LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA—ArtNews reports that the J. Paul Getty Museum has repatriated to Turkey a bronze funerary couch dated to 530 B.C. Provenance records suggest that the bed had been in several European collections from the 1920s through the 1980s, when the museum purchased the artifact from an antiquities dealer. However, Gökhan Yazgı of Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism and officials from the Getty Museum confirmed that the records had been falsified by a former owner. Recent research determined that the couch had been illegally excavated in the early 1980s in western Turkey’s Manisa region, where Turkish archaeologists have excavated a tomb with similar fabrics, wood, and bronze artifacts. “We seek to continue building a constructive relationship with the Turkish Ministry of Culture,” concluded museum director Timothy Potts. To read about carved burial chambers at western Anatolia's settlement of Blaundos, go to "Canyon of the Ancestors."
