Saturday 3 March 2018

The Ilves Collection and the Finnish Academy


The eBay seller going under the names MixAntik in 2012 and then in 2016, ebuyerrrrr has supplied apparently unpapered artefacts to a number of collections. We know that the Green collection has bought from him, and according to Roberta Mazza, so did another collector:
According to my research, an anonymous Finland-based collector bought papyrus fragments through ebuyerrrrr and other Turkey-based accounts, and has found academics and conservators to research them. [...] International academic journals have recently published editions from the Finnish collection, now known as P. Ilves (the inventory numbers count over 100 of them). 
Rick Bonnie in Helsinki announces that he has been accumulating info on this Finnish anonymous collector (P. Ilves) for a while now and asks anyone (dealers?) who know anything about him or her to contact him. He says that he's informed the Finnish National Board of Antiquities already about the collection and adds that it is 'pretty large.. somewhat around a thousand fragments is my lowest estimate'. It is not clear whether that is 1000 papyri, or 1000 artefacts.

Bonnie indicates that 'This case also has helped in creating @WCOM_Helsinki, which is now in the process of developing a policy within the university regarding work with cultural objects. Rick Bonnie and Suzie Thomas will be teaching a course in the autumn of 2018 'on the ethics of working with cultural objects including manuscripts specifically targeted to graduate students within the university'.It seems to me that a few more institutions need such policies. WCOM Helsinki is a Helsinik University project "Working with Cultural Objects and Manuscripts: Provenance, Legality, and Responsible Stewardship". Good for them.

See also: The Publication of the Coptic Manuscripts of the Ilves Collection Research project
and: Coptic Manuscripts from the Ilves CollectionA Research Project of the Academy of Finland
Note, neither of these give any information about the artefacts themselves, how they arrived in, of all places, Finland, and how the collector acquired them.

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