The History Blog

Zahi Hawass is like Napoleon only he escapes from Saint Helena not just Elba. Yet again, Hawass has managed to hold on to his job even after being fired a second time. (Okay technically he resigned the first time, but let’s just say that was a decision made under considerable political pressure.)

The prime minister announced earlier in the week that Zahi Hawass, the archaeologist known for his National Geographic documentaries and close ties to the Mubarak family, was to be replaced by Abdel Fattah el Banna as minister of antiquities. But Sharaf reversed himself and decided to temporarily keep Hawass in his post.

“Dr. El Banna has accused several of the antiquities employees of corruption and thus triggered much rejection against him holding the position. Essam Sharaf consequently believed that it wouldn’t be appropriate atmosphere for him to work,” the government announced in a statement.

Hawass told MENA on Wednesday that he was asked by Sharaf to carry on his duties but wasn’t mentioned in Thursday’s list of ministers. A Cabinet spokesman later announced that the ministry of antiquities would be downgraded to a Cabinet-affiliated office and not be its own ministry.

The new office will be the same as the old office before Mubarak made it a ministry during a reshuffle during the January turmoil that brought down his regime. So it’s the Supreme Council of Antiquities again now and it reports to the prime minister.

Hawass told the New York Times that he’s only hanging around for a few days until a suitable replacement can be found. He said he’s looking forward to retiring to write books and “living quietly as a private person, away from politics.” Yes I’m sure. Very likely.

It seems like it might even stick this time. Under pressure from continuing protests, Prime Minister Essam Sharaf announced Sunday that 12 ministers with ties to the Mubarak regime would be replaced, among them Minister for Antiquities Zahi Hawass.

For more than a decade, he has been the international face of Egypt’s archaeology, with his trademark “Indiana Jones” hat that turned him into an instantly recognizable global icon. Hawass, however, has been the target of a series of heavily publicized protests by archaeology graduates who accused him of corruption and seeking publicity for himself.

He has been accused of being too close to Mubarak and his family, along with former culture minister Farouq Hosni, himself a protege of the Mubaraks who had served in the Cabinet for 25 years until he was pushed out after the revolution.

Hawass confirmed the truth of this report to the New York Times, and there’s extraordinary footage of him getting mobbed by angry protesters as he attempted to leave the ministry on Sunday.

Archaeologists have long grumbled under their breaths about Hawass’ stranglehold on every aspect of Egyptian archaeology. Egyptian blogger 3arabaway explains the anti-Hawass case well in this post. I wasn’t aware of how Hawass’ indefatigable pursuit of foreign tourism translated into a repellent kind of mini-Jim Crow.

It is common practice for him to look down on Egyptians. During Egyptian public holidays, he bans Egyptians from visiting the pyramids and other historic sites, saying they harm Egypt’s antiquities. At the opening of the new Museum gift shop, when asked about the cafeteria and how it was too expensive for the average Egyptian, he said Egyptians can go eat at el-Gahsh (a popular foul place in a low-income neighborhood) – this cafe is for tourists only.

Ancient sites as Sun City. Charming.

Hawass’ replacement is still unknown at this time. The Prime Minister first appointed Abdel-Fattah el-Banna, a professor of restoration who has been an active participant in the Tahrir Square protests, but he was roundly criticized for lacking the archaeological credentials to be antiquities minister. Mohamed Abdel-Maksoud, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, made a beeline for the prime minister’s office to argue that it would be a grave error to appoint a non-archaeologist like Banna. Museum employees all over Egypt went on strike Monday to protest the appointment, so by the end of today Banna had handed in his resignation.

On July 3rd, the thousand-year-old Baphuon temple in Cambodia’s Angkor Thom complex will be officially reopened to the public after it was dismantled into its 300,000 component stones in 1960. It has taken a French and Cambodian restoration team 15 years to pick up where the 1960-1970 restoration was forced to leave off by the advancing Khmer Rouge forces and solve the greatest 3D puzzle in the world.

