When two hitherto unknown poems by Sappho were brought to light in early 2014, it was a literary sensation. The sixth-century BC poet is one of the most celebrated writers of Greco-Roman antiquity, a tender chronicler of the agonies of female desire, and a gay icon. But frustratingly few works by her survive, and those that do largely come from ancient papyrus fragments preserved in the dry sands of Egypt.
But now the editors of a scholarly volume in which the circumstances of the discovery were detailed have formally retracted the chapter because the manuscript’s “provenance is tainted,” according to a statement issued through the book’s academic publisher, Brill.
In the years following the publication of the poems, many concerns were raised by scholars about why the manuscript remained unavailable for study, and why documentation concerning its acquisition had not been made public. It was said to belong to a London collector who preferred to remain anonymous.
In the now-retracted article, first published in 2016, it was stated that the papyrus manuscript on which the Sappho poems were written had been recovered by the staff of the London collector from cartonnage – ancient Egyptian papier-mache, often used to create funerary masks. According to this account, this particular piece of cartonnage, perhaps once used as bookbinding, had been formerly in an American collection, and eventually purchased legally by the collector in a Christie’s auction in London in 2011. When the cartonnage was dissolved by the collector’s staff and the individual sheets teased apart, the Sappho poems were revealed. Crucially, the artefact in question had been, according to this account, taken out of Egypt before 1970, the year a Unesco convention on cultural heritage was widely adopted. Strict Egyptian laws govern excavation and trafficking of its ancient artefacts.
A privately circulated Christie’s brochure was revealed in 2019 containing some images of the recovery process described in the article, but the photographs, when analysed by papyrologists, led to yet more questions about the account’s credibility.
Small fragments of the same Sappho manuscript ended up in the private collection of the American billionaire evangelical Green family, who fund the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC. After concerns raised about the legality of a number of artefacts in their possession, museum officials investigated these small fragments of the Sappho manuscript and announced that they had been purchased in 2012 from a Turkish dealer, Yakup Eksioglu, without appropriate documentation. Eksioglu said last year that he was the source of all the Sappho fragments. He called the story of the recovery from cartonnage bought at Christie’s a “fake story”. The Green family has repatriated their portions of the Sappho manuscript to the Egyptian state, along with thousands of other artefacts found to have been wrongfully acquired.
According to the statement from the editors of the retracted chapter, “The repatriation of the Green Sappho fragments has restored these papyri to [their] rightful owner.” The main part of the papyrus manuscript, they said, “remains problematic, not only because its provenance is tainted but also because the papyrus … is inaccessible. We sincerely hope that it will also be made available to the academic community soon and its acquisition circumstances fully explained”. They have not, they say, seen any evidence to suggest that the manuscript is inauthentic.
