NEW YORK – The remarkable story of an ancient Greek kylix (drinking cup) seized from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York by investigators last year and how the cup was reassembled from fragments was featured in the New York Times as experts doubted the reconstruction was merely “a product of genius.”

“The first shards of pottery arrived at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1978, a purchase from a Swiss dealer,” the Times reported, adding that “a second handful was bought from a Los Angeles gallery a year later.”

“These ceramic tidbits – part of the hodgepodge of ancient fragments that the museum routinely collected – bore the unmistakable designs of ancient Greek pottery,” the Times reported, noting that “a Met expert thought they were a small part of a significant artifact, a drinking cup known as a kylix.”

“In dribs and drabs over the next 16 years, a remarkable pattern emerged – a Humpty Dumpty story with a happier ending,” the Times reported, pointing out that “as hundreds of disparate shards of pottery arrived at the museum – some as purchases, some as gifts – dozens turned out to be parts of the same Greek kylix from roughly 490 BC.”

“With great patience and puzzle-solving, the Met reconstructed the cup and decided it had been created by two notables of ancient ceramics: Hieron, the potter, and Makron, the painter,” the Times reported, adding that “one can imagine the excitement when the last fragment arrived in 1994.”

“A terra-cotta kylix, created in Athens 2,500 years earlier, had been restored to life,” the Times reported, noting that “the cup, 13 inches in diameter and depicting a man and a woman reclining on a couch, went on display five years later: an icon of ancient beauty as well as a testament to modern scholarship and technical expertise.”

“But law enforcement officials and a dozen archaeologists and art historians said in interviews that they believe that other, less serendipitous forces may also have been at work,” the Times reported, pointing out that “they suggest that the individual shards of the kylix, which had likely been found together, were knowingly dispersed among dealers who sold them separately to the Met, their small size deflecting the kind of attention a complete cup would have drawn.”

“In September, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office seized the kylix, now valued at more than $1 million, and declared it the product of looting,” the Times reported, adding that “the office cited as evidence old Polaroids of some of the fragments that had been taken prior to their arrival at the Met,” adding that “the photos had been found in the Geneva offices of Giacomo Medici, an accused Italian antiquities trafficker.”

“Investigators were struck by the fact that the fragments from a single cup – shards that had ostensibly lain together in the ground for centuries – ended up in the hands of different dealers or collectors who eventually sold or donated them to the Met,” the Times reported, noting that “three of them were later associated with the sale of looted antiquities” and “a fourth, it turned out, was Dietrich von Bothmer, who for decades served as chief curator of Greek and Roman artifacts at the Met.”

“After he purchased the other fragments for the museum, von Bothmer surprisingly found shards in his own private collection that nearly completed the piece, including the final fragment he gave to the Met in 1994,” the Times reported, pointing out that “nowhere, according to the Met’s records, did he or any of the others indicate where they had gotten the fragments.”

“David Gill, an archaeologist and fellow with the Centre for Heritage at the University of Kent in England, is among the experts who believe the Makron kylix was illicitly excavated just before pieces of it began showing up at the museum,” the Ties reported, adding that “he views it as another example of a long employed, but seldom discussed, practice of using fragments to market illicit antiquities because intact artifacts would draw too much attention.”

“If the Met had bought this complete cup attributed to Makron, there would have been jumping up and down,” Gill told the Times. “Instead, it had bought a fragment, and it loses the impact…It looks as if they are just putting a jigsaw puzzle together.”

Greek-American Matthew Bogdanos, Assistant District Attorney of Manhattan and Chief of the Antiquities Trafficking Unit that seized the kylix, told the Times that “the breaks in fragments on some cups appear to have been made strategically so that figures on the pottery remain intact.”

“It does make you wonder how many items they destroyed before they got good at it,” he said, the Times reported.

Other experts, though, say looters do not have the patience to undertake a scheme that can take a decade or more to unfold. And even cumulatively, they argue, fragments from a cup would not nearly match the price of an intact artifact.

1. Michael Padgett, the former curator of ancient art at the Princeton University Art Museum, one expert who does not believe looters would go to the trouble of breaking artifacts to sell as fragments, told the Times that artifacts “are worth much more unbroken!”

“But those who embrace the fragment theory suggest that there is little value to an intact vase if it can’t be successfully exported and that the prices of fragments soar if they are the last of the missing pieces,” the Times reported.

“The first three fragments are not going to be of great value,” ADA Bogdanos told the Times. “Now more come on the market and the price of the fragments is driven up. The dealer says, ‘hey, there are four more pieces!’ Now you want to pay more – I call it ‘incentivized buying.’”

“Over time, thousands of the vases have been reconstructed from fragments found alongside each other,” the Times reported, noting that “what some experts are concerned about are those rarer instances when vases have been reconstructed from shards that scattered and then turned up in the hands of multiple dealers.”

“Michael Vickers, professor emeritus of archaeology at Oxford University and a former curator at its Ashmolean Museum, is among those experts who said the sharp, crisp edges of some fragments are evidence of fresh breaks that occurred in modern, not ancient, times,” the Times reported, pointing out that “a piece of pottery that lay in the ground for 2,500 years would have more rounded, worn edges, he said.”

“It is not clear how the dozens of fragments that were used to reconstruct the kylix came to be so widely dispersed,” the Times reported, adding that “it is clear, investigators said, that three of the dealers who sold those fragments to the Met would be linked to the illegal trafficking of antiquities… And all of them had some kind of relationship with von Bothmer.”

“The last of the fragments sold to the Met came in a 1988 purchase from Frieda Tchacos, a dealer who gave the Met a fragment for a second cup in 1990 to honor von Bothmer,” the Times reported, noting that “Tchacos was arrested by Italian authorities in Cyprus in 2002 on charges of trafficking in looted art” and “she received an 18-month suspended sentence for handling smuggled goods.”

“Investigators with the Manhattan district attorney’s office said that, based on a witness account, they believe Tchacos, who could not be reached for comment, had gotten her kylix fragments from Raffaele Monticelli, a man U.S. and Italian authorities identified as a major tomb raider before his death last year,” the Times reported, adding that “some of the dealers who sold fragments to the Met had not been charged with any crimes related to antiquities when their fragments came to the museum.”

“But Bogdanos said an expert like von Bothmer “could not have not known that these objects were looted,’” the Times reported.

“From the very first fragment, it was the responsibility of the Met to verify that they are not putting themselves in trouble,” especially after the incident with the Euphronios krater which was returned to Italy in 2008, Christos Tsirogiannis, a forensic archaeologist and head of illicit antiquities research at the Ionian University in Greece, told the Times, noting that “instead, in this case they collected all these fragments out of thin air with a provenance that had no details.”

“At his death, von Bothmer bequeathed the Met some 16,000 fragments, some of which are on display today in one of the two galleries named for him at the museum,” the Times reported, adding that “occupying a central spot in one of the galleries is a second cup by Makron and Hieron that von Bothmer also put together from fragments.”

“Bogdanos said he was aware of the second cup, describing it as an artifact of interest but not one currently part of an investigation,” the Times reported, pointing out that “it is hard, though, he said, to embrace the notion that some museum curators were just blessed when it came to finding the pieces they needed.”

He told the Times: “Of all of the millions upon millions of fragments in the world, of all of the thousands of museums, of all the gin joints in the world, all the fragments came into my place? And that’s a coincidence?”