Month: April 2018

One of the earliest Persian garden carpets in the world to go on display in the US for the first time

Modern(ish), Museums

One of the greatest Persian carpets in the world is traveling from Glasgow to the United States for the first time to go on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The Wagner Garden Carpet was made in Kirman, modern-day southeastern Iran, in the 17th century. It one of the three earliest Persian garden carpets known in the world (the other two are at the Albert Hall in Jaipur, India, and the Museum of Industrial Art in Vienna, Austria) but its design is unique. There are no other carpets known that use its base pattern in whole or in part.

Its four-quartered garden layout is inspired by the Safavid royal gardens and the concept of the earthly paradise described in the Quran. In the middle is a basin where the channels that divide the garden meet. All along the H-shaped channels trees, plants and shrubs flower and animals — birds, butterflies, goats, rabbits, lions, gazelles, peacocks, leopards — roam amidst their lushness. Fish and waterfowl frolic in the canals.

It was named after its German owner who acquired it at the turn of the century. Sir William Burrell bought it in 1939 from the Royal Bank of Scotland. He displayed it in his drawing room at Hutton Castle in Northumberland, but only owned it for five years before donating it to the City of Glasgow.

It is huge, more than 17 feet long and 14 feet wide. The warps are all cotton; the wefts wool, cotton and silk; the pile wool. Because of its massive size and the delicate condition of its textiles, it has only been on display twice in the past three decades, and has never been seen outside the UK since the Burrell purchase in 1939. It is traveling now only because the Burrell Collection closed for an extensive £66 million refurbishment in October 2016 and doesn’t reopen until late 2020.

Dr Frances Fowle, Burrell Trustees chairman, said: “The Burrell Trustees are delighted to support the loan of one of the world’s most spectacular and important carpets to one of the world’s greatest museums.

“The loan will raise international awareness of the significance of Sir William Burrell’s collection while the museum undergoes much-needed refurbishment.” […]

While on display in New York the artwork will accompanied by a supporting display relating to the importance of gardens in Islamic culture and a full public programme including a symposium and a guest lecture by Noorah al Gailani, curator of Islamic Civilisations at Glasgow Museums and the Burrell Collection.

It will be exhibited at the Met’s Islamic Galleries from July 10th through October 7th, 2018.

Ardennes baker recreates World War I bread

Modern(ish)

A baker in Sedan, in northeastern France’s Ardennes region, is creating exact replicas of the bread that was distributed to French infantrymen during World War I. The soldiers were nicknamed “poilus,” meaning “hairy ones,” a reference to their propensity for facial hair which was a tell-tale sign of their country rustic origins. Baker Christophe Guénard calls his reproductions of the bread they lived on from 1914 to 1918 “Le pain des poilus” and wraps it in a tricolor ribbon.

Guénard began researching the “pain de guerre” because he wanted to create a leavener from scratch instead of using yeast or chemical leaveners like baking soda. He scoured archives in Paris and zeroed in on the 1914-1918 period when boulangers supplying the infantry on the front lines, bound by the exigencies and deprivations of wartime, had to create the most bare bones product they could. At the same time, this bread would be the main food keeping the poilus on the front lines going. It was the bulk of their intake; they ate half a loaf in the morning, half in the evening.

He found it was made of white flour, but it’s plain, with none of the additives, enzymes, dairy derivatives and other enhancements typical of bread flour. There are no chemical leaveners in the flour, nor was yeast used. Instead, they made a leavener from scratch, the very technique Guénard had been looking for, by macerating raisins in water for 10 days. The liquid (raisins strained out, of course) was then mixed with the plain white flour to create the dough. More flour was added over time to feed the raisin leavener.

“Every day, when I make this bread, I say we did the same during the war,” says Jerome Pirois, floury hands kneading a ball of dough, before a baking at 250° C for 35 minutes.

The baker is busy preparing about sixty loaves for the next day: “This is another way of working bread. When the boss told me about it, I educated myself. There’s a history behind it.”

“It is a great idea, it is this type of popular initiative that must be taken and which people support,” rejoices … Serge Barcellini, Comptroller General of the Armies and President of the French Souvenir, who moved to Sedan.

The bakery sells 120 loaves of Poilus every week for 12.50 euros apiece. A percentage of each sale is donated to Le Souvenir Français, the association that maintains war memorials and keeps the memory of war dead alive. The Ardennes region was one of the epicenters of slaughter of the Western Front, so the dreadful losses of World War I are still very much present in a way they may not be in other parts of France.