The three-tier pyramidical temple was built by King Udayadityavarman II in around 1060. Dedicated to Siva, it was the largest temple in the country until Angkor Wat was built in the next century, and it was famed for its dramatic central tower. With the tower, it was 164 feet (50 meters) high, and 426 by 340 feet (130 x 104 meters) wide. It was built around a sand core, however, and its massive size, hasty construction and thin walls led to structural problems almost from the beginning.

By the 15th century, large portions of it had collapsed, so when it was converted from a Hindu temple to a Buddhist one, builders had no qualms about removing large chunks of rock from the tower to create an abstract outline of a massive reclining Buddha (30 feet high and 230 feet long) on the second tier, endangering the structure even further.

Come the 20th century, the temple was in ruins. The Ecole Francaise d’Extreme-Orient (EFEO), the French organization that was in charge of Angkor conservation since 1908, started an ambitious program of restoration in 1960. Based on successful use of anastylosis by Dutch restorers in Java, the restoration of the Baphuon temple called for the ruins to be completely dismantled, the structure shored up, then the temple rebuilt. Each of the 300,000 sandstone blocks were numbered and spread out over 10 hectares of the surrounding area. Careful records were kept so that they could all be put back together again. This was a dry stone construction — no mortar was used to glue stones together — so every stone was individually shaped to fit together.

Soon after the temple was dismantled, the Cambodian civil war broke out. They were working on the second tier when the EFEO restorers were expelled from the country and many of the Cambodian restorers and builders were killed. When the KR took Phnom Penh in 1975, the EFEO offices were ransacked and all the records lost.

In 1995, after the civil war of the 1980s and the political turmoil of the early 1990s settled down, the EFEO restorers were allowed back into the country under the leadership of Pascal Royere. Without the original plans, however, the undertaking was daunting to the point of impossibility.

“It has been said, probably rightly so, that it is the largest-ever 3D puzzle,” Royere told AFP.

The team carefully measured and weighed each block and then relied on archive photos stored in Paris, drawings and the recollections of Cambodian workers to figure out where each part fits.

“We were facing a three-dimensional puzzle, a 300,000-piece puzzle to which we had lost the picture. And that was the main difficulty of this project,” Royere said.

Thankfully the EFEO offices in Paris had photographs of the site stretching back to 1910, so the team was able to track certain blocks and figure out where they went based on where they had been. Sometimes they would find the block they were looking for in 10 minutes, sometimes in three weeks. Royere was also fortunate to have the spry mind of Jacques Dumarcay, the architect who had supervised the dismantling in the 1960s, on his side, and about 30 Cambodian workers who had worked on Angkor projects in the 60s and 70s and had survived the genocidal rule of the Khmer Rouge. One of them, Mith Priem, is now a team supervisor at Baphuon. He was able to recognize patterns on the stones based on his decades-old experience and train new workers to do the same.

They attempted computer modelling but it wasn’t as helpful as the experience and knowledge of the people who had been involved in the original project. Ultimately this immense 3D puzzle would be solved by dedicated people with good memories working hard for a decade and a half.

The rebuilding has taken a good seven years longer than the earliest overly optimistic projections, but partial access was allowed to visitors starting in May 2006. There’s a lovely photo gallery of the restored Baphuon temple here, and video accompanying the AFP story here.

The Canadian government returned 21,000 looted ancient artifacts to Bulgaria‘s culture minister in a formal ceremony at the Canadian Museum of Civilizations in Ottawa. The objects range over 2,600 years of Bulgarian history from many different cultures — Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, etc. — that have had a presence in the region. They include jewelry, coins, belt buckles, crosses, amulets, bronze eagles and everyday items like bone sewing needles, arrows and spearheads.

Bulgarian Minister of Culture Vejdi Rashidov received the artifacts from Canada’s Heritage Minister, James Moore. Moore noted that the ceremony marked “Canada’s largest-ever return of illegally imported cultural property.” Minister Rashidov described the event as “highly emotional” and awarded the Canadian Cultural Heritage Department with the Golden Century, the highest insignia of Bulgaria’s Ministry of Culture.

