{"id":1187,"date":"2012-09-07T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-09-07T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/dailyjewel\/?guid=fb1ff224b20cf67c64c77d249a0c5fc8"},"modified":"2012-09-07T11:00:01","modified_gmt":"2012-09-07T11:00:01","slug":"penn-museum-strengthens-partnership-with-turkey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/dailyjewel\/2012\/09\/07\/penn-museum-strengthens-partnership-with-turkey\/","title":{"rendered":"PENN MUSEUM STRENGTHENS PARTNERSHIP WITH TURKEY"},"content":{"rendered":"

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PENN MUSEUM STRENGTHENS PARTNERSHIP WITH TURKEY<\/b><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\u201cOnly such an event could make an excavation team leader or a culture minister as happy as I am now,\u201d Culture and Tourism minister, <\/span>Ertugrul Gunay, did<\/span> not hide his excitement at the return of the ancient jewellery, including earrings, pins and pendants, which he said Turkey had been working to get back since 2009.<\/span>
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        Museum Agrees to Indefinite Term Loan of \u201cTroy Gold\u201d Jewelry<\/span><\/b><\/div>\n

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Mediterranean, Bronze Age Bracelet<\/a> in Electrum Gold<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

SEPTEMBER 4, 2012\u2014 Penn Museum (the University of Pennsylvania Museum of <\/span>Archaeology and Anthropology) announces a landmark agreement with the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism for an indefinite term loan to the Republic of Turkey of a collection of 24 gold jewelry pieces, dating to circa 2400 BCE.<\/span><\/p>\n

The agreement reached between Penn and Turkey includes identification of the \u201cTroy Gold\u201d as being on indefinite loan from the Penn Museum; a commitment by the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism of strong support for the University\u2019s excavations at Gordion, in central Turkey; the loan of a group of remarkable artifacts excavated in a series of royal tombs at Gordion and in Lydia for a future major exhibition at the Penn Museum; and a pledge for increased cultural collaboration between Penn and Turkey. <\/span><\/div>\n
State-of-the-art metallurgical analysis conducted at the Penn Museum corroborated the hypothesis that the rare jewelry had been found in the northeast Aegean, likely at or near the site of Troy, prompting a re-evaluation of its purchase history and provenance.  \u201cWe have a strong, long-standing partnership with Turkey, in which cultural exchange and cultural understanding are of paramount importance,\u201d said Dr. Julian Siggers, the Williams Director of the Penn Museum.  \u201cIn light of this history and our recent scientific testing, this agreement is right and appropriate. What\u2019s more, it will lead to great opportunities \u2014 for Penn, for Philadelphia, and for the wider archaeological community \u2014 to experience more of Turkey\u2019s rich cultural history and heritage in the future.\u201d<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Bronze Age “Basket”  Earrings<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n
The gold artifacts are delicate and distinctive: two precise techniques, filigree and granulation, were used in the production of the jewelry, which would have been worn by aristocratic women living 4,400 years ago.  Some of the decorative motifs and technical features of the pieces are echoed in the jewelry from the Greek island of Lemnos and from the Mesopotamian Royal Tombs of Ur, both of which date to the same general time of the Penn Museum gold, circa 2400 BCE. The latter site, located in modern-day Iraq, was excavated in the 1920s and early 1930s by a joint Penn Museum\/British Museum team and is the subject of a current exhibition on display at the Penn Museum. The same workshops may have supplied both Troy and Ur\u2014more than 1,200 miles apart\u2014with their precious metalwork, evidence of an extraordinary early trade network scholars are just beginning to understand.<\/span><\/div>\n
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Bronze Age Single Earring<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n
History of the Purchase<\/span><\/b><\/div>\n
In 1966, the Penn Museum purchased 24 pieces of gold jewelry of Early Bronze Age date (second half of the third millennium BCE) from a Philadelphia art dealership that has since ceased to exist.  Rodney Young, then Curator-in-Charge of the Penn Museum\u2019s Mediterranean Section, asked Assistant Curator George Bass to study the assemblage. Bass, who later founded the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, published the jewelry immediately\u2014first in a popular magazine (the Penn Museum\u2019s Expedition<\/i>), then in a scientific journal (theAmerican Journal of Archaeology <\/i>or AJA<\/i>).<\/span><\/div>\n
In these articles, Bass highlighted the difficulty of pinpointing the original find spot or provenance of the jewelry. Greek and Near Eastern jewelry of the mid-to-late third millennium BCE exhibits an \u201cinternational style\u201d tied to the long-distance trade networks that crossed Asia and the Aegean, thereby making it difficult to link jewelry without a known find spot to a specific site. Bass noted the objects\u2019 strong similarities to the Early Bronze Age jewelry of Troy in northwest Turkey, Poliochni on Lemnos (Greece), and Ur (southern Iraq).<\/span><\/div>\n
The purchase of the \u201cTroy Gold\u201d (as it soon came to be called) prompted a series of discussions at the Penn Museum that ultimately led to the formulation of \u201cThe Pennsylvania Declaration,\u201d which was intended to prohibit future acquisitions of antiquities that had no find spot and were believed to have been looted.  This Declaration was highly influential in the global museum community and was followed later that year by the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property<\/a>, which was implemented by the U.S. in 1983.  As George Bass noted at the end of his 1970 article, \u201cmore and more hoards [of this kind] will lose their historical value unless illegal excavation and antiquities smuggling can be stopped. The curators, board of managers, and director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology have just voted unanimously to purchase no antiquities in the future unless their place of origin and legality of export is certain\u201d (AJA <\/i>1970, p. 341).<\/span><\/div>\n\n\n\n\n
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Bronze Age Mediterranean Necklace<\/a> in Electrum Gold, composed of  350 hand made beads (11 different types) <\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

