Sharon Waxman | Live on Sound Authors

February 19, 2009

Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors! I’ve got four great author guests on the show today. My first guest will be award winning journalist Sharon Waxman. She’ll be speaking to us about her latest book called Loot: The Battle over stolen treasures of the ancient world and later on in the show we’ll talk to Jocelyn Crowley, who has a book called Defiant Dads: Fathers rights activists in America and there’s an author called Karen Brody and her latest book is called Birth and at the end of the show, we’ll speak to musician Dan Goldman who has truly gorgeous songs. But my first guest, it’s my special honor to welcome Sharon Waxman. She’s written a wonderful book called Loot: The battle over the stolen treasures of the ancient world. Beautiful inside and out this book. Welcome to the show Sharon Waxman.

Sharon Waxman: Hi, thanks for having me.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about how this book started for you.

Sharon Waxman: Oh this book well you know I’m actually better known to my readers as someone who’s written about Hollywood a lot in the past decades plus, but before that I was a foreign correspondent for about ten years and for particularly interested in the ancient world and the middle east. Living in Los Angeles where I do there were a lot of headlines that at one point started to emerge as problems getting ###, which is based here and Italy and Greece, demanding antiquities be returned from the museum.

Then I started hearing from friends; I used to have long-distance relationships in Egypt and the chief archaeologist of Egypt was telling me he had started this campaign to get the return of major treasures from western museums like the Bust of Nefertiti, which is in Berlin and the Rosetta stone which is in London at the British museum. I started putting the pieces together thinking there’s some broader trend going on here, what is it all about? Why are all of these smaller countries challenging big countries like the United States or France and England to get these things back? Then I started realizing that its part of a bigger picture that’s going on in the world, which is people, smaller countries taking control of their cultural heritage and taking possession of their cultural identity and wanting the return of these treasures as part of that.

So I decided to explore that question as a journalist, just to take that journey back in time to countries where pieces are now residing and where it was taken from and it was really fascinating. I learned about these amazing characters in the 19th century and I also learned a lot of stuff that I had kind of taken for granted. For example, I never knew how the Rosetta Stone got to the British museum or how the bust of Nefertiti came to be in Berlin. In fact I didn’t really know how the great treasures or even how the collections of ancient treasures even originated at the great museums. So all of it was a great learning journey for me and if readers are interested in learning about that I think they’ll like that journey back.

Dr. Kent: Its almost its not too far a departure from your Hollywood reporting because all of us love talking about these ancient treasures in Egypt and since we were small children we’ve seen it in cartoons and documentaries. How did your passion start for all of this?

Sharon Waxman: For the ancient world?

Dr. Kent: Yes.

Sharon Waxman: Well I think probably going to museums as a kid. I grew up in Cleveland and there was a really great collection of antiquities and art too in the Cleveland Museum of Art by the way which is not a major character in the book but does happen to be one of the museums in the crosshairs of countries like Italy and Greece. In fact they just made a deal to give 13 pieces back from their collection, so this is a trend that’s going on and its affecting our museums. It’s absolutely true that as a young person, which I guess I’m not anymore, it was going after college to the Louvre and discovering these amazing treasures helped really peak my curiosity in archaeology and the ancient world and ancient civilizations.

Dr. Kent: So let’s talk about the politics of this right away because I don’t think all that many folks are familiar with the battles that have gone back and forth and the legal aspect. You talk about what’s the law surrounding it. How long does it have to be gone and all that stuff?

Sharon Waxman: Well there aren’t really laws that govern who took what, when and what’s the right thing to do. That’s part of the reason why it’s a free for all right now and why as you say it really does become political very quickly. There are local laws in each country for example, the curator, the former curator of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Marian True, is on trial today in Rome under Italian law for fraud and for receiving stolen goods. So it’s actually a criminal trial. You’re talking about a Harvard educated PhD in Greek and Roman civilization who for 24 years collected antiquities as chief curator of the antiquities department at the Getty and its not like she was stealing for herself, she was collecting for the museum.

That is the person who is now on trial for fraud and criminal possession in Rome under Italian law. So there is a problem that you have a ### law and you can have a politically motivated prosecution because this is certainly politically motivated in the case of Italy and the Getty. In fact they told me and you can see in the book what they say is what they really wanted was to get their stuff back but the Getty wouldn’t give it so they undertook this prosecution of the Getty curator. The thing about it is my first instinct was to say the west stole all these things, they should give them back it would be the just thing to do, but as I investigated I found its really more complicated than that and raises so many questions.

In addition to that, of course I traveled to the countries that were where the ancient world was; Egypt, Turkey and one of the stories I tell in the book is how Turkey through the Metropolitan Museum a law suit actually sued under American law the Metropolitan Museum of New York in the 1980s to get these golden treasures back from the time of King Crisis. You know the phrase he’s as rich as Crisis so there really was a King Crisis and he was very rich of course and they were very skilled in making gold and silver back in the time we’re talking going back 2500 years. That civilization is now completely gone but its in Turkey so Turkey found out that the Met had bought illegally dug up and smuggled gold and silver pieces and sued and got them back. Then I went and found out that in 2006 a hoardist called the Lydian Hoarde was stolen from a museum in Turkey where they didn’t have security cameras and they didn’t take care of it and let anybody visit it.