It’s been a long time in coming. The first two imports of illegally excavated Bulgarian cultural property were discovered in 2007 by the Canada Border Services Agency. They were mailed from Bulgaria to an unnamed dealer who authorities believed planned to sell the artifacts on the Internet. The Border Services agents referred the confiscated objects to the Canadian Cultural Heritage Department which in turn called in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for further investigation. The Mounties kept seizing Bulgarian shipments until by November 2008, they had confiscated 21,000 coins, jewels and assorted artifacts.

No charges were filed against the importer, and he only formally abandoned the items in January of this year, thus finally clearing the way for the Court of Quebec to rule under the Cultural Property Export and Import Act that the seized artifacts should be returned to the Republic of Bulgaria.

It’s great news that such a large trove of priceless Bulgarian cultural property is on its way home, but I’m disturbed by the lack of legal repercussions here. You know who is receiving these stolen goods. You have the goods themselves in custody for three to four years, but you can’t make an arrest and instead have to wait until he lets go before you return the artifacts? That’s not much of a deterrent.

Minister Rashidov says the Bulgarian government plans a repatriation ceremony on the receiving end. Most of the artifacts will then be placed in a variety of Bulgarian museums.

In a break from the usual pattern, an art dealer who has chosen to remain anonymous put his freedom and career on the line to rescue an ancient Buddha statue looted from the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul during the 1990s.

The rare 4-foot statue of Gandharan Buddha with flames coming off his shoulders and water flowing from his feet dates to the 2nd century A.D. It was stolen at some time during the civil wars after the fall of the Soviet-backed Najibullah regime in 1992 and had traveled the dark halls of the black market in antiquities until it was recently purchased by a Japanese private collector. A Japanese dealer sent our hero a picture of the statue and he immediately recognized it from his years of travel in Afghanistan. He even remembered exactly where it had been displayed in the National Museum.

He contacted the collector and told him that the piece had been stolen, begging him to return it to the museum. Appeals to giving a damn about the cultural heritage of a war-torn nation fell on deaf ears. The collector refused to give it up. Under Japanese law, owners cannot be prosecuted for purchasing a stolen artifact even if there’s concrete proof that the item was looted.

The UK, on the other hand, has laws against buying stolen goods, but faced with the prospect of this precious piece of Afghan heritage disappearing into a private collection forever, the British art dealer (heretofore known as BAD, like in BADASS) decided he had to take the risk of being arrested to save the Buddha and return it to Kabul where it belonged. He offered to buy the statue from the Japanese collector.

He told two people of his plan: Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum and St John Simpson, a curator. They sought legal counsel only to receive confirmation that there was nothing they could do to protect themselves. Getting mixed up in this deal was illegal and they could get in big trouble, despite their best intentions. They decided the public good was more important than holding to the letter of the law, so they supported BAD’s attempt to buy the statue. He spent a year negotiating with the collector, and finally he was able to secure the sale using only his own money.

There are no details in the article about how the artifact was imported, possibly because said import was technically smuggling, but whatever they did worked.

Simpson described the rescue as “terribly appropriate”, coming as it did on the 10th anniversary of the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan: “They’re gone forever. But one very important piece can be returned. This is a very important and stunningly beautiful piece.”

Omara Khan Massoudi, director of the National Museum of Afghanistan, described it as “one of our most treasured objects”. One source put the sculpture’s value at £600,000, but the British Museum said it is “without value, given its provenance”.

The Buddha is now safe in the hands of the British Museum where it will go on display Wednesday as part of its hugely successful Afghanistan: Crossroads of the Ancient World, which has been so popular the museum extended its run through July 17. The Gandharan Buddha will be returned to the National Museum in Kabul along with the rest of the exhibits.

The Romanian government has recovered 232 artifacts looted over a decade ago from the ancient Dacian capital of Sarmisegetusa Regia. The authorities have been tracking the stolen treasure all over Europe and the US with the help of local police forces, Interpol, and historical experts.

