Month: January 2009

Egypt returns stolen artifact to Iraq

Ancient, Looting, Treasures

In a switch from the usual direction of these things, Egypt has returned an ancient bronze statue which had been looted from Iraq.

According to Zawi Hawass, the smuggler, an Egyptian national working in Jordan, was captured at Nuweiba Sea Port trying to sneak the statue into Egypt.

Not that this wasn’t a fine opportunity for Hawass grind his own axe, of course.

“When the invasion of Iraq began in 2003, we wrote to the British and American governments asking them to protect Iraq’s heritage and museums,” said Hawass. “But that didn’t happen.”

Hawass said that since then his office has been tracking stolen Iraqi artifacts and has recovered some 5,000 items.

Hawass, who is a vigorous campaigner to recover Egypt’s own stolen antiquities, said he will not do business with museums that buy stolen Iraqi artifacts.

It’s all a part of Zawi’s master plan. As are we all. But flies as wanton boys are we to Hawass.

Meanwhile, the statue seems to be of a Mesopotamian fertility goddess, but authorities aren’t certain which one or even how old the figure is.

Ravehenge

Ancient, Modern(ish)

Okay, the so title is a tad misleading. I snatched it from the British press which, I don’t know if you’ve heard, can on occasion tend towards the sensationalistic.

The actual story is that Stonehenge has perfect acoustics. It’s not that the standing stones would have been dedicated explicitly to musical performances, but that whatever the hell they were doing there most likely involved music and they wanted it to sound great.

In conclusions which were far from revelatory, Till used a computer model of Stonehenge and a concrete replica in America’s Washington State to recreate the sounds of the space 5,000 years ago, adjudging it to have possessed perfect acoustics.

Hey wait. There’s a Stonehenge replica in Washington? Well I’ll be damned. It’s a WWI memorial in Maryhill, overlooking the Columbia river.

This Stonehenge is the creation, not of Druids, but of Sam Hill, a dreamer and entrepreneur who founded the Maryhill community along the shores of the Columbia in the early 1900s.

Back then it was generally believed the English Stonehenge was built for human sacrifice. Hill believed that war was mankind’s greatest sacrifice. Thus he built his own Stonehenge to honor Klickitat County soldiers who died in World War I. Plaques bearing the names of the 13 soldiers killed in this war are attached to the inner circle of pillars.

That’s kind of cooler than the acoustics news. It looks like a beautiful place.

Mummy of female pharaoh uncovered

Ancient, Treasures

The mummified remains of Queen Seshestet have been found in a Saqqara pyramid.

She was mother of King Teti, founder of the Sixth Dynasty of pharaonic Egypt. Her name was not found but “all the signs indicate that she is Seshestet”.

Such old royal mummies are rare. Most date from dynasties after 1800 BC.

Female royal mummies are even rarer, since only a small number of women are thought to have ruled Egypt.

Seshestet ruled for 11 years.

No artifacts facts were found in the tomb or sarcophagus. Tomb raiders got to it long before Zawi Hawass.

Ancient Greeks used their homes as taverns, brothels

Ancient

Rowdy taverns feature prominently in Greek literature, but there haven’t been any actual confirmed taverns found. A researcher at the University of Leeds thinks she’s figured out why.

She reviewed archaeolgoical remains unearthed at several prominent sites dating from 475 to 323 BC, including the Villa of Good Fortune in Olynthus, and a residence known as building Z in Athens.

To many archaeologists, the vast numbers of mugs, erotic graffiti and objects found at the sites indicate no more than well-off families that threw lavish parties. But Kelly Blazeby will tell the Archaeological Institute of America meeting in Philadelphia this week that a more plausible explanation is that residents turned over rooms in their houses to selling wine, gambling and even prostitution.

“If you look at the remains coming from ancient Greek homes, it seems very clear to me that these buildings had another function, that some areas were used for commercial purposes,” she said.

It’s seems a reasonable interpretation to me. Even a wealthy home doesn’t have much need for hundreds of drinking vessels, never mind the cubicles that surrounded the cup room. OMG champagne room before champagne!

Anyway, Google tells me that one of the homes in question, Building Z, is already being marketed to tourists as a brothel, so not everyone finds the theory controversial.

And now because what’s a story about a bawdy-house without some bawd, here are some Greek erotic objects from random times and places.

Update: Fort Craig bodies to be reburied

Looting, Modern(ish)

*tl;dr warning. This one is a prolix one.*

Last year I posted a macabre story about researcher and amateur historian Dee Brecheisen who was found after his death to have looted multiple graves in forts and Indian burial grounds. He even kept the mummy of a black Union soldier in his home.

Here’s a follow-up story with much more detail.

Basically, Bureau of Land Management agents got a tip that there was the skull of another buffalo soldier on Brecheisen’s property. They found it, complete with bits of hair and skin, and searched the rest of the place.

They were particularly looking for a veritable looter’s treasure map Brecheisen had shown people when he was alive.

The archaeologists were particularly interested in trying to find a cemetery plot map, because Brecheisen had told people that with it, he was able match up burial registries and determine whom he’d dug up.

Army personnel at the fort between 1854 and 1886 were mandated to maintain such a map — and sometimes criticized for the sloppiness of their record-keeping — to keep tabs on who was buried there. The Army had exhumed remains in 1876 and reburied them at Fort Marcy in Santa Fe, and again in 1886, and reburied the remains at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

They didn’t find it or much of anything else, sadly, but to build a criminal case against the family and friends who knew of the loot and sold off his estate full of grave robberies without a peep, they had to connect the skull they had to Fort Craig.

So a volunteer team of archaeologists and FBI agents, state troopers, and sheriff’s office folks dug a trench next to a grave an anonymous tipster was marked as a buffalo soldier’s final resting place.

They found empty coffins and bits of bones and sent them to a military department I didn’t know existed but is very cool.

Samples of those remains were sent to the Joint POW/ MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii, which is responsible for bringing back and identifying remains of service personnel from past conflicts — though most are far closer in time.

“It was within their mission, even though these Soldiers were from the 1870s and 1880s,” Hanson said.

Unfortunately, they were unable to identify any remains, so there was no evidence for a criminal case, and by then, the cemetery was so dug up that they couldn’t leave it like that to be looted even further.

So they hired a contract archaeology firm and they’re the ones who found the remains of 60 men, women and children, including one child found mummified with “eyelashes, lips, combed hair, gown and tiny hands folded across the chest that held desiccated flowers.”

The map which might identify all these people is still MIA, both Brecheisen’s copy and any original that might have been in the files. The archives police are on the job.

(Yes. There is such a profession as archives police. If I had known this as a child, my life might have turned out very, very different.)

The bodies will be reburied in handmade coffins in a national cemetery.

Meanwhile, a wealth of knowledge about post-Civil War era frontier medicine has been unearthed. That’s one good thing to come out of this horrid episode.