So the question arises is the right thing to do, certainly its not right to buy illegally dug up things because it ruins archaeological sites and kills our common heritage, but is it always the right thing to give it back if that country cant take care of what they have.

Dr. Kent: I spent a little time in Cairo and went to the Cairo Museum and I was astonished that the wall is just plastered with things and I had no idea what I was looking at.

Sharon Waxman: Yeah, exactly. That place is a relic in and of itself, it’s amazing. their trying to build a new museum; trying to raise money to build a state of the art museum outside of the pyramids, but it is astonishing. I’m sure some of your listeners have been to Egypt and if they’ve been to Egypt they’ve been to the Cairo Museum and you can see that the lettering on the typewriters looks like it was done in 1902 and it was. The labeling is there; the museum was built in 1900 so it’s a great example of colonial architecture and stuff goes missing. I could go on but its all in the book.

Dr. Kent: I heard that they even stored mummies in the hallway for awhile for some reason.

Sharon Waxman: Things are stored not only in the hallway but one of the things I tell in the book because I had lost who your listeners if they’ve seen anything about Egypt they’ve seen this guy. He’s an Indiana Jones type character, you know he wears the Indiana Jones hat; he’s always very charismatic and is really trying to drag Egypt into the 21st century so he has a team of people building a computer database because they have no proper inventory of what they even have. But what I discovered when I went to the museum and lots of people were doing the inventory were students who were volunteering from France and England and America, but on this little team of people on the left off in this very sweaty corner of the museum.

I found that there was another rival project going on underneath the building which I also went to visit, which is funded by the Japanese to do the same thing. So there’s bureaucracy, politics, and I went and asked why are there two projects duplicating one another’s work? They said, well it’s true that there are but we are going to take this out to the new museum when it opens. It kind of highlights a bit of chaotic and Byzantine and a hard job to take a country like Egypt which has so many issues; poverty being a main one, and try to bring it to a state of the art museum. They have so much, they have far more monuments and statues and mummies than even a wealthy country would have trouble taking care of all of that.

Dr. Kent: Now I’m curious, I’d like to talk a little about your background. I did read that you learned both Hebrew and Arabic. I’m also an Arabic speaker.

Sharon Waxman: Oh cool; we could conduct the interview in Arabic. You might lose all your listeners, they might not like that.

Dr. Kent: Yeah, I don’t think the transcriptionist would be happy with me! How have all of your life paths crossed in your latest project?

Sharon Waxman: In my latest project? Are you referring to the book?

Dr. Kent: The book and whatever else you’re working on.

Sharon Waxman: My latest project is actually a news site, a news organization which took me back into Hollywood and that was launched a week ago and is called thewrap.com, which is a play on “that’s a wrap” and that’s taken me back out of the world of cultural politics where I’ve gone to and I’m not sure that all the strands of my life do meet. I’ve been a newspaper journalist for 20 some years and you may know and your listeners may know that newspapers are in deep trouble financially at the moment and we’re trying to create a new kind of digital news organization that’s still professional journalism.

Dr. Kent: I’m looking at one of your latest articles that says exclusive, Bale says his F-bombs were justified.

Sharon Waxman: Oh where did you find that on Google?

Dr. Kent: No I found it on your thewrap.com site.

Sharon Waxman: On the site, right, so we got a big story today, the studio is rising, the studio is falling, deals are falling through the Oscars are coming.

Dr. Kent: I’m curious about this whole Christian Bale thing and all of the celebrity things that end up being pitched to major networks and coming through CNN and all that. How does all of that happen?

Sharon Waxman: How do celebrities get on major networks?

Dr. Kent: There’s a lot of people that have meltdowns, how does this particular story about Bale get front page?

Sharon Waxman: Well that’s one of the things that we’re really focused on in the wrap because nobody’s really chronicling and the web has changed our culture; that’s too broad a statement but how it has just I’m sure nobody’s reporting on that in the Hollywood arena basically because that’s exactly what happened is you had this A-list star Christian Bale who had a long moment of indiscretion on the set of his movie but that happened nine months ago! Just because somebody released the audio of that, it was the seed that was in his microphone. He was miked as an actor, got out on the internet and within 24 hours the guy went from being a hero, the Dark Knight into being the subject of ridicule and satire and poor moral judgment.

Not to say that he does not deserve that but it serves as a mirror of what the bloggists here and the web becomes as a collective judgment. That in turn percolates up immediately to the broadcast networks or the big boys of which there are fewer and fewer. It is a real lesson I think in how our culture has changed so profoundly. Just think about it, a set is a very private place where it’s considered a closed circle of that family. For that to come out in public in this community where I am in Hollywood is a very jarring but it’s the world we live in now.

Dr. Kent: I’m fascinated; now as I’m listening to you and checking out your site at the same time, you’ve got the waxwork and I find it so interesting these days that all these media collide. Books, blogging, and news media all sort of blend into one these days. Where do you think its going?