The artifacts include two iron parade shields, 42 inches in diameter and decorated using a repoussé technique (beating the hot metal from the reverse side to form a decorative relief), one with a buffalo and the other with a griffin. These are extremely rare pieces. There are also 229 coins, 27 of them gold pieces of the Greek Lysimachus or Dacian pseudo-Lysimachus type, 39 silver Koson coins (named after the Dacian king Cotiso who is thought to have had them minted; the Greek version of his name, Koson, is on the coins), and 163 silver imitation Macedonian tetradrachma.

The star of the recovered material, however, is a two-pound gold bracelet from the 1st century B.C. that is one of 24 gold bracelets stolen from the archaeological site. Counting this one, 13 of the looted bracelets have now been recovered since 2005.

After the treasure of Pietroasele, which includes gold figurines weighing more than 19 kilos, “this is the most important find made on Romanian territory,” [Ernest Tarnoveanu, head of Romania's national history museum,] said.

The 13 beautifully decorated golden spiral bracelets recovered so far were among 24 stolen between 1998 and 2001, when the Sarmisegetusa site in southwest Romania was plundered.

Elements of the hoard have been recovered from American, German and Swiss collectors who had bought them in good faith, prosecutor Augustin Lazar said.

That’s very generous of them, I must say. The artifacts recovered today were purchased from a German collector for $430,000. I’m not sure why Romania had to buy its stolen treasure back, no matter how good the collector’s faith was when he bought them. This isn’t the first time, either. Romania has been paying redemption money to every single private collector who has been found in possession of Sarmisegetusa Regia loot. Italy just threatens to prosecute unless they cough up.

While the wealthy collectors are getting paid, the local thieves are doing hard time. Romanian courts have indicted 28 people for involvement in the Sarmisegetusa robbery. In December 2009, thirteen of them were convicted and received prison sentences of between 7 and 12 years, totaling 100 years of imprisonment.

In a solemn ceremony, Maori elders reclaimed the tattooed and preserved head of a Maori warrior from museum and government officials in Rouen, France. Sebastien Minchin, the director of Rouen’s Museum of Natural History, carried the toi moko (the Maori term for the tattoo and the head that bears it) in a case draped with a Maori ceremonial black shawl while Maori elder Kataraina Pitiroi sang a karanga, a ceremonial call-out song, then formally returned it to the delegation of elders, New Zealand Embassy officials and representatives from Te Papa Tongarewa, New Zealand’s national museum. You can see video of the ceremonial hand-over here.

This is the culmination of years of legal wrangling in France. The head, a sacred cultural object to the Maori dating back to the late 18th century or early 19th century, was originally preserved as a reminder of a victory in battle. The tattoos indicate high rank and the heads of elaborately-tattooed warriors would be kept as prized objects by the winners.

After James Cook mapped the coast of New Zealand in 1769 opening the door to further European exploration and mercantilism, a brisk trade in toi moko developed, populating the museums of Europe, and later the US, with these objects of fascination/human remains. Eventually, demand in Europe for the tattooed heads was so high that tribespeople were murdered just for their heads. Slaves captured in warfare would be tattooed right quick, decapitated and their heads sold. Because of its increasing brutality, the trade in tattooed heads was officially outlawed by Britain in 1831.

Rouen’s toi moko had been donated by a Parisian collector named Drouet to the Museum of Natural History in 1875. It went on public display in the museum until it closed in 1996. Then it was kept in storage for a decade until curators doing inventory before the re-opening of the museum found it. This was in 2006, and the city council, headed by the mayor of Rouen, Pierre Albertini, immediately proposed to return the head to New Zealand. The Maori had been asking for their ancestral heads back for two decades by then; it wasn’t even a controversial position, really. Most countries had already returned their head collections or were working on it.

The French Culture Ministry, however, put an immediate stop to the plan. According to the ministry, the museum by law had to consult with a scientific committee before making any offers to return anything. France’s national government has a blanket policy of considering pretty much everything in its museums as part of France’s national heritage, no matter where it came from and under what circumstances, based on the age-old finders keepers philosophy of ethics. The underlying fear was that allowing Rouen to one-sidedly return the toi moko would open a Pandora’s Box of demands for repatriation.

