ICOM International Council of Museums - International Institute for ...

Decree 29 elaborated the museums’ small collection policy. The national governmentalmuseum could collect by the following means:The stocks from the antiquities dealers who were no longer allowed to sell antiquitiesneeded to be given to the state;The illegally discovered objects were confiscated;The objects that came up through digs belonged to the State;Part of the excavated objects would go to the excavator and the other half to the State;The objects that came up from ancient historical monuments needed to be placed inthe museum for security reasons;The objects of private collections or any other provenance might become property ofthe State or might become part of museum collections.Decree 30 mentioned that in case of duplicates of objects, there was no need for themuseum to keep them, but a gallery for sale would be opened to the public that wishedto purchase “interesting antiquities at good bargain prices and a guarantee of excellentauthenticity.” All the revenues will go to the Antiquities Service (Arch IFAPO/SAHC) 1 .Meanwhile, in 1919, the NMB was founded when the French officer Mr. Raymond Weillgave a small nucleus of his collection (The Short Guide of the NMB, 2001: 5). Thatnucleus consisted of twenty-five objects that were documented by Mr. Maurice Pillet in1919. For the first time in May 1919, Charles Léonce Brossé mentioned the Muséed’Art Antique du Levant (Museum of Antique Art of the Levant); this was the earliestname of the NMB. He also mentioned eleven boxes that came from the excavations ofDr. Georges Contenau in Sidon in 1914. He proposed to make them part of the nucleusof the museum. What is interesting to note was that those boxes were meant to beshipped to the Ottoman Imperial Museum and were not sent there by Dr. GeorgesContenau. The latter also did not ask for them to be shipped to France along with therest of his belongings (Arch. IFAPO/SAHC) 2 .On August 27, 1920, Joseph Chamonard wrote a big report on the Museum of Beirutand detailed the possible locations of a museum. He laid out the advantages anddisadvantages of each location. Among the locations that he suggested was the houseof the Secretary General of the High-Commission, the other four were parcels of landwhere a possible museum could be erected. One was on the Martyrs Street, secondwas the Islamic cemetery that overlooks the Harbour in Beirut, third was the Ras Beirutarea and fourth was the Arts and Metiers Square. For the construction of the museum,he suggested that a proper budget should be laid out and the architect who shouldwork on this project should be French, as in Syria there was no one qualified for such ajob. He said that Brossé was a qualified architect of the Antiquities Service, but couldnot deal with supervising this kind of work as he had a lot to deal with, so he putforward the name of Mr. Pontremoli from Paris as he had worked on the construction ofthe Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. He also suggested that one should not abideto the idea of having a competition and selecting a winner as this system was verycostly and did not lead to good results, as was the case in Egypt. Throughout the letter,it is noticed that Chamonard was against the fact of constructing a building; hepreferred the idea of renting a building and putting the collections in it. He said that itwas not only for economic reasons, but one needed to be careful not to rush things inorder not to encounter problems in the future. Moreover, he said that the collectionswere very poor. The museum had 50 artefacts. Some were collected during theoccupation of Beirut; others came from Sidon from Renan’s Mission de Phénicie but1 Confidential Report on the status of the ancient monuments in the O.E.T. from Captain Engelbach, Lieutenant Mackayand Captain Weill to the General Commandant in Chief of the Expeditionary Forces of Egypt, dated Beirut, March 8,1919.2 Letter No. 133 from Lieutenant C. L. Brossé, responsible of the Fine Arts Service to the Head Administrator of theOccupied Enemy Territories of the West Zone, dated Beirut, May 27, 1919.2