Dr. Chris Parmenter, Assistant Professor of Classics and Gillian Marbury, Graduate Associate for the Classics Department will present a talk about a collection of artifacts from ancient Cyprus, currently housed within the Ohio State Museum of Classical Archaeology. These objects are currently on view in 198 Hagerty Hall as a part of rotating mini-exhibitions of visual culture. Parmenter and Marbury will discuss the culture and history of ancient Cyrpus and provide insight to the objects on display. This event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.
Ohio State’s Museum of Classical Archaeology (MOCA) is a collection of over 650 Mediterranean antiquities located in Dulles Hall. The collection offers students, researchers and members of the public the chance to view and study objects dating from the Late Bronze Age (c. 1500-1100 BCE) to as late as the 1970s. First established by Prof. Timothy Gregory in 2006, MOCA reopened for instructional use in 2023 after years of inactivity. The collection is not yet available to be viewed by the public.
The objects from ancient Cyprus on display in Hagerty are among the most evocative in MOCA’s collection. These intact ceramic vessels were acquired between 1867-75 by Luigi Palma di Cesnola (1832-1904). Born on Sardinia, Cesnola would emigrate to the United States to found a military academy shortly before the Civil War. He served as American minister on Cyprus between 1865-77.
Cesnola is one of Mediterranean archaeology’s problematic founders. In his decade on Cyprus, Cesnola scoured the island for antiquities, eventually exporting some 35,000 to the United States. Cesnola vied for celebrity by staging sensational discoveries of ‘treasures’ in hope of attention from the New York press. Without doubt, Cesnola produced the first methodical inventory of Cypriot archaeological sites. Most of what we now know about ancient Cyprus builds on his research. Unfortunately, Cesnola was a serial fabulist. Even by contemporary standards his excavation practices were atrocious. Members of Cesnola’s team (including his brother Alessandro) were arrested by British colonial authorities for looting.
Cesnola’s haul of Cypriot antiquities was purchased by the newly-founded Metropolitan Museum of Art (MMA) in 1879. Cesnola himself served as the museum’s director until his death in 1904. Over the following decades, the MMA auctioned off all but 5,000 objects of Cesnola’s collection. Dozens of small museums across the country have collections of ex-Cesnola objects.
Ancient Cyprus is fascinating and enigmatic. During the Early Iron Age (1100-700 BCE), many Greek speakers migrated to Cyprus, bringing with them a script called the Cypriot syllabary. On the island, they mingled with indigenous Cypriots and Phoenician immigrants from the Levant to create a vibrant and unique archaeological culture. The kingdoms of Cyprus had immense riches, trading with Egypt, the neo-Assyrian empire, and the Phoenician world in a critical period of Mediterranean history. But unlike their relatives in Greece, Cypriots recorded little in their script. Few Cypriots actively participated in the canonical events of Greek history in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Some of the objects on display here are dated to the Cypro-Archaic Period, roughly 750-500 BCE.
How was this collection at MOCA formed? Unlike other Ohio institutions, OSU did not establish a teaching collection in Mediterranean archaeology during the era of the legal antiquities trade. (Although Italy, Egypt, Greece, and Cyprus banned the unlicensed export of antiquities early on, the United States did not have a blanket import ban until 1980.) MOCA absorbed a handful of small, pre-existing collections on campus in addition to donations from the Columbus community. Due to serious legal and ethical issues regarding the antiquities trade, MOCA no longer accepts donations.
No objects in MOCA’s collection came from a scientific excavation. As such, they tell us very little about ancient Mediterranean societies. Rather, MOCA’s story is the history of collecting: how and why visitors to the Mediterranean decided to pick up distinctive objects and bring them home. Ironically, as artifacts in the collection were ripped from their depositional context, they created new stories that can be accessed via the study of accession records, auction catalogs and newspaper reports. Provenance research—the study of how objects ended up where they now are—will be a major activity of MOCA’s new iteration.