With the commemoration of the Centenary coming to an end this year, “the risk is that the memory of 14-18 collapses with memory consequences and economic consequences in the frontline regions,” he says.

But “to enter a bakery and have a direct and authentic memory” of the conflict feeds the interest of the population for this period, he adds.

The bakery now wishes to pass on its recipe to other craftsmen and make it travel out of the department, marked by the battle of the Ardennes in August 1914, to “make the product live”, enthuses Mr. Guénard.

Met returns two stolen artifacts to Nepal

Looting, Medieval, Museums

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has returned two stolen religious icons to Nepal more than 30 years after they were looted. One is a 11th-12th century Standing Buddha that was stolen from a shrine in the Yatkha Tole neighborhood of Kathmandu in 1986. The other is a stele known as the Uma Maheshwor idol that depicts the god Shiva and his wife Parvati and is estimated to date to the 12th-13th century. It was stolen from the Tangal Hiti temple in the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Patan in the Kathmandu Valley. The third largest city in Nepal, Patan is famed for its temples, palaces and rich tradition of artisan crafts.

The Met was given the Uma Maheshwor by a private collector in 1983. It wasn’t until the donation of the Standing Buddha in 2015 that the museum realized both pieces had been looted. Both statues feature in a 1989 book entitled Stolen Images of Nepal by Nepalese art expert Lain Singh Bangdel documenting the uncontrolled rash of thefts that ravaged Nepal from the 1950s through the 1980s. Temple deities were particular targets, stolen by the thousands. Easily portable — nobody thought to anchor them firmly when they were created a thousand or so years ago — and highly desirable to collectors, they weren’t guarded by security personnel. The local residents who worshipped them and prayed to them didn’t imagine they’d be ripped off and sold to unscrupulous Western collectors and institutions.

To its credit, the Metropolitan Museum of Art reached out to Nepal once it became aware the pieces were stolen. On March 6th, museum officials and Nepal’s Consul General in New York City signed a repatriation agreement, and less than a month later both idols were back in their native land.

The sculptures arrived at the Department of Archaeology in Kathmandu last Wednesday, April 4th. After the crates were opened, three men from the city of Patan traveled to Kathmandu to see their revered Uma Maheshwor stele for the first time in 35 years. The moment was all the more meaningful because Patan was devastated by the Gorkha earthquake that struck on April 25th, 2015, and many historical and religious structures and art works were damaged or destroyed.

Both works will now go the National Museum of Nepal in Kathmandu. This decision is not an uncontroversial one. The idols have profound spiritual meaning to the communities from which they were looted. They are considered living representations of deities. When they are put on display in a museum, they are exhibited as mere art pieces, a sharp decline in significance compared to the reverence they receive in their communities of origin.

There is a chance they might return to their shrines, however. By the terms of Nepal’s Ancient Monument Preservation Act 1956, communities can apply to have idols returned to them, but they have to prove they can secure them effectively. If they can convince the Department of Archaeology that the sculptures won’t be in danger of theft again, they will be returned. It’s a slim chance at best.

Roman tomb found at Bulgarian med school

Ancient

On March 29th, a Roman tomb was discovered on the campus of the Medical University of Plovdiv in Bulgaria. Workers stumbled on the find while doing repairs to the steam system in the courtyard behind the Rector’s office. Archaeologists were immediately called in to excavate the tomb. The University of Plovdiv’s Zdravka Korkutova and Medical University of Plovdiv Associate Professor Georgi Tomov found a fully intact tomb in exceptional condition containing inhumed skeletal remains.

The tomb is a single chamber made of brick and mortar covered by a granite block. Within just a few hours’ work, the archaeologists unearthed parts of a skull and lower leg bones.

Prof. Tomov said: “Probably the tomb is from the second to the third century and more than one person was buried there, that is, it is a family tomb. This will become apparent after an anthropological study of what is there has been done. By examining the skeletons, we will get information about the gender and age of the buried, their health, whether they have suffered from illness, and what kind of medical interventions they have had.”

