Month: June 2013

1,200-year-old lost city found in Cambodia

Medieval

A team from the University of Sydney’s Australian Centre for Asian Art and Archaeology has discovered a previously unknown city from the early Khmer Empire on Phnom Kulen mountain, 25 miles of Angkor Wat, Cambodia. Archaeologists knew that there were a few scattered temples on the site because the ruins are still visible through the jungle growth, but when they attached Lidar to a helicopter and then flew over the area for seven days, the remote sensing technology revealed much more than a handful of isolated temples.

Lidar, a portmanteau of laser and radar, points a laser beam at a target and then determined distances by analyzing the reflected light. It’s a highly effective (and highly expensive) tool for mapping architectural features hidden underneath thick jungle canopies. What the Lidar found was more than two dozen new temples, plus canals, roads and dykes indicating the site was a major city complex. Many of the temples are invisible to the naked eye and show no sign of having been interfered with by looters, a rare boon to archaeologists.

In effect the Lidar technology peeled away the jungle canopy using billions of laser pulses, allowing archaeologists to see for the first time structures that were in perfect squares, completing a map of the city which years of painstaking ground research had been unable to achieve.

The archaeologists were amazed to see that 36 previously recorded ruins scattered across the mountain were linked by an intricate network of gridded roads, dykes, ponds and temples divided into regular city blocks.

The team believes these structures belong to the ancient city of Mahendraparvata, the capital built by the founder of the Khmer Empire, Jayavarman II. Scriptures describe a great ceremony held by Jayavarman II on Phnom Kulen mountain in 802 A.D. to celebrate Cambodia’s freedom from Javanese control. He was proclaimed God King at this ceremony and built a city on the sacred mountain and ushered in the glories of the new Angkor era. Angkor Wat was built more than 300 years later in the 12th century.

Like Angkor Wat, the Mahendraparvata city grid is oriented east-west and north-south, but Angkor Wat was built on a flat plain while Mahendraparvata was built on a mountain side. Clearing the area of vegetation and building in neat geometries was an exceptional feat of engineering for the newborn empire. That deforestation may have been an important contributing factor to the demise of the city because stripped of its natural ecology, the city became dependent on water management systems which could not support its population as it grew.

Much more investigation much be done before the question of what happened to Mahendraparvata is answered. Archaeologists believe the Lidar only covered the tip of the iceberg over those seven days. They think the city is far vaster and they want to return with a more extensive Lidar exploration. It’s an expensive proposition so they’ll need to raise funds before they come back with more Lidar, but in the meantime they have a rich new archaeological site to explore the old-fashioned way.

Here’s a video of them tramping the jungle, looking for the structures revealed in the Lidar data. Watch the whole thing because it’s amazing to see just how little of the archaeology can be seen with the naked eye. One of the temples is under a rice field and there is exactly one partial brick on the surface testifying to what’s underneath.

Rosenberg’s diary found in New York state 67 years after Nuremberg Trials

Modern(ish)

The diary of high-ranking Nazi Party ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, missing since it was used as evidence in the Nuremberg Trials, has been found in western New York. The 400 loose-leaf pages were written from 1936 through 1944. During the pre-war years he was, among other things, the head of the Nazi party’s foreign affairs department and during the war years he was in charge of looting cultural property all over Europe and, after the invasion of the Soviet Union, he served as Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories.

Rosenberg was one of the first members of the Nazi Party, beating even Adolph Hitler who joined nine months after him in October 1919. After the failure of the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, Hitler, in prison for treason, appointed Rosenberg temporary leader of the party during his absence. He was editor of the Nazi paper Völkischer Beobachter and a profound anti-Semite and Aryan supremacist who expounded his racist and pagan philosophy in his best-selling but rarely read 1930 book, The Myth of the Twentieth Century. He was influential in the development of key Nazi ideas like Lebensraum (“living room,” or Germany’s need to stretch its legs all over Europe using the local population as a footstool) and the persecution and mass-murder of European Jews. As Reich Minister, he was directly involved in deportation of civilians in his territories to forced labor camps and in the deportation of Jews to death camps.

