The History Blog

Over two hundred antiquities from the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul are hitting the road this spring, including gold pieces from the renown Bactrian hoard.

The exhibition will open at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., starting May 25th, and will move on to the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and finally, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

The story of how these precious artifacts survived the past few decades of violence and chaos in Afghanistan is a fascinating one.

The so-called Bactrian Hoard, one of the greatest archeological finds of the 20th Century, is the heart of the trove, discovered accidentally in 1978 by Russian archeologist Viktor Sarianidi, Hiebert’s mentor. Six 2,000-year-old nomadic tombs, from an area in northern Afghanistan that was once an important crossroads on the Silk Road, contained more than 20,000 beautifully crafted pieces.

Before Sarianidi could study the items, the Soviets invaded, and he rushed the pieces to Kabul, where they went to the National Museum. That was the last he saw of them.

Unbeknownst to him, 10 years later, as the communist government weakened and rockets rained on the city, a group of museum workers packed the most important artifacts into boxes, sealed them with their signatures and brought them to the presidential palace, where they were stored in a vault.

“Only 13 to 20 people knew about the treasures, and as fighting between the different groups got worse we decided not to tell anyone about them,” said Omara Khan Masoudi, now director of the National Museum in Kabul.

It was not until 2003 that a new government under President Hamid Karzai entered the palace and discovered — in a massive Austrian-made vault, alongside the government’s gold bullion — piles of sealed boxes.

By then, rumors had circulated for decades that the Bactrian Hoard had been looted or taken to Moscow or even melted down, so it was rediscovering the treasure all over again when officials opened those boxes.

The museum workers who saved the antiquities are known as the key-holders. They’ll be accompanying the exhibition along its route because in Afghanistan curators are bound by law to their collections and are personally responsible to ensure their safety.

I think that’s totally cool. They’re sworn guardians of ancient treasure like characters out of Indiana Jones or The Mummy.

The January raids on four California museums resulted in the arrest of art historian Roxanna Brown on Friday.

Yesterday, she died in a federal prison of an apparent heart attack.

As is routine with all inmates upon booking, Brown was given a medical screening at the prison. A spokeswoman for the detention center did not disclose the status of that screening.

By Monday, Brown was too ill to appear in court, but did appear briefly Tuesday. She had been charged with one count of wire fraud, allegedly for allowing art collectors to use her electronic signature to overstate the value of items they donated to several Southern California museums. The collectors then claimed fraudulent tax deductions, investigators said.

Brown was a vocal anti-looting advocate. Her position was that buyers of antiquities should only consider purchasing finds from well-documented official digs. Anything short of that was likely to result in buying stolen goods.

How to reconcile this highly ethical stance with the tax fraud charges, I have no idea. Now she will never have the chance to clear her name, although I’m certain the investigation will continue.

Divers in France have found a marble bust of Julius Caesar tentatively dated 46 B.C. in the Rhone river. If the date pains out, that would make this the oldest surviving portrait of Caesar.

It’s no idealized representation, either. His age shows, and it only ads to his hotness.

There were some other marvels nestled in the murky depths of the Rhone.

Among other items in the treasure trove of ancient objects is a 5.9 foot marble statue of Neptune, dated to the first decade of the third century after Christ.

Two smaller statues, both in bronze and measuring 27.5 inches each also were found, one of them, a satyr with his hands tied behind his back, “doubtless” originated in Hellenic Greece, the ministry said.

“Some (of the discoveries) are unique in Europe,” Culture Minister Christine Albanel said. The bust of Caesar is in a class by itself.

They’re not done diving, so there may be more treasures to be found.

Holes cut into skulls in the Cuzco area indicate that trepanation was a relatively common practice for Inca surgeons, most likely as treatment for combat injuries.

Interestingly, the skulls dating from 1000 A.D. show no evidence of bone regrowth which means the owners of said skulls died under the knife. They clearly didn’t give up, though, because by 1400 A.D. 90% of the skulls showed healing and no infection.

Of 411 skulls that were sufficiently well preserved to study, 66 had holes cut through the bone.

In one location, 21 of 59 skulls—over a third—had received trepanation.

While methods of trepanation varied over time, Inca surgeons eventually settled on a scraping technique to penetrate the skull without causing wider injury.

“The skull was slowly scraped away, resulting in a circular hole surrounded by a wider area of scraped bone,” Verushko said.

Some of the skulls had been perforated more than once, including one individual who had undergone the operation seven times.

Damn. Stop-loss much?

Absinthe, the mysterious green beverage beloved of turn-of-the-last-century artists, has long had a reputation for causing dangerous madness. Van Gogh’s ear-cutting episode was reputedly brought on by a bad absinthe trip.

It was banned in Europe in the early 20th c. due to this Reefer Madness panic. The ban was finally lifted in 1988, but even so the myth of the pre-ban “original” absinthe’s mind-bending characteristics has persistent.