The date estimate is derived from the style of the tomb and its location. In the Roman period, Plovdiv, then known as Philipopolis, had four necropolises just outside the city boundaries, as was customary in Roman urban planning. The largest of them was opened in the 1st century A.D. just to the west of the city and as Philipopolis prospered in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, the cemetery expanded westward towards the hill of Dzhendem tepe. (Plovdiv has seven hills too, btw.) It had been the site of religious shrines since the Bronze Age, and the Romans built the city’s main temple dedicated to Apollo Cendrisseos there, so it was religiously fitting that a necropolis would reach its foothills. The campus of MU-Plovdiv is in the shadow of Dzhendem tepe.

The tombs built for people of means during this time of expansion and prosperity are of markedly higher construction quality than the ones before or after. They are made of brick and mortar with plum and flush walls, like the one just discovered behind the Rector’s office. When the city’s fortunes began to decline in the 4th century, the tombs were more patchwork affairs, modest in scale and constructed from recycled building materials scavenged from earlier structures.

The skeletal remains are currently being studied. MU-Plovdiv’s rector, Dr. Stefan Kostyanev, behind whose office the tomb was found, hopes the finds can eventually be displayed in yet-to-be-built University museum.

52 new Nasca lines discovered by drones

Ancient

Peruvian archaeologists have discovered more than 50 new ancient geoglyphs in the Palpa province using drone and satellite technology. Known as the Nasca lines after the culture that created some of the largest and most dramatic figures on flat topography so they can only be fully seen from the air, in fact some of the geoglyphs predate the Nasca. The Paracas culture, for example, created elaborate human and animal designs on the sides of cliffs, which makes them visible to people on firm ground, as long as they’re far enough away.

The new geoglyphs add crucial data on the Paracas culture, as well as the mysterious Topará culture, which marked the transition between the Paracas and the Nasca. Centuries before the famous Nasca lines were made, people in the region were experimenting with making massive geoglyphs.

“This means that it is a tradition of over a thousand years that precedes the famous geoglyphs of the Nasca culture, which opens the door to new hypotheses about its function and meaning,” says Peruvian Ministry of Culture archaeologist Johny Isla, the Nasca lines’ chief restorer and protector.

And they’re in need of a most valiant protector. If it’s not truckers driving over the lines, it’s Greenpeace protesters callously treating them like nothing more than a backdrop. The Greenpeace cloud did have a silver lining in that it resulted in a grant from the US government to aid in the conservation of the geoglyphs.

The additional funding was essential to the new discoveries, because Peru’s archaeological sites are very poorly documented — only 5,000 of the estimated 100,000 have been thoroughly recorded on the ground. Many of them aren’t even accessible to ground teams. The recently discovered ones primarily consist of thin, geometric lines which have been hard-worn by the harsh desert environment. Only the powerful oculi of aerial viewing technology could have detected them. (Boosted by the great repository of knowledge of local peoples who had an awareness of where some of the hillside geoglyphs had been even when they were so eroded they were no longer visible to the naked eye.)

Enter the GlobalXplorer project, founded by space archaeologist and 2016 TED Prize recipient Sarah Parcak to marshal the power of crowdsourcing to analyze satellite images for signs of archaeological remains and interference from looters. Parcak and the GlobalXplorer volunteers scoured satellite views of Peru and flagged potential sites of interests. Their data was relayed to Peruvian archaeologists Johnny Isla and Luis Jaime Castillo Butters who, backed by financial support from the National Geographic Society, visited those locations on the ground.

There was little evidence of looters interfering with the sides pinpointed by GlobalXplorer, but there was plenty of evidence of illegal encroachment from abusive, unauthorized gold mining. It was drone footage that broke it all wide open.

How could so many geoglyphs hide in plain sight? Over time, many of the lines and figures have been reduced to faint depressions in the soil, visible only on 3-D scans of the terrain captured by the eagle-eye perspective provided by drones. And despite satellites’ awe-inspiring surveillance power, they can’t see everything.

The most powerful satellite that GlobalXplorer uses can see a foot-wide object from 383 miles above Earth’s surface. That’s the equivalent of seeing a single human hair from more than 650 feet away. But the lines that trace the newfound geoglyphs are mere inches across—too fine to spot from space.

Low-flying drones operating at altitudes of 200 feet or less, in contrast, can spot objects less than a half-inch wide. “The [drone camera] resolution is incredibly high,” says Castillo.

He speaks truth. National Geographic broke the story and has some magnificent aerial video of the lines, both the newly discovered ones and ones that haven’t been recorded before from above, taken by the drones.