Glossary Collecting and the antiquities trade
Partage
Also called: division of finds
The division of excavated finds between the host country and the excavators, the system by which many Cypriot antiquities lawfully went abroad.
Under partage, the finds of a licensed excavation were shared out: the host state or its museum took its portion and the excavating institution exported the rest. The practice was common across the Mediterranean and the Near East in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it explains why so many excavated collections are held far from their sites.
In Cyprus the Ottoman regulation of 1874 divided a licensed dig's finds into thirds for the Government, the finder and the landowner, and the British Museum's excavations of the 1890s kept two-thirds of their finds. The largest division was the Swedish Cyprus Expedition's in 1930, when Sweden received about two-thirds of some 18,000 finds, taking tomb groups whole. The Antiquities Law of 1935 ended division in principle, and an amendment of 1964 abolished it outright.
Full entry: The Legal Export of Cypriot Antiquities
Related terms
- Export licence
An official permit allowing an antiquity to leave its country of origin; in Cyprus, issued by the Department of Antiquities from 1935.
- Antiquities Law (Cyprus)
The Cypriot statute governing excavation, ownership, dealing and export of antiquities, first enacted in 1905 and recast in 1935.
- Museum duplicates
Objects judged surplus to a museum because it held similar examples; the Cyprus Museum sold such duplicates to the public until 1991.
- Firman
An Ottoman imperial decree; in nineteenth-century Cyprus, the personal permit that let a foreigner excavate and sometimes export the finds.