It was, on the surface, the kind of glamorous scene that London's Mayfair stages with practised ease: cameras, crowds, and Zendaya — one of the most photographed women on the planet — arriving to promote *The Odyssey*, Christopher Nolan's cinematic retelling of Homer's epic, in which she plays the goddess Athena. But it was not her portrayal of a deity that set the academic world alight. It was her earrings, which Barron London, a Mayfair gallery and dealer, describes as gold medallion plaques attributed to the Ziwiye hoard — a collection of ancient objects unearthed in north-west Iran in the late 1940s and widely considered to date from the first millennium BC. The dealer, which had loaned the jewellery for the photocall, argues that the pieces celebrate "the remarkable artistry of ancient Persian goldsmiths.

" Academics, however, are considerably less celebratory. A formal petition has since been launched demanding that Barron London publish the complete provenance of the plaques, disclose the legal checks it conducted before acquiring them, and permit independent examination of the objects — or else suspend their sale entirely. Dr Christos Tsirogiannis, an antiquities specialist at the Swiss Federal Office of Culture, expressed dismay that nobody in Zendaya's entourage had foreseen the controversy, describing himself as "extremely surprised, negatively surprised" by the lapse. The petition was organised by Romina Frohar, founder of the Forensic Archive of Iran, an independent body that documents threats to Iran's cultural heritage.

Frohar's argument cuts to the ethical heart of the dispute: cultural appreciation, she insists, cannot stand in for provenance transparency. If objects are publicly presented as Iranian heritage, then their origin, ownership history, and export records ought to be open to scrutiny — regardless of whether a retailer's intentions are celebratory or scholarly.