The papers were seized by Allied troops in August of 1945 and relayed to the U.S. Army’s Records Subsection of the Documents Unit of the War Crimes Branch. Rosenberg was also captured after the war and was tried for conspiracy to commit aggressive warfare, crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was convicted of all four charges and was hanged on October 16th, 1946. When asked if he had any last words, Rosenberg was reportedly the only executed Nazi war criminal to decline, replying simply “No.”

Some time after the trial, the diary disappeared. Authorities believe it was taken by Dr. Robert Kempner, the deputy chief counsel at the Nuremberg Trials and chief prosecutor of the Ministries Trial, the 11th of the 12 Nuremberg trials. As chief prosecutor, he had access to all Nazi documents even though he wasn’t personally involved in the prosecution of Rosenberg. Kempner was a German lawyer who fled to the United States during the war. When the trials were over, he returned to the US and lived in Pennsylvania. He was given permission by the Office of the Chief of Counsel of War Crimes to keep some of the unclassified documents for his personal study and without oversight he helped himself to a great many papers, including apparently the Rosenberg diary.

Kempner died in 1993 and in 1997, his heirs told the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum they wanted to donate his papers. Museum staff documented the collection at that time and the diary was not there. After a two-year dispute with the estate, museum experts returned to document the collection again and found things missing. Papers continued to disappear and reappear for the next few years, but the diary was not among them.

The museum kept looking, though, and in November of 2012, an art security specialist working with the museum contacted the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents with new information about the Rosenberg Diary. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s and HSI worked together on the case, ultimately serving a search warrant in April of this year and seizing the long-lost documents.

The authorities are not releasing any names or exact locations, but the scuttlebutt is that the diary wound up with Kempner’s former secretary after his death. She lived in western New York.

“Thanks to the tireless investigative work of HSI special agents, and years of perseverance by both the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the long-lost Rosenberg Diary has been recovered, not in Germany but in the United States,” said Director Morton. “This important record of the crimes of the Third Reich and the Holocaust is now preserved for all to see, study and learn from. The work of combating the international theft of cultural heritage is a key part of our work, and no matter how long these items may appear to be lost to history, that hard but important work will continue.”

“This seizure is the result of the joint efforts of this office and Homeland Security Investigations,” said U.S. Attorney Oberly. “The discovery and return of this long-lost, important historical document to the government of the United States is a significant achievement. Although it is a reminder of a dark time, the Rosenberg Diary is important to our understanding of history. Our hope is that it will provide valuable insight to historians.”

“The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is thrilled to have recovered the diary of Alfred Rosenberg, a leading Nazi ideologue,” said U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Director Sara J. Bloomfield. “As we build the collection of record on the Holocaust, having material that documents the actions of both perpetrators and victims is crucial to helping scholars understand how and why the Holocaust happened. The story of this diary demonstrates how much material remains to be collected and why rescuing this evidence is such an important museum priority.”

Lost medieval inscribed stone found in Wales stream

Medieval

Archaeologists on a walk stumbled on a long-lost inscribed stone dating to the 9th or 10th century in the Nant Tawelan river in the village of Silian, County Ceredigion, mid-west Wales. Nikki Vousden, staff member of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, and University of Wales archaeologist Dr. Roderick Bale were taking a stroll along the stream one bank holiday when they noticed one of the wet stones had an inscription. The water glinting off the surface highlighted the unusual pattern: a linear Latin cross with a lozenge shaped ring at the upper end.

There are only three stones known with a cross and lozenge pattern. One of them is at St. David’s Church in Llanllawer, the other at St. Tecwyn’s Church, Llandecwyn, and the third has been missing for longer than anyone knows. Its existence was documented by Dr. Victor Erle Nash-Williams in his 1950 reference The Early Christian Monuments of Wales, but his sources were a cast of the surface and a photograph of the stone kept at the National Museum of Wales. A label on the picture identified the stone as coming from Silian, but there was no record of who took the photograph, who made the cast or the context of the original find.

