Inside the dangerous world of papyrus dealing Frauds have infested the artefact trade

Mazza is a papyrologist: a specialist in the study of ancient papyri. She spends her days reading lines of Greek and Coptic on scraps of ancient reed. While some papyri are beautiful, most are rather prosaic objects. They are biscuit-brown or faded ochre, holed and tattered, the cast-off skin of an entire civilisation. The most extensive cache was excavated at Oxyrhynchus, near modern Al-Bahnasa, by the Oxford classicists Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt between 1896 — 1907. The aridity of the Egyptian desert had preserved hundreds of thousands of fragments, many of them still legible to the naked eye.

Speaking to Mazza, she tells me what drew her to papyrology. “I was fascinated by two main things. The first was the materiality — this wasn’t philology or producing editions and translations — this was the real thing. The other was the idea that in order to be a good historian you had to get to the actual voices of the people.” For a papyrologist, these voices ring clear. A short browse through a tiny percentage of the finds from Oxyrhynchus reveals the city’s connective tissue. The sale of a two-year-old slave girl; receipts for wine, wheat, firewood, baskets, ropes, irrigation machinery, and military clothing; a wet nurse’s contract of employment; loan agreements; deeds of surety; a report of accidental death; a recipe for tooth powder; treatises on gangrene and haemorrhoids; and a cheery drawing of the god Bes. These are much more than desiccated fragments of reed. They are the inky shadows of the dead.

Such texts, while hugely valuable to historians, don’t turn much of a profit on the black market. But literary and religious works were found at Oxyrhynchus too, and these are a different matter entirely. Although Mazza’s book takes in a broad range of depressing frauds, from forged Dead Sea Scrolls to aggressive eBay fences, her main subject is the strange case of the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC. The museum is a pet project of Steve Green, president of the arts and crafts chain Hobby Lobby, a business founded by his father. Green, an ardent evangelical, intended to fill the museum with biblical manuscripts. He wanted visitors to trace the immutable Bible of evangelical Christianity across as many papyri, vellum codices, and early printed books as he could buy.

And buy he did. Green went on extensive shopping trips to Turkey, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates, where he hoovered up astonishing quantities of cuneiform tablets, medieval manuscripts and, of course, papyri. Anything even tangentially related to the Bible or early Christianity was fair game. His budget — purchases were paid for by Hobby Lobby, not Green himself — appeared almost limitless. But filling the Museum of the Bible’s galleries may not have been Green’s sole motivation. Once open, the museum would be an incorporated charity with 501(c)(3) status. Donations of cultural assets to such a charity receive tax relief of around 33 per cent of the item’s fair market value. As Mazza writes, “In founding a museum dedicated to the Bible — that is to say, to the evangelical view of the Bible — the Green family could be instruments of God’s will, benefactors of humankind, and also see substantial tax savings.”

Naturally, these tax savings depended on whatever the fair market value might be. And this is where papyri differ from $4 million coffins. Any idiot can look at a gold-plated artefact and value it in the millions. But it takes a scholar to evaluate a papyrus. The range of skills involved is intimidating. A command of ancient languages is naturally vital, but so too is the art of recognising a potentially valuable document from a few fragmentary sentences. Given that there are often literal holes in the text, a papyrologist must make an educated guess as to the missing words. Finally, a knowledge of paleography — the study of ancient handwriting — is essential, as changes in handwriting over time are one of the main clues to a text’s approximate date.

Buying a job lot of papyri, as Steve Green frequently did, is therefore a risky business from a financial standpoint. An appraising papyrologist might find that you’ve bought a bunch of seventh century copies of the Acts of the Apostles — all well and good, but not worth much. The dream is for a scholar to examine your purchases and declare that they have found something interesting, or better yet, extraordinary. The scholar then edits the papyrus in question and publishes their work in a prestigious academic journal. The fair market value of your papyrus rockets, and the 33% tax relief on donation potentially exceeds your initial investment many times over.

Any serious collector of papyri must therefore cultivate close relationships with individual scholars. The ever-growing Green collection, based in Oklahoma City, did so with gusto. Senior academics were invited to study the extensive holdings, and PhD funding was provided to train up future papyrologists. All very laudable, and as we have seen, potentially very profitable. Yet the atmosphere at the Green Collection was clearly rather different to that of other research environments. Mazza points out that “those who were offered the chance to study manuscripts and other objects were instructed to keep the material to themselves. They even had to sign nondisclosure agreements, typical of business but unknown in academia, especially in text-orientated fields like papyrology.”

This insistence on confidentiality may have been sparked by a growing realisation that much of the material acquired by Hobby Lobby was of dubious provenance. In August 2010, Green invited Patty Gerstenblith, a professor of law at DePaul College, to advise him on a purchase of cuneiform tablets and other artefacts from an Israeli dealer. Gerstenblith has stated that she “read them the riot act”. The items were obviously of Iraqi origin, and therefore potentially subject to a ban on cultural exports from Iraq that had been in place since 1990. Green bought them anyway, accepting the dealer’s convoluted account of the tablets’ history — which conveniently circumvented the ban.

