Italian authorities have seized dozens of important artifacts from the Etruscan civilization that some foolish locals had attempted to sell on the black market.
Their paper trail led to what the Italian Ministry of Culture said was one of the most important discoveries of Etruscan antiquities that has ever come from police work.
The haul was uncovered in the central Italian region of Umbria, where a local farmer came upon an Etruscan tomb in his field. Two stone sarcophagi, 8 stone urns, a perfume bottle, and bronze mirrors were among the treasures recovered.
A local entrepreneur and another man from the town of Citta della Pieve were arrested after phone taps and other leads led the Carabinieri art police to find them with the artifacts.
They had sloppily shared images of the artifacts on the internet in an attempt to gain access to the illicit art trade and even posted a photograph of the businessman on Facebook with one of the artifacts in the background.
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The men “had nothing to do with the world of practiced tomb raiders and were clumsy and amateurish in the way they tried to access the black market for looted art,” Perugia Chief Prosecutor Raffaele Cantone said according to reports.
One sarcophagus contained the full skeleton of a woman in her 40s, and some of the tops of the urns had residues of paint, including red on lips and gold on jewelry.
The Etruscans were a culturally advanced people that inhabited central Italy before the rise of the Roman Republic. The tomb discovered by the farmer included material inscribed with the name Pulfna, the same surname found on another tomb near the same town back in 2015.
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That tomb, and the contents it held, were reported to the authorities by the landowner and founder, who received $110,000 as a reward, while the arrested individuals this year will face up to 10 years in prison for trafficking and theft.
The moral of the stories is that honesty pays, and that if you are planning to illicitly sell ancient antiquities, don’t ask about it on Facebook.
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