Recently, Christie’s auctioned a stone head of pharaoh Tutakhamen, amid protests by Egyptian authorities and activists. At the heart of the controversy around the sale, which fetched $ 6 million, is the question of ‘provenance’.
About:
In matters of antiques, the word means “the record of the ownership of a movable work of art”.
When provenance is unclear, museums and institutions of repute do not usually deal with such works of art.
Over 100 countries are signatories to the UNESCO 1970 convention on the means of prohibiting and preventing the illicit, export ad transport of ownership of cultural property.
For evidence of provenance, UNESCO relies on INTERPOL database of stole objects and national inventories. When an object is not listed, establishing its provenance becomes problematic.
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