ON JANUARY 16, 2012, Dr. Scott Carroll arrived at the Morrison Building of Baylor University, where he was expected at the Department of Classics. It was not his first visit. Since Steve Green, evangelical magnate and owner of Hobby Lobby, had made him director of his family’s quickly growing collection of biblical antiquities, Carroll took regular trips there to foster connections. He needed a team of academics to study and publish articles and books on the collection’s highlights, before exhibiting them in the future museum to be opened in Washington, DC. Baylor’s faculty and graduate students were given the opportunity to research some of the most rare and prized items: ancient papyri from Egypt, remains of the earliest Christian texts ever found.
That mild winter morning, Carroll—a sturdy white-haired man in his early sixties—was going to demonstrate how one could retrieve early Christian texts by disassembling “mummy masks,” a popular term he liked to use for ancient Egyptian head coverings made to protect mummified bodies before entombment. From about 300 to 30 BCE, professional embalmers produced these and other body coverings in a specific type of cartonnage, a material that looks like modern, brightly colored papier-mâché. The ancient Egyptian version was obtained by plastering together layers of textiles and other materials, then coating them with gesso. Once dry, the covering was painted in various colors and styles to represent an idealized portrait of the dead. Sometimes written papyri discarded from personal and public archives were used to form the cartonnage.
At Baylor University that morning, Carroll was carrying one of those head coverings—a cartonnage mummy mask—from the Green collection to show how, if disassembled with the proper care, fragments of ancient papyrus just might be found that could prove intellectually groundbreaking and of substantial monetary value.
A small crowd started populating the Lounge of Destiny, the common room of the Department of Classics where the event was going to take place. Faculty, PhD students, and a few external guests gathered around a table placed in the middle of the room, where the Egyptian mummy mask was deposited near a pile of blotting paper. Pulled off the head of the dead body which it had protected for centuries, the fragile cartonnage covering had collapsed, looking like an empty, squashed receptacle. But the face painted on it was still almost intact. According to Egyptian religion, through embalming and complex burial rituals, the dead took on godlike qualities, which the idealized portrait, painted on the gesso cover, reflected. The expression of the mask was transfixed, calm and gently smiling, its complexion white. A black-, white-, and red-striped wig covered the head. The mask’s wide-open eyes, highlighted by kohl, seemed to look up astonished at the American ceiling of the Lounge of Destiny, so different from the burial chamber where the ancient Egyptian had been deposited to rest and become immortal over two millennia earlier.1
Carroll grabbed the object with his bare hands and started showing it around. The cartonnage mummy mask, he explained, had been made through the recycling of linen and papyrus documents that one could still see obtruding beneath the painted portrait. “The writing exposed right here is called demotic,” Carroll said, pointing at some of the papyri visible through the cracks, “which is a late stage of Egyptian, and a lot of texts that were written in demotic were accounts and things of that nature; we call those documentary texts.” Documentary texts were not unimportant, Carroll explained, but they are not literary, which was the sort of text he in fact hoped to find.
Because the mask dated to the early Christian period—Carroll stated—and was from a region where early Christians used papyri for writing, he thought there was a good chance that some biblical texts might be found among the fragments inside the cartonnage. “So we will do our best and what will happen is that you may ask, aren’t you destroying art, is it unethical to do this, and so forth”—Carroll pointed out—“we actually have a process of development with my colleague at Oxford to preserve the outers” (sic; he meant the external painted gesso layer of the cartonnage). But before too many questions were asked about the process, Carroll stated that he and his unnamed Oxford colleague were still working on it, and that morning something else was going to happen. As curator and director of the Green collection and by virtue of his past experience as an archaeologist in Egypt, he had taken the decision and responsibility to sacrifice the mummy mask for the sake of retrieving the papyri it might contain.
“The process today is: I’ll take this,” Carroll continued, showing the mask again, “and we will dissolve this. And I’ve gone through a process that’s been through experimentation about twenty years.” He began by transferring the head covering to the sink of the Lounge of Destiny—one wall of which was equipped with a shiny emerald-green kitchen. Then Carroll slowly dissolved the ancient Egyptian artefact in a soapy warm water solution with the help of some white plastic spaghetti tongs. The dead Egyptian’s portrait liquefied under the eyes of the enthralled audience; a muddy mass of wet papyrus fragments and linen was then transferred back to the table where students, faculty, and guests started carefully peeling off each piece of papyrus, leaving them to dry between the sheets of blotting paper.
That day, Professor Jeffrey “Jeff” Fish, a fair blond man in his forties, assisted Carroll in dissolving the mask and then supervised his colleagues, students, and other guests as they disentangled the papyrus fragments still wet from the sink. Fish was on the Baylor classics faculty, an academic with a brilliant career, who since the time of his PhD had worked under the guidance of a most renowned Oxford Reader in papyrology, Dirk Obbink. Carroll, instead, was a total outsider to papyrology and classics academic circles, and Fish was surprised when he heard that the Green family had started collecting papyri and hired Carroll. Fish might have been skeptical, but it was an email from Obbink that recommended Carroll and the new Green collection, assuaging any doubts.
