It doesn’t look like much from the outside, but the inside of the Australian National University Classics Museum is akin to peering into the cupboards of a kitchen from 2,000 years ago.
The collection has all the latest interior decor, gadgets and gizmos for living during Greek and Roman times — a sieve used to make cheese, a plate, a bottle for oil, and something that looks remarkably like a Pyrex pie dish.
The ordinary nature of these everyday objects is extraordinary.
“This is a strigil. It’s what you used when you went to the baths,” Emeritus Professor Elizabeth Minchin said, pointing to an object with a curved, blunt blade.
Strigils were used in ancient Greece and Ancient Rome to scrape sweat, dirt, and oil off the body. (Supplied: ANU)
In a world without soap, this was what you washed yourself with.
“You oiled yourself down. If you’d been out working outdoors, you rubbed yourself over with some kind of clay compound. Then you scraped it off and rinsed yourself down,” Professor Minchin said.
“I really don’t want to think about the baths with that kind of oily scum on top.”
The purpose of the museum, which is open to both the public and to Australian National University (ANU) students, is to bring ancient history to life.
For curator Georgia Pike-Rowney, the museum is where she handled her first ancient object in the ‘Artefacts in Everyday Life’ course taught by Professor Minchin.
Some ancient Roman plates like this one still have marks from the hands that dipped them almost 2,000 years ago. (Supplied: ANU)
“Elizabeth [Michin] gave me a red slipped Roman dish. And she said, turn it over,” Dr Pike-Rowney said.
“It had these marks and she said, ‘Now put your fingers over them. Those are the fingerprints of the slave who dipped it into the red slip’.
“Just to see that this is where they would have held it and dipped it in makes it very real. You can read articles about potters working in ancient Rome, but to be part of that action is really important.”
‘Too risky’ for the museum to keep collecting
The ANU Classics Museum started in 1962 with a vision.
Professor Richard Johnson, the ANU’s first Professor of Classics, believed students who could not travel overseas should still be able to hold objects from the world they were studying.
Without funds to buy big pieces, they focused on collecting everyday objects — and over the years, curators have collected over 600 artefacts.
Everything in the museum’s teaching collection can be touched, held and closely examined to connect to the history and the story.
A toe, made out of Parian marble, was found in Syria. (Supplied: ANU)
Dr Pike-Rowney’s favourite piece is a big marble toe found at Jebel Khalid, an archaeological site in Syria, which has since been very badly damaged by ISIS.
“What’s interesting about this object is that this kind of marble was never available in Syria,” she said.
Small fragments were analysed and found to be Parian marble, from the island of Paros in the middle of the Aegean Sea, yet it was found in the Temple Precinct in Jebel Khalid.
Artefacts with a story to tell
According to Dr Pike-Rowney, the marble toe is special because we know exactly where it was found, which makes tracing its story possible.
“The ancient world was a dynamic place — with a lot of change and movement and objects and people and materials, and this little piece speaks exactly to that,” she said.
It’s just one of the reasons looting is so damaging.
Curator Georgia Pike-Rowney says the museum has made a deliberate shift away from collecting ancient items. (ABC News: David Sciasci)
Often, when an object is looted, the context around it is lost — the information about where it was found, how it was buried, and what surrounded it.
That context is the archaeology, and without it, a large part of the artefact’s story disappears.
Like many museums, questions around how ancient objects are acquired have led the ANU Classics Museum to stop collecting altogether.
Dr Pike-Rowney described it as moving “from acquisition to activation” — the museum has enough, and what matters now is what it does with what it has and what it teaches.
“We’ve had some repatriation cases that have come to our attention that we need to manage, and basically it’s just too risky,”
she said.
“Instead, what we’re doing is we’re raising awareness about the ancient illicit antiquities market, and trying to prevent this kind of thing from happening into the future.”
The shift is deliberate and principled.
“The world of museums has changed a lot, particularly in terms of antiquities and particularly the ethics around collecting ancient objects,” Dr Pike-Rowney said.
Artefacts tomb robbers stole
The ANU Classics Museum is currently managing three repatriation cases, all involving items that were legally purchased decades ago, but have since been found to have been looted and illegally exported from Italy.
One case has drawn significant attention.
An ancient Greek amphora was acquired by the ANU Classics Museum in 1984. (Supplied: ANU)
Professor Minchin recalls the moment she learnt the Italian government was investigating one of the museum’s objects — a Greek amphora from Sotheby’s in London, purchased by the ANU in 1984.
“I knew exactly which one it was,” she said.
“It was the pride of the collection.“
“Unbeknownst to the ANU, when they purchased this object, it now appears it was illegally excavated by Tombaroli [tomb robbers] in Italy in the 1980s,” Pike-Rowney said.
“This kind of activity we now know was extremely common.”
The case came to their attention in 2022.
“The Italian government have this incredible organisation called the Carabinieri Command for the Protection of Cultural Heritage,” Professor Minchin said.
“These are specialist police officers who have training in art and antiquities, and they had a Polaroid photograph that had been seized from a known dealer in illicit antiquities, and it matched our object.
“So this was hard proof that our object should not have left Italy when it did.”
The university immediately agreed to a voluntary repatriation.
Under Australian law, they were permitted to keep the piece. Ethically, they chose not to.
Dr Georgia Pike-Rowney says the items in the collection are not treasures, but items from real cultures that hold meaning for modern people. (ABC News: David Sciasci)
But the Italian government, in a gesture of considerable goodwill, offered to loan the amphora back to the museum for four years, with a further four-year extension to allow staff and students to develop educational resources in collaboration with the Italian Embassy.
The repatriation case has restored some of the lost story; the museum now knows that the amphora was made in Athens roughly 2,500 years ago, and found in Italy, “probably in an Etruscan tomb”.
With the ancient and modern histories interwoven, this object’s history becomes richer — a window into trade, migration, colonial settlement and cultural exchange across the ancient Mediterranean and then into the modern day Tomberoli network and antiquities trading.
That’s also why Dr Pike-Rowney is hesitant to call anything in the collection a ‘treasure’.
“They’re not treasures,” she said.
“They’re real material from a real culture. And current people today have a relationship with them.”