Tuesday 27 July 2010

The Morgantina Hoard: the Lebanese "connection"

I have been working on some Lebanese connections. I came across this statement in The Medici Conspiracy by Peter Watson and Cecilia Todeschini (p. 216). This appears in the purported collecting history ("provenance") of the Morgantina silver hoard:
It [sc. the Met] had said that the silver was acquired on two separate occasions, in 1981 and 1982, purchased from a certain Nabil el Asfar, a dealer in antiquities  from Beirut. According to this account, Asfar had acquired the silver pieces from his father sometime after World War II and in 1961 they had been sent to Switzerland, where they had remained until the Metropolitan Museum decided to buy them.

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