An administrative court backed the government’s position so for years the toi moko remained in storage in Rouen. Recognizing the specific cultural significance of the toi moko, French senator Catherine Morin-Desailly submitted a bill the French senate in early 2008 that would allow the return of the Maori heads in France, not just the Rouen one but 15 others from public collections all over France as well. The bill was passed unanimously by the Senate in June of 2009, and finally by the National Assembly in May 2010.

They made a point, however, of emphasizing that this was a particular exception based on the human dignity of the remains and the strong cultural traditions of the Maori in modern-day New Zealand. “The minister emphasises that this very particular case must be placed within its specific context and should not be confused with the debate about other claims concerning certain items in the public collections.”

Now, a year later, the first toi moko, the one that started it all in Rouen, is on its way back home. It will be placed in a sacred space of the Te Papa museum on May 12th, along with a number of other toi moko retrieved along the way in Sweden, Germany and Norway. The rest of the French toi moko will be returned to New Zealand in 2012.

Police have uncovered a 2nd century Roman mausoleum beneath 60 tons of trash at an illegal toxic waste dump outside of Naples.

The dump is on the grounds of a 17th-century tower in the coastal town of Pozzuoli, just west of Naples, a town which was called Puteoli in Roman times from the Latin word “putere” meaning “to stink.” Back then the name came from its location right in the middle of the Phlegraean Fields, a caldera that includes the dormant Solfatara crater that regularly emits jets of sulphurous fumes, although it applies even more today given the enormous problem of illegal garbage piles plaguing the area.

When police raided the dump, they employed earth-movers to clear and impound the trash. They found an area where parts of the 17th century tower appeared to have been intentionally ruined so the rubble could disguise the trash. After clearing away a large pile of truck tires, they discovered the entrance to the tomb.

When they saw a marble-lined tunnel behind the opening, they realized they had found something ancient and alerted archaeologists excavating a nearby Greek site to the find. Inside the police and archaeologists found a large stuccoed tomb with marble beams in surprisingly good condition despite being filled with trash from the garbage dump, including car batteries.

The tomb had already been raided, possibly even recently by the people running the dump so they could sell whatever contents they found then use the empty mausoleum to stuff more trash into. The looters broke into the side of the tomb creating two exits then covered them with tires.

“Once again we see an illegal and uncivil act of huge proportions from the point of view of the environment and our cultural history,” said Michele Buonomo, president of the Legambiente environmental pressure group. “The operation is testimony to the neglect and abandonment of our patrimony.”

The owner of the property and another person who leased the land have been charged with violating environmental and historical preservation laws. Nobody reported the dump or the presence of hazardous waste, including local officials, so police intend to investigate who intentionally looked the other way in dereliction of their duty.

Sadly, this isn’t the first time this same site has been used as a trash dump. Organized crime figures were charged years ago for illegally dumping trash there, but obviously it didn’t take. Naples is drowning in garbage, and the Camorra, the regional mafia, are behind many of the illegal dumps that have arisen all over an area rich in Greek and Roman heritage.

Zahi Hawass was reappointed Minister of Antiquities today. Interim Prime Minister Essam Sharaf had agreed to demands from ministry employees that Antiquities remain separate from the Culture Ministry. Faced with an aimless department with a power vacuum at the top, continuing thefts at archaeological sites generating a great deal of concern and UNESCO attention, plus a world-famous archaeological power player on the loose, he asked Hawass to return. He, of course, accepted.

Mr. Hawass, who has never been accused of being humble, said on Wednesday that he did not ask to come back, but that there was no one else who could do the job. “I cannot live without antiquities, and antiquities cannot live without me,” he said.

Pardon my rolling eyes. Anyway, he returns to the mess he left, and then some. Ministry inventories of the damage and theft from museums and ancient sites released two weeks ago of the losses from the Cairo Museum and the Tel El-Faraein storehouse found 81 artifacts missing, including four gilded statues of Tutankhamun.

