The University recently had the mosaics restored and place under glass in the floor of the new Wolfe Center of the Arts. The New York art dealer who sold the mosaics to Bowling Green University in 1965 for $35,000, said that they had come from the ancient site of Antioch.
That the mosaics have been chopped up into manageable fragments points to the work of smugglers as a mosaic of this magnificence would have either been left whole at the site of it's discovery or brought whole to a local museum, not butchered up and passed on to the New York art market?
The archaeological site of Zeugma was heavily looted in the 1960's and excavated in the early years of the 21rst century before a hydroelectric damn submerged the site. In these excavations archaeologists excavated dozens of stunning mosaics which are now in the Gaziantep Zeugma Mosaic Museum.
Bowling Green State University officials are looking into their collection and the legal issues to see if the origins of the mosaics can be proved and where their collection legally belongs.
Photo: Robert Nardi
