LONDON — Zendaya wore earrings at a London photocall for the movie The Odyssey. The earrings worn by Zendaya were loaned by Barron London, a gallery and dealer based in Mayfair.

Barron London stated the gold medallion plaques on the earrings are attributed to the Ziwiye hoard, which was discovered in north-west Iran in the late 1940s. The dealer stated the artefacts date back to the 1st millennium BC.

A petition has been launched calling for Barron London to publish the complete known provenance of the gold plaques. Romina Frohar set up the petition regarding the earrings.

Frohar said Barron London has described the loan as a celebration of ancient Persian artistry, but cultural appreciation cannot substitute for provenance transparency. She is the founder of the Forensic Archive of Iran, an independent investigative archive documenting threats to Iran’s cultural heritage.

She said if these objects are being publicly presented as Iranian cultural heritage, the evidence concerning their origin, export, ownership history and acquisition should be open to scrutiny. She is also a PhD researcher at the Glasgow School of Art.

The petition calls for Barron London to reveal the checks undertaken on the legality of the items. It also calls for the dealer to permit examination of the objects.

Glenn Spiro mounted the gold plaques with diamonds in yellow gold to create the earrings. Frohar noted that private custody can be responsible when it is transparent, conservation-led and attentive to public and scholarly access.

She said legal possession alone does not extinguish the cultural claims of the people whose history the object embodies. Barron London described the loan of the earrings as a celebration of ancient Persian artistry.

Dr Christos Tsirogiannis is an antiquities expert at the Swiss Federal Office of Culture. He said personally, after all these two and a half decades of continued scandals emerging everywhere about all sorts of illicit antiquities … he is extremely surprised, negatively surprised, that no one among all these people that escort these celebrities said something to protect her.

Tsirogiannis stated that about 90% of antiquities in the market are proved to be illicit or lacking provenance and documentation. Possibly they are coming from a burial, he said.

He said how does she feel that she is wearing an ancient dead woman’s earrings [that may have been] looted? Zendaya portrays the goddess Athena in the movie The Odyssey.

Simon Mackenzie is a professor of criminology at Victoria University of Wellington (Te Herenga Waka) in New Zealand. Most so-called source countries for antiquities now have state ownership laws in place to say that ancient objects discovered belong to the state, Mackenzie said.

He said the act of discovery and looting is essentially a form of theft [from the government]. In many countries, including Iran, laws regarding state ownership of antiquities were built up over time and were not retroactive.

In 2018, Christie’s sold a 3,000-year-old relief from the palace of Ashurnasirpal II for nearly $31m. Ashurnasirpal II was a neo-Assyrian king who ruled 800 years before the establishment of the Roman empire.

Kim Kardashian posed in a gold dress next to a gilded Egyptian coffin at the Met Gala in 2018. The Met museum acquired the 2,100-year-old coffin of a priest called Nedjemankh for $4m.

The Met museum made the coffin of Nedjemankh the star of an exhibition. Experts revealed the coffin of Nedjemankh had been excavated by thieves in 2011.

The coffin of Nedjemankh was smuggled out of Egypt to Dubai and then Europe. The coffin of Nedjemankh was restored and given false documents in Europe.

The Koh-i-Noor diamond was surrendered to Queen Victoria by the 10-year-old maharajah Duleep Singh in 1849. The surrender of the Koh-i-Noor diamond was part of the Treaty of Lahore. The Koh-i-Noor diamond became part of the British crown jewels.