So at some point somebody knew it was historically significant enough to make a cast of the inscription. How the stone went from museum cast-worthy to sitting in a stream 40 miles south of St. Sulien’s Church, Silian, is a mystery. The stone is being kept at St. Sulien’s right now, which has two other inscribed stones. The earliest, inscribed “Silbandus lies” with a linear Latin cross superimposed over the words, dates to the 7th-9th century and is now built into the church’s external south wall. The second dates to the 9th or 10th century and has a pattern of linked knots on one side and square frets on the other. It was discovered in the churchyard in 1808 and was moved to the interior south wall of the church in 1960.

The newly rediscovered stone is called Silian 3 because it’s the third of St. Sulien’s three stones. Silian 3’s inscription is made of punch marks clustered close together. The design wasn’t carved into the surface with a chisel; it was punched out in divots with a metal tool. According to Professor Nancy Edwards of Bangor University, author of the three-volume A Corpus of Early Medieval Inscribed Stones and Stone Sculpture in Wales, the Silian 3 inscription is unique. Although they share the cross and lozenge imagery, the other two stones are different in overall pattern.

There are 534 documented early medieval inscribed stones and sculptures in Wales. Find sites cluster around churches and burial grounds. Some of the inscriptions indicate they were used as grave markers, and indeed there are extant stones that bear clear marks of having been embedded vertically into the ground. However, not a single inscribed stone has ever been discovered in context attached to a grave. Nancy Edwards believes (pdf), and inscriptions back her up, they were also used as boundary markers of church property, to record a donation of land to the church, or in the case of the larger works, as unmistakable signs of sacred ground. They may also have been placed along roadsides to serve as prayer stations, much like statues of saints and whatnot are still used in Italy to this day.

X-rays restore lost aria from Cherubini’s Médée

Modern(ish)

Researchers at Stanford University’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have recovered the final aria of Luigi Cherubini’s opera Médée 216 years after the composer destroyed it in a fit of pique. When Médée debuted on March 13th, 1797, at the Théâtre Feydeau in Paris where he was the house composer, critics were unimpressed, declaring it too long. As the story goes, in response to this slight, Cherubini blackened out the last aria, “Du trouble affreux qui me dévore” (“The terrible disorder that consumes me”), with charcoal. Just like that, 500 bars were gone.

The opera is now acknowledged as the artist’s greatest masterpiece, but for almost 200 years it wasn’t even performed in the original French. Cherubini produced an Italian translation, Medea, which premiered in Vienna in 1802, and in 1855 German composer Franz Lachner staged a German translation of the Vienna version to which he added recitatives in place of the original dialogue. Lachner’s iteration was then translated back into Italian and it’s that version which became the popular staging for most of the 20th century. In the 1980s, the French opera began to be performed again, and in 1997 an unabridged version was staged at Lincoln Center in honor of the opera’s 200th birthday.

Unabridged except for those missing 500 bars, that is. Those seemed to be lost for good, until Heiko Cullmann, a Berlin music scholar visiting Stanford University, read about the SLAC’s successes using the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) to reveal writing concealed by other writing, like the Archimedes palimpsest and explorer David Livingstone’s berry ink diary. He suggested SLAC turn its blindingly bright light onto Cherubini’s original manuscript at the Stanford Library to scan the blacked out aria.

When Cherubini composed Médée in 1797, ink contained a large amount of metal. In the case of Cherubini’s manuscript, the handwritten notes were written with iron gall ink, which, as the name suggests, contained a large amount of iron. The manuscript pages Cherubini wrote on came preprinted with the horizontal lines of the musical staff. These printed lines contained a high level of zinc.

By setting their sensors to look for X-ray energies associated with zinc and iron, the scientists literally had X-ray vision: The charcoal smudges – and even the paper itself – mostly contained carbon and would be almost completely transparent to the X-ray beam.

The scientists focused their X-ray beam down to 50 microns across – smaller than the width of a human hair. Slowly the scientists scanned the document line by line, moving left to right and right to left as the beam worked its way down the page. Each side of the page took about eight hours to scan.

Since the carbon is invisible, after hours of scanning researchers had a jumble of notes because Cherubini wrote on the front and back of the page. They surmounted this obstacle in a delightfully low-tech way: by collating according to note orientation. The composer consistently wrote notes with the ball at the bottom facing right, so the team went through the scans by hand and separated the right-facing from the left-facing notes. Literally overnight, the aria that had been lost for centuries was found.