A UNESCO delegate visited Egypt last week to see for himself the situation on the ground and to produce a thorough list of what’s gone missing so it can be published worldwide in an attempt to preempt stolen artifacts from turning up in antique stores and auctions. Some officials were made uneasy by the visit, thinking it smacked a little too much of foreigners coming to Egypt to show the hapless natives how to manage their cultural patrimony. Others were glad to have UNESCO’s help.

From both perspectives, Hawass’ return is an advantage. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s what spurred his reappointment.

“What we need now is the quick appointment of an antiquities leader,” Abdel Maqsoud [director of the central administration for antiquities in Alexandria and Lower Egypt] pointed out. To date, he says, no one knows who will meet with the UNESCO delegate. “It could be an archaeological team from the ministry of antiquities affairs or the Prime Minister Essam Sharaf or both – nobody knows yet,” confirmed Abdel Maqsoud.

On his part, Zahi Hawass, former minister of antiquity affairs said that he was requested by the assistant director general for culture, Franceso Bandarin to meet the UNESCO delegate. Hawass said that he will discuss with the delegate the recent status of Egypt’s antiquities and the amount of break-ins and loss, as well as the means to restituate [sic] such objects in the case they were smuggled out of the country.

He made clear that on several other occasions he rejected offers from UNESCO and other international organisations help to protect Egypt’s antiquities, calling the interference of any foreign country in the protection of Egypt’s heritage “antiquities colonisation.”

A top official in the ministry who requests anonymity told Ahram Online that Hawass cannot meet UNESCO delegate officially as he is no longer the antiquities minister, although he can meet the delegate as a professional archaeological expert in order to provide suggestions, the same as the former general director of the Supreme Council of Antiquities Gaballa Ali Gaballa or any other archaeological expert.

That was Monday, March 21st. A week and a half later and here we are.

The 1,800-year-old Roman spa complex of Allianoi in Izmir Province, Turkey is already halfway submerged under the dammed waters of the Ilya River. Flooding began on December 31st, 2010. By the end of February, Allianoi was already under an estimated 61 million cubic meters of water. You can see a desperately sad slideshow of the rising waters here.

Despite the best efforts of historical preservation activists, the government refused to budge from its plan to make a reservoir out of one of the best preserved ancient spas — still a functional hot spring — in the world. According to the Bergama Chamber of Agriculture, the dam will double the agricultural value of the area, irrigating 44,000 acres of hard farmland and helping 6,000 local families.

The Turkish government also claims the sand they covered the Roman structures in will preserve the site so they can just dig it back up again once the dam reaches the end of its lifespan (30-50 years), but according to Ahmet Yaras, the head archaeologist of the Allianoi dig, even if the immense pressure from the weight of the water and silt don’t damage the site, and even if the dam isn’t just rebuilt, the notion that anyone will just happily dig down through the 50 feet of silt that will be left behind after the water drains is no more than a fantasy.

Meanwhile, the hemorrhage of young people leaving the area for greener pastures isn’t likely to be staunched by the new reservoir.

“Irrigation is crucial for the agriculture of the region,” said Gorenc. “Eventually the salaries of the villagers will rise and migration to the big cities will decrease.”

But some in the village of Pasakoy, which lies nearest to the dam, believe it will not halt the current migration pattern, which has already turned many Anatolian villages into virtual ghost towns. “There aren’t people who want to farm the land,” said Pasakoy Mayor Adnan Celik, who has lost most of his own fields to the reservoir.

“The young people emigrate from the village and their parents and grandparents are too old to farm. The tourism from ruins would have kept them here,” Celik contended.

The economic potential of the ruins has never been fully explored. The ruins were only discovered in 1998 when archaeologists excavated the area in preparation for the construction of the dam. They found the complex in exceptional condition, complete with thermal baths, streets, insulae, covered passages, courtyards, colonnades and huge swaths of undamaged mosaics. They also found a hospital that was very likely used by famed 2nd century doctor Galen, the father of pharmacy and author of medical books that were held as the gold standard of medicine in Europe and the near East until Andreas Vesalius in the 16th century.