ARCHÆOLOGY AND THE TURKISH OFFICIALS

To the Editoiî of The Nation :

Sir : I wish to add a few brief remarks to the sharp and able paragraph in your number of May 29, relating to the conduct of Turkish officiais in the partition of archæoiogical discoveries made at Assos. No later than June, 1883, having been directly informed by Baltazzi Bey, commissary to the Turkish Government, of the arrangement agreed upon betwen himself and the American delegates, I immediately wrote in the Revue Archéologique (1883, ii., p. 263) to protest against the terras of that arrangement, and insist upon the highly déplorable results winch itinvolved for archæology at large. My chieftheme was the following, wliich I can do no better than to repeat hore. The excavations at Assos were begun with a firman, issued at a time when the Turkish law about antiquities, promulgated in 1874, was still in vigor. Now, that law, the French text of which mav be found in the Ottoman Codes of Nicolaïdes, expr-essly spécifiés that indivisible discoveries shall not be divided, but valued, and that the Porte will accept for its share two-thirds of the entire estimate. Again, the archaic frieze of the Doric temple in Assos, an important part of which was found by the American mission, must certainly be styled indivisible ; and the best prooi' that the Turkish Government understands a frieze to form an indivisible whole, is that M. Benndorf was allowed, in 1882, to earry away the entire sériés of reliefs from the Mausoleum of Gjôlbaschi in Lycia, a telegram from Constantinople having ordered, in answer to his inquiries, that “ indivisible antiquities should not be divi-