Nevertheless, some of these artefacts were seized by Memphis customs officials in 2011. In the wake of a government investigation — and a $3 million settlement in 2017 — Hobby Lobby released a statement explaining that, “The Company was new to the world of acquiring these items, and did not fully appreciate the complexities of the acquisitions process. This resulted in some regrettable mistakes.”

Unscrupulous dealers are adept at mocking up the elaborate fictions — and the elaborate paperwork — required to sell looted antiquities to prestige clients such as the Green collection or the Metropolitan Museum. Kim Kardashian’s gold coffin, for example, was sold to the Met with a forged export licence stating that the coffin was in Europe before the Unesco ban on cultural exports from Egypt came into effect in 1972. The looting of archaeological sites required to supply this illicit trade continues unabated. Mazza notes that “despite all the measures taken nationally and internationally, the truth is that in Egypt illegal excavations, looting, and smuggling are endemic”.

Yet the strangest story explored by Mazza involves not a grave robber or a dodgy antiquities dealer, but an Oxford don. Dirk Obbink was Professor of Papyrology at Oxford, the general editor of the Oxyrhynchus papyri, and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. He was also at the heart of the Green collection’s greatest coup: the supposed discovery of the earliest extant fragment of the Gospel of Mark.

In the autumn of 2011, Scott Carroll and Jerry Pattengale visited Obbink in his rooms at Christ Church. At that time, Carroll and Pattengale worked for the Green collection. Carroll in particular had a key role in sourcing papyri and other objects for potential purchase by Hobby Lobby. The two men have different recollections of that visit to Oxford (and of subsequent events), but agree on one key point: Obbink showed them papyri that day. Three were fragments of Matthew, Luke, and John. The fourth and smallest papyrus was the most interesting. It was a fragment of the Gospel of Mark, said Obbink, and he thought that it might date from the late 1st century. This would have made it the earliest known surviving manuscript of the New Testament. Pattengale has stated that Obbink, who claimed to be acting on behalf of a private collection, then offered the papyri for sale. In 2013, Hobby Lobby purchased all four fragments.

They never received them. As news of the Mark papyrus spread within the academic community, it gradually became apparent that it was not an unknown fragment after all. It was identifiable as P.Oxy. 83.5345, a catalogued, though unpublished, piece of the Oxyrhynchus papyri, owned by the Egypt Exploration Society and archived at Oxford. The same was true of the other three papyri. In December 2017, Obbink emailed Hobby Lobby. Mazza describes what happened next: “Obbink wrote in the email that the four papyri were in the ownership of the Egypt Exploration Society and he had sold them ‘by mistake’, an explanation obviously hard to believe.” The general editor of the Oxyrhynchus papyri agreed to refund Hobby Lobby the sum of $760,000.

This was just the beginning. Concerned by the gospels fiasco, representatives from the Museum of the Bible met with the Egypt Exploration Society to go over previous purchases from Obbink. Some of these fragments were found to be parts of the Oxyrhynchus archive, and were returned to Oxford by the museum. In 2021, Hobby Lobby took legal action against Obbink, listing seven separate sales of papyri between February 2010 and February 2013. The numbers involved were staggering. In November 2010, Hobby Lobby’s 4th purchase from Obbink saw the business pay $2,400,000 for “papyri fragments and other antiquities.” The following July, Hobby Lobby purchased another lot for $1,335,500. All payments were made to a bank account in Obbink’s own name. In March 2024, an Oklahoma court ordered Obbink to pay Hobby Lobby the sum of $7,085,100, and prejudgment interest from February 2013 at a rate of 6% per annum.

Mazza suspects that we will never know the whole truth about l’affaire Obbink. Not all of the papyri he sold came from the collection that he was supposed to safeguard. Others, such as new fragments from the poetry of Sappho which Obbink unveiled to much fanfare in 2014, have even murkier origins involving London auctioneers and Turkish eBay vendors. We are unlikely to know how a man of such intelligence thought he could get away with it all. Hubris seems to be the only explanation for the actions of this brilliant, greedy classicist. Mazza favours a less abstract answer. As she said to me, “There’s this strange idea that academics are different from other people. But you have the same amount of crooks [as in the wider world].” At least Obbink got one thing right. His bizarre actions illuminated the murkier corners of the antiquities trade, and may have prompted a review of the entire Green collection. In 2020, Steve Green returned 11,500 artefacts to Egypt and Iraq. Mazza notes dryly that just 43 papyri have made it into the Museum’s gallery.

Mazza’s book details the grubbiness — the smallness — of the black market in antiquities. Ancient objects, whether papyri or gold coffins, become assets to be bought and sold. Some scholars use their learning to transform artefacts from records of human lives to numbers on a balance sheet. Others don’t care much about where a new fragment of Sappho or Callimachus comes from, as long as they get to write articles about them. Even passionate collectors can lose sight of what they long to own. “The collectors of ancient manuscripts often become real experts. In the case of the Greens, there was a great attachment for faith reasons, but I think that was the main drive. They were completely uninterested in learning about these papyri,” says Mazza. For her, this ignorance was summed up by an appearance Steve Green made on CNN. He had brought one of his papyri into the studio, a fragment of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. He did not notice that it was displayed upside down.