As a musician, Bergmann did worry that he was violating Cherubini’s artistic choices by uncovering the aria the maestro had hidden, but ultimately he concluded that Cherubini probably wouldn’t mind that more than two centuries after Parisian critics pooh-poohed his masterpiece, people still want to hear it as he first wrote it.

The complete sheet music is now available and some opera company is sure to stage the full Médée soon. Without further ado, here is “Du trouble affreux qui me dévore.”

Boston hospital cleans its mummy in public view

Ancient, Modern(ish)

The mummy of a 6th century Egyptian stone cutter that has been on display at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston since 1823 was removed from his sarcophagus for a professional cleaning on Friday, June 7th. His name is Padihershef and salts used in the mummification process have been gradually seeping out of him for centuries. Peabody Essex Museum conservator Mimi Leveque was contracted to remove the salt deposits from his face and linens. She used cotton swabs moistened with saliva — looks like Mom was right all along about saliva’s face cleaning properties — to wipe the salts off his blackened visage, small brushes and a vacuum to remove dust and dirt from the surface.

Leveque’s work was open to the public from 11:00 AM to 3:00 PM in the Ether Dome, a historic operating theater where the first public use of inhaled ether as an anesthetic took place on October 16th, 1846. The Ether Dome began its historic run as an operating room in 1821; Padihershef moved in two years later after he was given to the museum by the city of Boston. The city had received him as a gift from Dutch merchant Jacob Van Lennep, the Netherlands Consul General in Smyrna, Ottoman Empire, who donated the mummy so it could “be given to some pubic establishment as a mark of respect to that city.”

Van Lennep’s company did a great deal of business in the US — it imported the first cargo of figs into the country — but it’s unclear why Van Lennep went to so much trouble to acquire a mummy for Boston. He asked his cousin Lee, the British Consul in Alexandria, to score him a mummy and when Lee couldn’t find any good ones in Alexandria or Cairo, he sent a dogsbody to Thebes to dig up a new one. Padihershef was in excellent condition and was considered the best mummy to have been found in decades.

His elaborately decorated sarcophagus told us most of what we know about him. Padihershef was a bachelor, son of father Iref-iaen-Hershef and mother Her-ibes-enes. He worked in the City of the Dead in Thebes, tunneling into cliffs to make tombs for the wealthy. Born on August 5th, 662 B.C., he was in his 40s when he died.

Van Lennep sent Padi to Boston on the ship Sally Ann along with his standard shipment of raisins, wool, rugs and opium. He arrived at Boston Harbor on April 25th, 1823, and was given to the hospital on May 4th. Padihershef was the first mummy ever shipped to the United States, as far as we know. He caused a sensation and was promptly put to use raising funds for the hospital which charged the curious 25 cents a visit. He was briefly leased to an oddities impresario who took him on a tour of American cities so visitors could pay $2.50 to catch a glimpse of him.

With the exception of that tour, Padi’s has resided in the Ether Dome for almost 200 years. He and his coffin have been standing vertically in cases in the front of the operating theater and both the body and the sarcophagus need some touching up. This conservation project began in March after an anonymous donor gave Mass General $5,000 to examine Padihershef in detail. He’s been X-rayed at the hospital before, once in 1931 and once in 1976. Both historical X-rays indicated stunted bone growth from severe childhood illness, but there’s so much more data that can be revealed with X-rays today and CT scans collect information in three dimensions about soft tissues as well as bones. In fact, the March scans discovered that there’s a broom handle inside Padi’s torso, possibly the result of some long-forgotten conservation attempt to keep his head attached to the body. The team hopes to find out more about Padi’s life, diet, illnesses and death this time around.

Experts are working to restore and stabilize his coffin and linens. Once he’s clean and composed, Padi will go on temporary display at the George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum in Springfield, Massachusetts, after which he will return to the Ether Dome. He and his coffins will be placed in new horizontal custom designed display cases which will be much more comfortable for them since they won’t have to fight gravity.