Sharon Waxman: I think we don’t know exactly where it’s going and that’s what makes for a very exciting time as a journalist to be able to be writing about it and learning and exploring. Stuff is being invented every single day and the kind of changes we’re seeing in the way we communicate and the vehicles that create common glue that holds together as a society. Movies are a big part of that; TV is a big part of that. Newspapers were a part of it but they’re going away so what’s going to replace that is obviously something that’s a conversation, the connection that’s happening on the web but a different kind of communicating and its much more interactive obviously and fluid and instantaneous and global. That to me as a journalist is one of the most fascinating things we can observe and write about but yet we’re also part of that because we are changing too as part of those changes. It’s a really interesting time to be doing what I’m doing, at least for me.

Dr. Kent: Wow. It seems like you always choose the things that you enjoy. Let’s go back to Loot for a minute. Because you’ve covered celebrities and big figures how did you find it chronicling these big figures in all of history here? Being tossed back from country to country.

Sharon Waxman: It was really wonderful. It was like being Indiana Jones as a journalist because the 19th century had; you know what they did in the 19th century? You’re bopping me back and forth but I spent a year mostly by myself in libraries and crawling through tombs and now I’m back in the web world which is completely different. The thing about the people in the 19th century is that they all kept journals. All these guys with these incredible characters; one of whom I write about in the book, this guy Giovanni and he was a circus performer who became an archaeologist at a time when it was being invented.

Archaeology itself only dates back to the 19th century and he kept these amazing diaries of his travels up and down the Nile. He discovered the Abu symbol, these huge statues in Aswan that was a temple built by Ramsey’s and he discovered the entrance to the second pyramid and he really was a circus strongman, that’s how he started. But he was a self taught engineer and inventor and all these guys in the 19th century is part of the people getting educated and they learned how to draw. So they would keep diaries and do sketches of their work. There’s this one amazing character after another that you can read and listen to their own words because they really come to life.

Dr. Kent: When you cover Hollywood, do you also find yourself in a back dusty room of libraries?

Sharon Waxman: No, not at all, I’m at my desk.

Dr. Kent: How do you go about that?

Sharon Waxman: Oh we’re just fielding phone calls, emails, texts from all over but yeah, we do go to the movies occasionally, not often enough.

Dr. Kent: You really tread the line between generations; it’s fascinating. Well there’s many websites online that detail things about this book Loot.

Sharon Waxman: There’s my site which is lootbook.com and all the reviews and commentary are there, discussion about the book and that’s the most gratifying thing is the response from readers who really have embraced the subject and offered up suggestions and thoughts. That was my goal with the book to bring the subject out of the hands of the museum authority and bring it to the wider public because there are solutions to be found to this issue of antiquities that are in a state of war at the moment. But only when more reasonable people, which are those of us who are not primary actors in this thing, there are ways to find to come to solutions that serve all of us and that in fact most of all serve the antiquities themselves so they’re not lost.

Dr. Kent: Absolutely and where can we find out about the antiquities after reading your book?

Sharon Waxman: Well, you can go to lootbook.com, that’s one place where there are resources, there’s lots of resources in the back of the book in the bibliography and I would contact the local museum and get involved in your local museum.

Dr. Kent: And visit Egypt.

Sharon Waxman: Yeah.

Dr. Kent: Now I have another question for you. from my personal experience, when I went down beneath the pyramid like most tourists do in that narrow, narrow tunnel and there’s this sort of empty room at the bottom.

Sharon Waxman: It’s a tomb.

Dr. Kent: What did you feel? You’ve been down there I assume.

Sharon Waxman: I didn’t go down there because I went all the way to the top, which is I think his name was ### tomb at the top. ### And it’s amazing; it’s like being in a modern art gallery, all wax that was floated up the Nile and yeah.

Dr. Kent: In your mind can you picture the works of art in those spaces? I know when I was in this tomb I was like man, this is empty I wish I knew what used to be in here.

Sharon Waxman: Either it was empty, or I think the tomb robbers took whatever was in there many years ago and I’m not enough of an Egyptologist although I did learn a great deal from doing this book, but I don’t know if that tomb was full in the same way that the tombs in the Valley of the Kings was filled absolutely chalk a block with furniture and food and like King Tut which was absolutely top to bottom every square inch filled with the belongings of the king. Those might’ve been the same.

Dr. Kent: It’s so much fun thinking about this stuff, just like I’m pretty obsessed with the newest headlines in Hollywood and this book I’ve heard a lot about it. I’m only a few pages into it but I’m psyched to read the rest. It’s called Loot: The battle of the stolen treasures of the ancient world. It’s by Sharon Waxman, thank you so much for chatting with me today.

Sharon Waxman: Thank you and I hope your listeners will check out my new site thewrap.com if they’re interested in intelligent dialogue about what’s going on in Hollywood.

Dr. Kent: Yeah, its good stuff. Thewrap.com. Well thank you so much and have a nice day!

Sharon Waxman: Thanks for having me, see you later.

Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show will be Jocelyn Crowley who has interviewed more than 150 father’s rights group leaders and she’s got a new book called Defiant Dads: Fathers rights activists in America, so come on back and listen to that.

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