Social policy – Page 9 – The History Blog

Zahi Hawass Fired

July 18, 2011

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.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/0Ubm5yoIfuk" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

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.

World’s biggest jigsaw puzzle is put back together

June 30, 2011

Medieval, Social policy

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.

Canada returns 21,000 stolen Bulgarian artifacts

June 13, 2011

Ancient, Modern(ish), Social policy, Treasures

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.

British art dealer breaks law to SAVE looted artifact

May 29, 2011

Ancient, Looting, Social policy, Treasures

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.

Romania recovers stolen Dacian treasure

May 11, 2011

Ancient, Museums, Social policy, Treasures

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.