After Fish and Carroll worked with the papyrus fragments, then came the part Fish liked best: reading letters, words, and sentences in the hope of identifying passages from works of ancient literature—some verses from Homer, lines from a tragedy of Aeschylus, or possibly from the Jewish Bible, the Book of Leviticus, and so on. Who knew what texts might emerge from the cartonnage?
Something truly exceptional, however, seemed to happen in the Lounge of Destiny that day: a rich harvest of both classical and biblical texts were recognized among the papyrus fragments scattered on the blotting paper. Two days later, Carroll hinted at the findings on his Facebook account: “Baylor-mania update: One less mummy mask BUT new papyri texts of Homer, Euripides, Thucydides, the earliest-known text of Romans and numerous large sections of the most-illusive [sic] and valuable of all Greek works—the lyricist SAPPHO!! This will be front page London Times news! Woohoo.”2
Carroll’s report and the popular YouTube video of the performance shot that day omitted, however, important details of that morning’s events. Carroll had arrived at the Lounge of Destiny bringing along not only the famous mummy mask but also an array of loose papyri from other mysterious sources and now in possession of the Green family. While his guests were occupied with various tasks, Carroll planted these loose papyri among those truly retrieved from the mask.
To make the discovery more realistic, Carroll went so far as to wet the ancient papyrus fragments—works by Sappho, Homer, Euripides, and Thucydides, as well as Paul’s Letter to the Romans—before mixing them with the demotic documents. They looked fresh from the sink, but their origin was very different.
Why would anyone destroy an ancient Egyptian mummy mask only to then pretend to have found in it papyri sourced elsewhere? For two main reasons: to create a sense of excitement around the discovery, the discoverer, and the collection he worked for, and to cover up the real, illegal provenance of the loose papyri snuck in among those genuinely from the cartonnage. “Provenance” is a technical term that specialists use to indicate the history of an ancient object, like our papyri or the mummy mask, from its first surfacing to the present day. Sometimes it is possible to track the history of a papyrus from the moment it was excavated onward or to find out when it first appeared for sale on the antiquities market. But, more often than not, it is impossible to know how and exactly when papyri and other Egyptian antiquities emerged, because dealers, academics, collectors, and a host of other characters we will encounter in this book have voluntarily or involuntarily erased any trace of the trails these objects have followed to come to us.
I am a colleague of Dirk Obbink and Jeff Fish. Like them, I am an academic trained in papyrology, the discipline that deciphers, studies, and translates ancient texts written on papyrus—a special paper that the ancients manufactured through the processing of a plant by that name, cyperus papyrus. Hundreds of thousands of papyrus fragments—mostly as small as stamps or postcards, rarely in pristine condition—have survived hidden under the dry soil of Egypt. Europeans and North Americans started searching for and collecting them from the nineteenth century onward. Papyri are the protagonists of this book, and this book is the story of how the passion for papyri was born, developed, and then degenerated under the influence of market forces and the market-oriented academic system.
Although Obbink, Fish, and I belong to the same academic family, we couldn’t be more different.3 While Obbink and Fish started working for the Green collection at its inception in 2009, I have been one of its most vocal and active critics. Why? This book will explain it at length, but the 2012 Lounge of Destiny episode already gives you some hints. It is perfectly clear to any professional papyrologist that the dismantling of a cartonnage head covering in a sink to retrieve papyri is completely unethical. While the first generations of papyrologists not only dismounted funerary cartonnage coverings but even broke and unwrapped hundreds of embalmed bodies of animals and human beings to check if they contained texts, since the mid-twentieth century these practices have been dropped as problematic because they lead to the destruction of archaeological evidence. We now believe that funerary cartonnage coverings and embalmed human and animal remains have the same archaeological value as the texts they sometimes hide inside. Besides, new digital imaging techniques allow us to see through the linen and papyrus layers of these and other objects; they will soon develop to the point that papyrologists will be able to directly read the texts encapsulated inside.4 In short, it was both unprofessional and unnecessary to destroy a mummy mask to retrieve papyri in 2012. But it created an aura of adventurous discovery to attract the attention of an audience happy to believe that every professor is a modern Indiana Jones. Far from it: we are clumsy, shortsighted, and overburdened human beings excavating libraries and archives rather than exotic locations; we are busy teaching and applying for funding otherwise out of reach.