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New Research Brought to the Collection<\/span><\/b><\/div>\n
When the \u201cTroy Gold\u201d assemblage was carefully examined again in 2009 by Ernst Pernicka, a professor at the University of T\u00fcbingen in southern Germany and director of the Troy Excavations, and Hermann Born, archaeologist at the Museum f\u00fcr Vor und Fr\u00fchgeschichte in Berlin, a particle of soil was found lodged inside one of the gold pendants. The use of a technique called neutron activation analysis revealed that the particle\u2019s composition was consistent with the soil in the Trojan plain.  <\/span><\/div>\n\n\n\n\n
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Bronze Age Hook & Basket Style Earrings<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n
Toward the end of 2011, the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism contacted the Penn Museum regarding the potential transfer of the gold to Turkey, and a series of discussions subsequently took place between the University of Pennsylvania and the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism. A joint decision was reached wherein the gold would travel to Turkey on indefinite loan. The expectation is that the gold will eventually be displayed in a new museum that is planned for the archaeological site of Troy. <\/span><\/div>\n
Brian Rose, the James B. Pritchard Professor of Archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania and the Curator-in-Charge of the Penn Museum\u2019s Mediterranean Section, co-directs the excavations at the famous site of Troy in northwest Turkey and has been charged with oversight of the \u201cTroy Gold\u201d for many years. <\/span><\/div>\n

\u201cDetermining the fate of cultural property whose only certain provenance is the art market is never an easy task, and we continue to adhere to the principles of the \u2018Pennsylvania Declaration\u2019 that the Penn Museum formulated 42 years ago.<\/i><\/b><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ensuring a future for the past is a responsibility shared by every museum in the world, and the Penn Museum will continue to be proactive in charting a course toward that goal.\u201d<\/span><\/b><\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Penn Museum<\/b> (the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology), celebrating its 125th<\/sup> anniversary in 2012, is dedicated to the study and understanding of human history and diversity. Founded in 1887, the Museum has sent more than 400 archaeological and anthropological expeditions to all the inhabited continents of the world. With an active exhibition schedule and educational programming for children and adults, the Museum offers the public an opportunity to share in the ongoing discovery of humankind’s collective heritage.<\/span><\/div>\n
Penn Museum<\/b> is located on the University of Pennsylvania\u2019s campus at 3260 South Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104.  Penn Museum can be found on the web at www.penn.museum<\/a>. For general information call 215.898.4000.<\/span><\/div>\n
Source: Penn Museum Press Release<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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PENN MUSEUM STRENGTHENS PARTNERSHIP WITH TURKEY\u201cOnly such an event could make an excavation team leader or a culture minister as happy as I am now,\u201d Culture and Tourism minister, Ertugrul Gunay, did not hide his excitement at the return o…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":102,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[61,1206,1209,1205,1208,734,1207,1210],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/dailyjewel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1187"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/dailyjewel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/dailyjewel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/dailyjewel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/102"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/dailyjewel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/dailyjewel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1187\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/dailyjewel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/dailyjewel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/dailyjewel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}