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British Museum Takes Former Curator to Court Over 18,000 Missing Artifacts

Lawyers alleged that Higgs “abused his position of trust” by manipulating records to lift hundreds of ancient antiquities.

A High Court judge ordered a former curator at the British Museum to return artifacts he allegedly swiped from the institution on Tuesday, according to The New York Times. Peter Higgs, who was the museum’s senior curator in the Greece and Rome department, was fired in July 2023 for “gross misconduct,” after the museum discovered over 1,800 artifacts were missing from its archive. Lawyers alleged that Higgs “abused his position of trust” by manipulating records to lift hundreds of ancient artifacts over nine years. Lawyers also accused him of using fake names and accounts to obscure the sale of antiquities, some of which were allegedly sold online for only a few British pounds. In court on Tuesday, Higgs was ordered to list or return any artifacts which remained in his possession, and to disclose records of his eBay sales and PayPal transactions. The missing artifacts were first reported to the museum in 2021 by Ittai Gradel, an antiquities dealer, who said pieces from its collection were being sold on eBay. Museum Director Hartwig Fischer stepped down in July 2023, taking responsibility for the museum’s failure to “respond as comprehensively as it should have.”