Also unethical from a papyrologist’s point of view was to gloss over the provenance of the mummy mask, given the strict legislation regulating the market in Egyptian (and other) antiquities. The sloppiness of the whole performance was remarkable: the sink, the washing up (they used Palmolive soap, it transpired later), and the spaghetti tongs. Certainly this was not a modern conservation lab. Last but not least, the statement that papyri of the Roman period had been found in that mummy mask was simply untenable: the style of the portrait showed beyond any possible doubt that it dated somewhere between 300 and 200 BCE. This is hundreds of years before Paul wrote the Letter to the Romans (mid-first century CE) and the other literary papyri were penned, judging from the handwriting. It was impossible to have found texts written after the birth of Christ in a mask dating at least two hundred years before he was born.
In 2020, eight years after the Baylor event, Scott Carroll and Jeff Fish admitted that Christian and classical fragments were surreptitiously mixed with those extracted from the cartonnage head covering. The admission came together with many others as a chain of events finally led to the uncovering of multiple and repeated crimes. These all took place while the Green family was amassing most of its collection, about 40,000 items, between 2009 and 2017.5
This book reports and documents how the chain of events unfolded from my point of view. I have been deeply involved in the story I am going to tell. This is not a standard academic monograph. This is not a journalistic report either, because I am not a journalist and I am invested in the story, as I said. This is a personal memoir about my profession and how it does a dangerous dance with collectors, dealers, auction houses, criminals, and those walking a fine line between what’s legal and what’s not.
I am going to guide you through my world—academia—but we will also step into other environments that one would not suspect cross mine. Our trip will have stops in Egyptian, Israeli, and Turkish antiquities shops. We will visit Christie’s salesrooms in London and far less exclusive and intangible auction sites, like eBay. Scott Carroll and Dirk Obbink are the main protagonists of the story, which includes many other characters, but first and foremost, a strange new breed of collector-dealers: American evangelical Christian millionaires, preachers, ministers, and scholars who have made big business out of biblical manuscripts, real and fake. The drama will develop through various countries, cities, and towns: London and Oxford, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Rome, Oklahoma City, Washington, DC, Waco, Santa Barbara, and other small towns. This is a global history: the history of how the West stole the rest of the world’s cultural heritage, and of how it now struggles to confess and come to terms with its sins.
1. What follows is based on a video recording of the event, “From Mummy Mask to Manuscripts,” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_gwgGcpD1M. Carroll’s words are transcriptions from the video. “Kohl” is a dark eye cosmetic widely used in antiquity for aesthetic, medical, and religious reasons. I thank Baylor Professors Jeff Fish and Simon Burris, who were happy to answer questions on the event later, while I was writing this book.
2. The post was dated January 18, 2012. Scott Carroll’s Facebook account (facebook.com/heydoc) was public for a long time, and many bloggers and academics who were interested in the Green collection monitored, archived, and reported some of Carroll’s statements and pictures in their social media, publications, and blog posts. Later, perhaps under the pressure of mounting criticism, Carroll concealed or canceled most of his Facebook posts, which many, including myself, however, had already stored in the form of screenshots or Word files. I thank Candida Moss, Rick Bonnie, Lynda Albertson, and Brent Nongbri for sharing information over the years.
3. As the following story will show, both Obbink and Fish worked for the Green collection but with very different roles and responsibilities. Fish was never involved in the trading of papyri.
4. See Adam Gibson, Kathryn E. Piquette, Uwe Bergmann, William Christens-Barry, Graham Davis, Marco Endrizzi, Shuting Fan, Sina Farsiu, Anthony Fitzgerald, Jennifer Griffiths, Cerys Jones, Guorong Li, Phillip L. Manning, Charlotte Maughan Jones, Roberta Mazza, David Mills, Peter Modregger, Peter R. T. Munro, Alessandro Olivo, Alice Stevenson, Bindia Venugopal, Vincent Wallace, Roy A. Wogelius, Michael B. Toth, and Melissa Terras, “An Assessment of Multimodal Imaging of Subsurface Text in Mummy Cartonnage Using Surrogate Papyrus Phantoms,” Heritage Science 6, article 7 (2018), open access, https://doi.org/10.1186/s40494-018-0175-4s; the virtual unwrapping and reading of carbonized papyrus scrolls from the ancient Roman site of Herculaneum has recently become a reality that can be followed by visiting the dedicated website “Vesuvius Challenge,” at https://scrollprize.org/.
5. In 2010, a New York Times article gave the number of 30,000 items already collected (Geraldine Fabrikant, “Craft Shop Family Buys Up Ancient Bibles for Museum,” International New York Times online edition, June 11, 2010, at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/12/business/12bibles.html); in 2017 the Museum of the Bible had 40,000 items according to Candida R. Moss and Joel S. Baden, Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 59. Because not all the pieces bought by the Green family were donated to the museum, doubts about the exact quantity of items acquired by the Greens persist.
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