Prometheus 6   

Ancient Art at Met Raises Old Ethical Questions
By MARTIN GOTTLIEB and BARRY MEIER

lmost lost in the sumptuous display of Mesopotamian antiquities in the "Art of the First Cities" exhibition now at the Metropolitan Museum is a small limestone fragment, triangular in shape and delicately carved.

The piece shows Naram-Sin, a king of the ancient Akkadian empire, seated beside Ishtar, goddess of love, fertility and war. In the show's catalog it is described as an "extraordinary" example of the era's art.

It also has another distinction. In terms of its archaeological pedigree, it might as well have fallen out of the sky.

Until about four years ago, when a scholar spotted it in the Upper East Side home of a prominent collector, the Naram-Sin limestone was essentially unknown. No record of its excavation or history of ownership has emerged. In antiquities circles, that empty space amounts to a warning label: this piece may be the fruit of plunder.

The "First Cities" show opened in May, on the heels of the ransacking of the Iraq Museum and as pretty much everyone in the archaeological community was vowing to stanch the trade in stolen antiquities. But as the story of the Naram-Sin limestone shows, the everyday world of buying, selling and exhibiting is often a lot more ambiguous than that. The marketplace is full of objects with mysterious pasts — a lot of them indeed looted — and it's often anything but clear which ones are legitimate and which are not.

How to handle such orphan objects — is it ethical to buy them, to show them, even to write scholarly articles about them? — is one of the central, and most divisive, issues in the hothouse world of museums, collectors and archaeologists. But the debate has become increasingly public and pointed with the recent events in Iraq.