syria before being claimed by the British. Another example is the Maqdala treasures, taken by the British from
Ethiopia.
20th century The most significant looting in the 20th century was the
Nazi plunder (19331945), first primarily of the property of German Jews and subsequently of conquered territories. These acts were legal under Nazi German law but certainly illicit. For details, see , below. During the 20th century, most plundering of archaeological artefacts was undetected and unpunished. In most countries, there was little or no actual legislation to protect archaeological sites. • In the United Kingdom and Ireland, the
Ancient Monuments Protection Act 1882 introduced the principle of protection for national heritage sites. Subsequent laws have enhanced this protection (most recently in the UK, the
Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act 1979). Nevertheless, the availability of increasingly powerful and accurate
metal detectors has led to a surge in
nighthawking (theft of archaeological artefacts, from scheduled and unscheduled sites). • In Spain, since 1978, a framework for legal protection of cultural heritage has been developed.
21st century In the decade of the 2010s there has been several cases of looters with metal detectors in archaeological sites. ==Looting by perpetrator==