German scientists have examined the contents of sealed pre-1915 absinthe bottles to see just what exactly makes the green fairy tick. Turns out, it’s just green anise-flavored moonshine.

German researchers worked with US and British colleagues to test the level of thujon in 100-year-old bottles of absinthe. Thujon, a chemical found in wormwood, was the substance blamed for causing psychotic episodes.

The research found that absinthe contained only minimal levels of thujon and that the psychoactive effects were also questionable.

It was 140-proof, though, so no need to look further than the hooch factor to explain people acting the fool under the influence. Especially when you consider that absinthe tastes like licorice and is often served over a sugar cube. That sweet stuff really sneaks up on you.

It’s actually been on loan at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History for almost a hundred years, but the descendants of Eliza Lucas Pinckney have now donated it to the museum.

Pinckney’s dress is an excellent example of a typical sack-back dress from the period, and it is only one of two in the Smithsonian collection that has both the original matching stomacher and petticoat. A sack, or robe à la française, has flowing pleats that fall from the shoulders, making the gown appear to be unfitted in the back. A stomacher is a decorative piece that covers the front of the corset, where the gown’s bodice edges were intentionally separated.

The dress is notable not just for its beauty and rarity, but also because its original wearer, Eliza Lucas Pinckney, was an immensely successful business woman who ran her father’s plantations from the age of 16 and pretty much single-handedly provided South Carolina with the cash crop that sustained it in the decades between the decline of rice and the advent of cotton: indigo.

The silk threads woven into the golden gown were spun from silk worms she herself bred, in fact, in one of her many successful agricultural experiments.

I couldn’t let the first annual National Train Day pass without comment.

May 10 was chosen as the National Train Day in commemoration of the day the last rail and the last spike — an engraved golden spike now residing in the museum — joined the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads in Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869.

I love me some trains, and in this day and age when air travel costs far more than the ticket price in discomfort, humiliation and delays, and car travel gets increasingly more prohibitive as the price of a full tank skyrockets, it’s good to see Amtrak actually wake the hell up and get some PR steam.

For some fantastic period pictures and scans of news articles published on the day, check out the Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum.

The looters got there first, of course, but at least some of the 27 might be intact, and even the empty ones might have beautiful frescoes, which are fairly rare among archaeological explored tombs (60 painted tombs out of 6,000).

Archaeologists say there is also a “good chance” that there may well be other tombs waiting to be discovered. The tombs were discovered at Tarquinia, 50 miles north of Rome in an area named a World Heritage Site by Unesco.

Covering more than 400 acres, the area was the burial ground for the Etruscan tribes who predated the Romans. Maria Tecla Castaldi, an archaeologist, said: “This is the most exciting discovery here in decades. There are frescoes of two figures on the walls, but we need to carry out a proper excavation and search.

Tarquinia is like a honeycomb of Estruscan necropolises. There’s not just a “good chance” that there are other tombs in the area. It’s a given.

That good chance would convert into a sure thing if archaeologists could ask the local tombaroli (tomb robbers). Twenty-seven tombs is a week’s work for these guys. They’re miles ahead of the authorities.

More yuge loot news out of Spain, only this time it’s not massive quantities but just plain massive.

Italian police from the stolen artwork squad were in Barcelona on business when they happened past an antiques store. In the store, they noticed a solid marble oval bathtub that looked suspiciously familiar.

It was billed as a reproduction of a Roman bathtub and priced at €6000 ($9230). Only it isn’t a reproduction, and it’s actually worth €300,000 ($461,500). It was made in the second century A.D. under Hadrian’s reign and was stolen from the garden of an Italian villa in 2005.

The store owner had bought it a couple of years ago from some total idiots for €3000. Here’s the thing that really gets me, though: this tub weighs half a ton. How in God’s name did the thieves get it out of that garden? It can’t have been any kind of stealth operation. I mean, cranes and vehicles that make loud beeping sounds must have been involved.

Then to go through the trouble of shipping their half-ton of ill-gotten gains across the Mediterranean for a pittance …. It’s like a Mack Sennett short: The Keystone Bathtub Thieves.

Spanish police have arrested two people for smuggling an enormous cache of looted pre-Colombian artifacts.

Seven hundred antiques including masks, sculptures, jewelry and ceramics, dozens made of gold, all of them extremely valuable museum-quality artifacts looted from archaeological sites in Peru and Ecuador were weeks away from the auction block.

It is alleged that the historic treasures were plundered from archaeological sites - mostly in Peru and Ecuador - and then sold on to the couple through middlemen in Colombia.

The couple had just returned from a trip to the Colombian capital, Bogota.

The Spanish police seized documents and a computer which allegedly detailed a trade in cultural contraband stretching back years.

One interesting thing about these low-down dirty no good sons of bitches “antiquities dealers” is that they tend to keep excellent records. If police can manage a surprise raid, they can get loads of information about the criminal organization.

I hope they throw every book they have at them.