Greek New Testament Papyrus: $99 + shipping and handling. Buy it now!

November 22, 2015 6:21 AM

Greek New Testament Papyrus discovered on eBay. (NY Times)
posted by colfax (13 comments total)

That's fascinating. And I never knew scholars would refuse to study privately-held pieces.
posted by persona au gratin at 7:58 AM on November 22, 2015

Very interesting, thanks for posting it.
posted by languagehat at 8:06 AM on November 22, 2015

My husband's responsible for prosecuting the illegal sale of antiquities in our state (sometimes it is illegal) and the last incident brought to his attention was someone selling a HUMAN SKULL on Craigslist for $200. (Which he claimed was Native American and "recovered" from a burial mound but that will be up to the archaeologists to decide.)

I don't think the guy realized he was going to be investigated for murder, grave robbing, and theft of antiquities, plus fraud and illegal sale of human remains and Native American antiquities, by three different police forces, and come out of it with at least one felony conviction. His best hope is that he just robbed a regular grave and was attempting to defraud people.

But yeah, private sales of antiquities are a huuuuuge problem, even when those sales are technically legal, because they help drive the illegal market that leads people to rent backhoes and dig up 8,000 year old burial mounds of irreplaceable importance. Tomb raider are real, but they're not sexy.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:27 AM on November 22, 2015 [14 favorites]

Eyebrows, that reminds me of something that happened when I was in grad school. One of the guys in the radiation protection office at the med school got busted; he had been stealing old preserved medical specimens from storage and selling them at an antiques market.
posted by sevenyearlurk at 8:56 AM on November 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

IIRC, it was once (still is?) common for medical students to acquire real skeletons for studying anatomy, so I would imagine there are more than a few old legitimately acquired ones sitting in people's attics that occasionally show up on ebay/craigslist.
posted by cosmic.osmo at 10:29 AM on November 22, 2015

Poor Percy.
posted by Countess Elena at 11:07 AM on November 22, 2015

Yeah, there's no blanket ban in the US on selling or owning human skeletons. You can even buy skulls online if you've got $1,500 to $3,000 burning a hole in your pocket.
posted by Pyry at 3:19 PM on November 22, 2015

Right, and if it were a medical skeleton he were trying to pass off as looted grave goods, that'd be one thing, although he'd still have a nice chat with the cops about the fraud aspects.

This was fairly clearly acquired in some nefarious fashion, although I don't know that they've decided in which one yet. Accidentally finding a skull that washed out of a grave or turning one up while plowing/digging/excavating is most likely, because someone who's been robbing graves doesn't usually post about it to Craigslist, and charges a lot more than $200. Still illegal to sell if it was "found." Only legal if it entered the stream of commerce from a legit human bone dealer or an actual funeral home or medical facility returning it to the skull's heirs (which sometimes actors want done so they can play Yorick forever after).

(Selling medical antiques that entered the stream of commerce in questionable ways 80 years ago is probably fine, as long as they're not Native American, but that's why it's good to have paperwork for your legal human bones.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 4:04 PM on November 22, 2015 [3 favorites]

You can even buy skulls online if you've got $1,500 to $3,000 burning a hole in your pocket.

The page that link goes to is titled "normal human skulls" which is the most amusingly suspicious name I think it could have. I get what they're trying to say, but I can't read it any other way than some nightvale-esque, "these skulls are NORMAL. PERFECTLY NORMAL. NOTHING TO SEE HERE. MOVE ALONG. DO NOT QUESTION THE NORMALCY."
posted by gloriouslyincandescent at 4:22 PM on November 22, 2015 [3 favorites]

or medical facility returning it to the skull's heirs (which sometimes actors want done so they can play Yorick forever after).

Del Close, the improv comedy teacher who trained several generations of Saturday Night Live cast members at Chicago's Second City, had a provision in his will that his skull would be preserved so that he could play Yorick in Hamlet. The skull appeared in several Chicago area theater productions, but eventually audience members figured out the skull didn't belong to Del Close. Eventually, the executor of Close's estate confessed that she tried several times to get pathologists or somebody else to remove Del's head from his body, but nobody would do it for her. With no options available to her, she had Del cremated and attempted to pass off a skull she bought at the Anatomical Chart Company in Skokie as Del's. There's a New Yorker article that covers the whole story.
posted by jonp72 at 6:32 PM on November 22, 2015 [3 favorites]

OH DEAR GOD THE STICKY TAPE
posted by cosmologinaut at 11:18 PM on November 22, 2015

I find it interesting that it belonged to a professor of religion, who apparently never bothered to look at it closely enough to realize its importance or purposefully chose not to bring it to anyone's attention in his years of ownership. Was finding early Christian writings on papyrus simply not a priority or topic of interest until recently? Was it the improbability factor of it not being from a codex make it hard to identify its value sooner?
posted by Atreides at 6:53 AM on November 23, 2015

The page that link goes to is titled "normal human skulls" which is the most amusingly suspicious name I think it could have.

Turns out they also sell "Pathological Human Skulls" and "Fetal & Child Skulls". I'd link to them but uh ... yeah.
posted by iotic at 9:12 AM on November 23, 2015