MIDDLE EAST EYE (18.5.2021)
When a British missionary rode through al-Ram in 1881 asking for antiquities, residents of the Palestinian village tried to stop him from taking the local treasures. Armed with guns, a group of men confronted him and refused to let him take the village’s ancient stone mask. At least, this is how the story was reported by Thomas Chaplin, the British man who took the mask.
“A woman brought me a very curious stone mask, which I immediately purchased for a small sum,” wrote Chaplin, who was then the director of the evangelical London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews’ hospital in Jerusalem.
“It seemed, however, that the object was regarded in the village as a sort of talisman which it would not be well to part with, so a number of men ran after me with their guns and demanded it back,” he continued in an article published in the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement nine years after the incident. The villagers’ attempts to hold on to the mask, however, were not successful.
Today the mask is believed to be one of the oldest known in the world, and it is part of the Palestine Exploration Fund’s (PEF) archaeological collection, a British society based in London.
“It’s a fascinating object, we believe it comes from the ritual material culture of the Neolithic period, about nine to 10,000 years ago,” says Felicity Cobbing, PEF’s chief executive. Since Thomas Chaplin was an associate of the PEF who often provided the organisation with assistance, it is likely the mask was donated to the fund after his death.
Established in 1865 under the royal patronage of Queen Victoria, the PEF’s collection in London includes thousands of artefacts taken from Palestine between the 1860s and the 1930s.
“The mask was acquired in an open transaction,” says Cobbing, who adds that by taking the mask to England, Chaplin didn’t break the terms of the Ottoman Antiquities Law, which allowed the export of portable artefacts.
“According to the circumstances of the time it was not unusual and not illegal” she tells MEE. “He [Chaplin] paid for it, and eventually they [the villagers] agreed to the sale.”
Not everyone, however, is convinced of the legitimacy and fairness of the purchase.
“It has to be returned,” says Tawfiq Abu Hammad, who lives in al-Ram. Abu Hammad, who works as an accountant at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), believes the mask was taken under duress.
For the resident of al-Ram, the appropriation of antiquities in the late 19th century is only an episode in the long history of systematic dispossession of Palestinians by colonial powers. Those in power might have changed, but he says deprivation is ongoing.
“Now the biggest hardship in al-Ram is the wall and the continuous theft of land,” says Abu Hammad. Al-Ram lies northeast of Jerusalem, and is now a town surrounded on three sides by the separation wall built by Israel. Since it was occupied by Israel in 1967, at least one hundred hectares of the town’s land have been confiscated to build Jewish settlements and Israeli military bases (…)
Read more: https://www.middleeasteye.net/discover/palestine-ancient-masks-dispossession