About ten years ago, when I started looking at the Green papyrus collection, Rick Bonnie, an archaeologist based in Helsinki, became the more and more interested in a smaller and far less public collection of papyri and other manuscripts, the Finnish Ilves collection. Like Steve Green and his family, the owner of the Ilves collection established connections with scholars willing to research his manuscripts but unlike the Greens he wanted to remain anonymous – Ilves is a fantasy name (obviously, the experts who accepted to work for him know the man’s name and address, but the rest of us is left speculating over the mysterious label). Bonnie and I soon realized that the Ilves and Green collections had much in common, as they were both sourcing papyri from Turkish dealers operating through eBay and other means.

While Bonnie did not reach “Mr Ilves” in person, he became acquainted with his eBay identity. As papyrologists working for Ilves were fully aware that the collector had acquired some of his papyri through eBay sellers and published some of them in academic journals with details about their shady sources, Bonnie was able to cross-check eBay open access information and identified the Finnish account “cde789” as belonging to Mr Ilves. eBay allowed searching data that customers leave open access, so Bonnie analysed the transactions made by “cde789” as buyer: from 2003 to 2019, the collector made at least 463 acquisitions. (The same account was also mentioned in an open access article by Bob Kraft).

As Bonnie explains in a recent book chapter summarizing his finds, Mr Ilves mostly acquired from three eBay sellers: “mjgreyfarr”, “minnos2004” and “ebuyerrrrr”. The first account is linked with the sale of noted American dealer Bruce Ferrini’s manuscripts, following his financial troubles, while the other two are the eBay interfaces of two Turkish dealers who have sold (and possibly are still selling) hundreds papyrus fragments and other antiquities from Egypt and elsewhere since at least the early 2000s. Ebuyerrrrr (= Yakup Ekşioğlu) is particularly well known as I reported him to eBay and also to the Art and Antiques Unit of Metropolitan London Police back in 2016 and that made him upset. Among other things, Ekşioğlu sold hundreds of unprovenanced/illegal items to the Green collection, most notably the 26 New Sappho fragments belonging to the same ancient roll as the Brothers Poem Sappho papyrus. He is closely associated with the protagonists of the thefts and trading of the Egypt Exploration Society papyri discovered in 2019, as I will explain in my forthcoming book where the identity of the business behind minnos2004 will also be revealed.

You might wonder why I am telling this story, since it is well known and published already. I am repeating all this because one of the most prestigious series in papyrology, “Papyrologica Bruxellensia” printed by renown academic publisher Peeters, has accepted to host the publication of a catalog of 20 papyri from the Ilves collection, which were exhibited in August 2020 at the National Archives of Finland. The editors of the volume explain in the acquisition history section (pp. 9-10) that the “catalog comprises the manuscripts from the Ilves collection that, according to the present owner of the collection, were purchased from an antiquities dealer  in London in the late 1940s  by the grandfather of the owner, who was apparently introduced to the dealer by  Sir M. E. L. Mallowan, a professor at the University of London.” They think that Mr Ilves’ word suffices to prove that the papyri “would have arrived in  Finland before the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property ( effective 1972; ratified by Finland 1999).” But is the word of a collector who has bought hundreds papyrus fragments from eBay accounts operating illegally from Turkey enough for papyrologists to state that they have performed a careful provenance research ahead of study and publication, as required by current academic professional policies? Does due diligence just mean listening and believing what a collector with this profile tells when pressed about provenance? Or are there reliable and authentic documents showing that the husband of Agatha Christie (I suppose M. E. L. Mallowan is that Mallowan) and the grandfather of Mr Ilves were friends and visited dealers in London back in the days, and those freshly published 20 have that origin? When I’ll see those documents, I will publicly change my mind on the possible legal source of the just published papyri. Until then I will continue thinking that those 20 papyri more probably have the same origin of those that Coptologist Ivan Miroshnikov published years ago: they came from shady Turkish sellers without documentation of any sorts. I am waiting to be proven wrong.