Beethoven skull fragments return to Vienna

Modern(ish)

A dozen fragments of Ludwig van Beethoven’s skull have returned to Vienna where they will be studied and preserved by the Medical University of Vienna. These are the only known surviving pieces of the composer’s skull, collected when Beethoven’s body was exhumed in 1863. The rest of his remains were reburied.

Two palm-sized and ten pea-sized fragments had broken off the skull during the autopsy performed the day after Beethoven’s death on March 26, 1827. They were placed in his coffin and buried on March 29th. In 1863, the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde music organization arranged for Beethoven’s body (and that of Franz Schubert) to be exhumed and studied. The loose fragments were acquired at that time by Viennese physician and medical historian Franz Romeo Seligmann. Seligmann was an enthusiast of art history and phrenology and had been present at the exhumation, so he took them to make his own study of the skull of a musical genius.

The fragments remained in the family for decades, winding up in France when the family fled Nazi persecution. In 1990, US businessman Paul Kaufmann, Seligmann’s great-grand-nephew, inherited them after his mother died. He discovered the fragments in a family safety deposit box in a bank in France. They were in a metal box with “Beethoven” scratched into the lid. He loaned the fragments to the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies at San Jose State University where they were studied.

Some US researchers have cast doubt on their authenticity, believing that the parts would have been damaged in a different way in the 1827 autopsy. Viennese researchers who studied them in 1985 thought they were real, however, and Medical University of Vienna forensic pathologist Christian Reiter makes a strong circumstantial case that the fragments match the shape and saw grooves on the plaster cast of the skull made in 1863. The fragments also contain high concentrations of lead, something found in undisputedly authentic locks of Beethoven’s hair.

Austrian coroner Christian Reiter said the 10 fragments, including two bigger pieces, one from the back of the head and one from the right side of the forehead, had “great value”.

“We have received really valuable material here, with which we hope to continue to research in the next years. That was Beethoven’s wish too,” Reiter said.

The composer battled illness through his life and explicitly asked for his body to be studied, Reiter added.

First things first: the question of authentication will be resolved at once. DNA samples have been taken from the skull fragments by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. The results will be compared to the DNA retrieved from the locks of Beethoven’s hair. By the end of the year, the question should be conclusively answered.

Italy returns looted funerary stele to Turkey

Ancient, Looting

Italian authorities have returned a 2nd century A.D. funerary stele looted from the ancient city of Zeugma to Turkey. The stele, deemed by archaeologists to be of extraordinary historical and artistic significance, was given to officials of the Turkish embassy in Rome at the end of April, and this week it was welcomed home in a ceremony at the Gaziantep Zeugma Mosaic Museum.

The stele is carved from a solid block of limestone of a type found in the Gaziantep region. It was the primary stone used for statues and headstones in Roman-era Zeugma. It is a rectangle with a deeply inset arch. Inside the arched niche is the bust of a woman dressed in the traditional chiton of a Roman bride, her right hand over heart holding her veil, her left hand holding a spindle. An inscription in Greek on the base reads “Satornila, the wife who loves her husband, goodbye.”

It was seized from a house in Florence in an investigation by the Carabinieri for the Protection of Cultural Heritage of Venice last year. The suspect had purchased it in France then filed a fraudulent request for a temporary entry certificate, claiming the stele had originated in Italy. Had the certificate been granted, he would have been able to export the artifact without being bound by national cultural heritage protections for five years. Before they would grant the license, the Florence Export Office asked him for proof of legal ownership prior to 1909 (the year Italy’s protection of archaeological assets law came into effect) and legal documents proving its original removal from Italy was legitimate.

The suspect hastily withdrew his application, but his shadiness was in the cross-hairs now. The Carabinieri undertook to reconstruct the real transit history of the stele, with the aid of Turkey’s Culture Ministry, Zeugma archaeologists, Interpol and the Italian Culture Ministry’s database of illicitly stolen cultural assets. Meticulous research into the iconography, style, size, materials and soil traces found on the stele confirmed that it was from Zeugma, not Italy.

The stele is an outstanding example of artistic style of Zeugma in the Antonine Period, and archaeologists believe its inscription will shed new light on the history of the ancient city, especially the local families that adopted Latin names after becoming Roman citizens.

Bronze Age “charioteer’s belt” found in Siberian tomb

Ex Cathedra

A rescue archaeology excavation at the site of railroad expansion in the Askizsky region of Khakassia in Siberia has unearthed the grave of a Late Bronze Age man buried wearing a “charioteer’s belt,” a flat bronze plate with two curved hooks at the end reminiscent of a yoke used to harness draft animals. This device is believed to have been used by charioteers to tie their reins to their waists so their hands were free for combat.

