Events Calendar – British School at Athens

Upper House Seminar

Dr Artemis Papatheodorou (The Metropolitan Museum of Art), “The Ottoman laws on antiquities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries”

Abstract: In the long nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire promulgated not one but four regulations on antiquities: the first one in 1869, the second one in 1874, the third one in 1884 and the final one in 1906. These regulations reflected attempts to manage antiquities in a comprehensive manner: from a definition of antiquities to the conditions for conducting excavations, importing or exporting ancient artefacts, and other topics. In an effort to trace their raison d’ être, this presentation will focus on the goals of each regulation. It will also look into the content of each regulation with an emphasis on the protection of antiquities, the ownership and export of finds, as well as the conditions for archaeological research. It will moreover examine a complementary act of law that focused on the preservation of antiquities in the early twentieth century, and a draft law that aimed unsuccessfully to replace the 1906 regulation. Significantly, this presentation will also touch upon the ways in which these regulations were implemented throughout the Empire.

Bio: Dr Artemis Papatheodorou is a cultural historian specialising in the history of archaeology, heritage and the classical reception in the Ottoman long nineteenth century. She is currently a Chester Dale Interdisciplinary Fellow with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, where she investigates vernacular archaeologies in late Ottoman Anatolia and photography. Her DPhil from the University of Oxford looked into the Ottoman policies on antiquities between 1839 and the end of the Empire in 1923. Her research focused, more precisely, on the central state legislation on antiquities, the archaeological laws of the autonomous Principality of Samos, and the archaeology-related activities of the most important Ottoman Greek learned society, the Hellenic Literary Society at Constantinople. Artemis was previously a Fellow in Provenance Research with the Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations, Koç University, and the Berlin Museums, an Early Career Fellow in Hellenic Studies with Harvard University, and a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations, Koç University. She has also taught history classes at the American University of Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates, and Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, in Athens, Greece. Her upcoming project is a study of the Mediterranean legislations on antiquities between 1789 and 1945.

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image: Excavation at the Temple of Apollo in Didyma, 1906, © German Archaeological Institute – Istanbul