Dr. Prodi – Dr. Obbink has clearly had time to talk to numerous members of the media about his discovery, but has refused to respond to repeated requests from scholars, public and private, for more information. Moreover, none of the drafts which were posted made any reference to provenance or collection history — which is presumably the very first thing a scholar would want to mention about the object they’re analyzing. Third, looting has been documented as rampant in Egypt particularly since the “Arab Spring,” so a lack of association with British or Italian projects at Oxyrhynchus means absolutely nothing about the date of the fragment’s discovery. And fourth, it is becomingly increasingly clear that a new cache of papyri has emerged on the market since 2009: http://paul-barford.blogspot.com/2014/02/freshly-surfaced-sappho-papyrus-where.html?m=1 .
As for ZPE, there is no ethics statement to be found on their website, and when pressed on the Fordham mosaics, Werner Eck told me that my “accusations” (which were, in fact, questions, just as the posts here have been questions rather than accusations) were “unfounded.” Yet now Fordham has decided to hire an “independent” expert to vet the provenance of the mosaics. Professor Tronchin has identified a set of ethical guidelines for papyrologists, but it is remarkable that these guidelines preclude only work on pieces discovered to have been stolen from existing collections and not work on pieces which are likely to have been looted. I think those of us in cultural heritage protection are wondering: is that a technicality…or a loophole?