The tomb is dated to between the 11th and the 8th century B.C., a time when the Lugav culture was dominant in the area. The site under excavation contains material remains of a cemetery as well as a settlement from this period, and the Lugav barrows in the cemetery can be grouped into three stages — the transition to the Lugav culture, the Lugav middle stage and the late stage, when characteristics from the next culture (Tagar) appear mingled with the Lugav features. The charioteer’s tomb is from the middle stage.

It is a square masonry tomb with an earthen mound built on top of it. The deceased was buried with a bronze knife, bronze jewelry, including a necklace with rectangular pendants typical of Lugav culture, and the belt.

Aleksey Timoshchenko, an archaeologist at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told Live Science in an email that the object was found in its original placement at the waist of the person in the undisturbed grave.

“This fact, along with direct analogies in burial mounds of China, allows us to determine their purpose a little more confidently,” he said.

No chariot remains have been found in Siberian burials from this era, and for years the hooked bronze belt was classified by Russian archaeologists as an unknown object. Its use was identified by comparison with artifacts found in Chinese chariot burials and bronzes from the Zhou Dynasty (11th-3rd century B.C.).

Leonardo’s models take virtual flight

Multimedia, Renaissance

Google Arts & Culture, in collaboration with 28 museums, libraries and historic sites with collections of works by Leonardo da Vinci, has created an online hub dedicated to art, inventions and writings of the great Renaissance polymath. Inside a Genius Mind is the largest online retrospective of Leonardo’s works ever assembled with high-resolution scans of more than 3,000 drawings on 1,300 pages of Leonardo’s notebooks. His sketches, architectural designs, anatomical studies, weapons systems, flying machines and more, many of them never before available online, have been digitized and uploaded to the portal.

The online hub offers visitors a traditional route through Leonardo’s story. You can read his biography, examine his individual paintings in high definition with extensive annotations, and explore the notebooks. You can also find out more about his life and works by accessing the Leonardo Library, browsing categories of knowledge (architecture, anatomy), specific codices and different subjects in his sketches and types of inventions.

One of the world’s foremost experts in Leonardo da Vinci’s oeuvre, University of Oxford art historian Martin Kemp, has been enlisted to help curate the portal, alongside a curation team that includes a Machine Learning element. This curation team organized Leonardo’s notebooks into five themes — Secrets of Flight, Spirals, Earth as a Body, Perpetual Motion and Destruction — to allow users to move through his ideas and creative processes in the same lateral, thought-skipping way Leonardo himself used when he wrote them.

My favorite section is 10 Leonardo Inventions in 3D. Seeing models created from his notebooks has always been a highlight of museum exhibitions dedicated to Leonardo’s genius. It is sheer joy seeing his ideas and sketches converted into realistic 3D animations. The Leocopter, which the colossal bronze statue of him holds in one hand at the entrance to Fiumicino Airport in Rome, and the armoured tank both make the cut.

3D animated model of Leonardo da Vinci's flying machine.

Neolithic blade-polishing boulder found in Valley of the Stones

Ancient

A rare polissoir, a stone used by Neolithic people to sharpen and polish stone axe heads 5,000 years ago, has been discovered in the Valley of Stones National Nature Reserve in Dorset. It is only the second polissoir found undisturbed in situ, known as an “earthfast” stone, in England.

The boulder is a sarsen stone, a form of sandstone best known for its use in Stonehenge and other Neolithic megalithic monuments. Of more than 1,000 sarsen boulders documented in Dorset, only a handful bear the tell-tale evidence of having been used to polish tools.

The presence of the polishing stone was revealed when volunteers cleared the area of vegetation that had grown over the sarsen stones, obscuring them from view. It top surface has a scooped, glossy area created when the edges of the axes were swiped over the spot repeatedly to hone and sharpen them.

Anne Teather and Jim Rylatt, directors of Past Participate CIC a non-profit company that helps people find out more about local heritage, were working in another part of the valley when they decided to stroll over to see how they were getting on.

Rylatt got there first and saw the boulder. “It’s a relatively unprepossessing boulder on one side,” he said. But then he flicked away some leaves and found the shiny, polished area. “It’s safe to say I was surprised. The only other one found in situ in England was found in the 1960s at Fyfield Down [in Wiltshire].” […]

It may be that this was a work area rather than a living one. “There may have been people doing other things here, processing animal skins perhaps, cutting up meat to make dinner.”

Teather said the polissoir was close to an ancient routeway. “You can imagine people coming to the stone to polish axes. This was not necessarily a place of settlement but a place people came to and moved through.”

The area around the stone has now been excavated and analyzed to determine if there is any archaeological material — lithics, organic remains — left by the Neolithic axe makers. The discovery of the polissoir has also spurred Historic England to study the landscape to shed new light on its prehistoric occupation.