Editorial: Free Hadrian

041

In 1975, an American tourist uncovered a statue of the Roman emperor Hadrian on an Israeli kibbutz. We had intended to picture the head of this rare bronze statue on the cover of this issue of BAR. It seemed a perfect tie-in with the story “How It Came About: From Saturday to Sunday,” in which Hadrian figures so prominently.

We were stunned when the Israeli Antiquities Department refused either to release a color picture of the statue or to allow our photographer to take a color picture of the statue. When our Jerusalem correspondent reported the withholding of the photo to BAR’s Washington office, the BAR Editor telephoned the director of the Antiquities Department, Avi Eitan, in disbelief.

Eitan confirmed that BAR would not be permitted to print a color picture of the Hadrian statue—despite the fact that the statue had been found years ago (by a tourist and not by Department of Antiquities archaeologists), despite the fact that black and white pictures of the statue had been released in 1976, and despite the fact that information about the statue and its discovery had already been widely published, including a story in BAR (see “Rare Bronze Statue of Hadrian Found by Tourist,” BAR 02:04). (We obtained another Hadrian statue from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts for our cover.)