Conflict and the Heritage Trade: Rise in U.S. Imports of Middle East “Antiques” and “Collectors’ Pieces” Raises Questions

American imports of art, collections and collectors’ pieces, and antiques from Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey increased sharply between 2011 and 2013, prompting questions about whether trafficked heritage has piggybacked onto the mainstream marketplace.

War, mass looting, and other grave threats to heritage greatly expand the risk that smuggled cultural contraband will slide into the stream of international commerce undetected. Because art and antiquities transactions often lack transparency or fail to undergo rigorous due diligence, examining published trade data is one way to potentially spot trafficked cultural material hiding under the cover of everyday imports.

One region that has witnessed grave threats to cultural heritage is the Middle East. The intelligence community and the academic community both report that antiquities trafficking has generated revenue for the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). More investigation needs to be conducted to measure the scope of the terror group’s earnings activity, but the American Schools of Oriental Research and others have confirmed that archaeological site looting has been a wellspring for pillaged artifacts spilling out of Syria and Iraq, a result of both Syria’s civil war and ISIS’ sprawl. Spoils from the region reportedly have transited through the neighboring countries of Lebanon and Turkey. And in nearby Egypt, the country has suffered its own cultural heritage crisis amid unrest, prompting the nation to petition for an agreement with the United States that would help protect ancient archaeological and ethnological materials in jeopardy.

Given the cultural heritage emergency that has erupted in the Middle East, U.S. International Trade Commission figures documenting an upsurge in imports of Harmonized Tariff Schedule 97 goods from Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey flag concerns about whether conflict antiquities have entered America’s stream of commerce. HTS 97 is the customs classification for works of art, collectors’ pieces and antiques.

Total American imports of HTS 97 goods from the five countries rapidly escalated from $51.1 million in 2011 to $95.2 million in 2013–an astonishing 86% rise. The across-the-board spike can be gleaned from the table below, which displays hefty individual percentage increases of cultural imports from each of the five countries.

Copyright note: Although the data presented here is sourced from publicly available information, it has been carefully selected, coordinated, arranged, and analyzed so that it is subject to copyright as a compilation by CHL. The publication, retransmission, or broadcast of this compiled data is strictly prohibited without CHL’s express consent.

Photo credit: Svilen Milev
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