FBI repatriates 22 artifacts looted from Okinawa in WWII

The FBI has returned 22 objects and artworks looted during the Battle of Okinawa after they were discovered in a Massachusetts attic. The artifacts were found by a family when they were going through their father’s personal effects after his death. They figured the painted scrolls, pottery, metal figurines and a hand-drawn map of Okinawa were Asian pieces that might be antiques, so they did some online research and found the painted scrolls listed in the FBI’s National Stolen Art File. The family reached out to the FBI and reported the artifacts as potentially looted cultural property and the FBI Boston Field Office initiated an investigation in January of 2023.

They confirmed that the painted scrolls, map, pottery and metal objects were from the Ryukyu Kingdom, a tributary state of China (1429-1875) and vassal state of Japan (1609-1879) that ruled Okinawa until it was formally annexed by the Empire of Japan in 1879. The painted scrolls depict Ryukyu monarchs and date to the 18th and 19th centuries.

The scrolls were very fragile and had to be unrolled by expert conservators to determine if they were the lost scrolls.

The FBI transported the artifacts from Massachusetts to Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, D.C., where the scrolls were unfurled for the first time in many years, revealing portraits of Okinawan royalty in vivid reds, golds, and blue accents.

The FBI compared the scrolls to old black and white photographs taken in the 1940s before they were stolen and identified them as the lost Okinawan paintings. An unsigned, type-written letter found with the collection said they were collected in Okinawa in the last days of World War II. The deceased father was a Word War II veteran, but he never served in the Pacific theater.

[FBI Special Agent Geoffrey} Kelly explained that these artifacts were especially important because they depict Okinawan royalty—and serve as pieces of cultural identity. “A nation’s cultural identity is really summed up in the artifacts and the history,” said Kelly. “This is what makes a culture. And without it, you’re taking away their history. And the surest way to eliminate a culture is to eliminate their past. And so, it’s really important for us as stewards of artifacts and cultural patrimony to make every effort that we can to see that these go back to the civilizations and the cultures in the countries where they belong.”

The National Museum of Asian Art assisted the FBI in ensuring that the artifacts were properly packaged for transport. Colonel Scott DeJesse and U.S. Army Civil Affairs & Psychological Operations Command (Airborne) 38 G Monuments Men and Women led the effort to secure and transport the artifacts to Okinawa Prefecture, Japan. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service provided additional support, and FBI legal attaché office in Tokyo was responsible for the handover of the artifacts in Japan. On March 15, 2024, the official handover took place, and Denny Tamaki, the Governor of Okinawa Prefecture, announced the return of the artifacts.

1,000-year-old bone skate found in Czech Republic

Archaeologists have discovered a 1,000-year-old bone skate in the basement of a house in the central Moravian city of Přerov, Czech Republic. The skate was made of animal bone, likely the metacarpal (shin bone) of a horse. Fragments of pottery found around the blade date it to the 10th or 11th century.

Archaeologists from the Comenius Museum made the discovery during a rescue excavation in the Upper Square of the city. At the time when the skate was made, the Upper Square area was on a hill overlooking the left bank of the Bečva River. There wasn’t a city of Přerov yet, but rather an agglomeration of small settlements dotting the branches of the Bečva. The Upper Square was first a fortified square and then a fortress built by Polish King Boleslav the Brave after his conquest of Moravia in 1003.

Archaeologist Zdeněk Schenk:

“The object has a specific shape. On one side, it is curved into a tip which has a hole drilled in it and there is another hole at the back. They were used to thread a strap through, which was used to attach the skate to a shoe or to a wooden sledge.”

The hole was pierced through the end of the lower end of the metacarpal that connected to the phalanx bone (ie, the toe). The surface of the bone is still polished after a thousand years, suggesting it saw significant use. It is small so was worn by someone with petite feet, perhaps a woman or child. It could also have been mounted under a transport sled instead of a shoe.

“Rather than skating, they would shuffle along the frozen surface with the help of a stick or two. They would also attach the blades to sledges to carry a load of goods across the frozen water.”

Similar ice skates made from animal bones have been found in other parts of central and northwestern Europe. They typically date to around the same time — 10th or 11th century. Far older examples dating back 3,500 years have been found in China.

The bone skate will go on display at the Comenius Museum in Přerov Castle.

Neolithic burial mounds found in Magdeburg, Germany

A series of Neolithic burial mounds from different periods have been discovered at Magdeburg in the eastern German state Saxony-Anhalt. The site is being excavated by the State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt (LDA) before construction of two new Intel semiconductor plants. Excavations began in 2023 and are scheduled to end in April.

The 300 hectare large industrial park also partially includes a small hill, known as Eulenberg. Although not particularly high, it divides the otherwise relatively low-relief Börde landscape, whose fertile loess and black earth soils were an important factor for settlement already during the early Neolithic period. The area currently examined turned out to be a highly complex, long-used burial and ritual landscape.

The mounds were built by people of the Baalberg Culture (4100–3600 B.C.) approximately 6,000 years ago. They are about 200 meters (656 feet) away from each other and each contain wooden burial chambers with the remains of several people. The burial chambers are 65 feet and 98 feet long. Today the mounds are heavily eroded, but when they were first built and for many millennia afterwards, they would have dominated the landscape.

The mounds were still a sacred site 1,000 years later. The passageway between them was used by people of the Globular Amphora Culture (3300–2800 B.C.) as a funerary procession route. The skeletal remains of young cattle were found buried in pairs along this path. They were offerings of the community’s most valuable belongings to the gods.

Another thousand years later, the site was modified with a palisade ditch following the course of the corridor between the mounds but including the larger of the two mounds. About 600 meters (1968 feet) away a group of smaller burial mounds were built by people of the Corded Ware Culture (ca. 2800-2050 B.C.). So this one small site had ritual significance to different peoples for more than 2,000 years.

Bodleian acquires rare Bach manuscript

Johann Sebastian Bach, 1685–1750 Cantata 'Auf Christi Himmelfahrt allein', BWV 128 [1725]. Photo courtesy the Bodleian Libraries.The University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries have acquired a rare autograph manuscript by German Baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach. One of only four manuscripts in the UK written in Bach’s hand, the document was accepted by the government in lieu of £3.65 million in inheritance taxes.

Also known as the Kohn manuscript after collector Sir Ralph Kohn who fled Nazi Germany for England in 1940, the 16-page manuscript is Bach’s composition of his cantata for the feast of the Ascension Day, May 10, 1725: “Auf Christi Himmelfahrt Allein.” This is the only surviving working manuscript of this cantata and it is the complete score. The music would not be printed until 1878.

Kohn had previously loaned the manuscript for exhibition at Buckingham Palace in the early 2000s. He died in 2016 and his widow Zahava inherited his collection. She has now passed away as well and her heirs paid the tax bill with the manuscript.

The short, festive cantata, which lasts less than 20 minutes in performance, is scored for two horns, three different types of oboe, trumpet, strings and continuo, with four-part chorus, and alto, tenor and bass soloists. Its five movements comprise a celebratory opening chorus, a short recitative and aria for bass voice, a duet for alto and tenor, ending with a simple chorale. The music for this cantata was all new, which is relatively unusual for Bach who frequently recycled and adapted movements from his other compositions. The music for many of his cantatas has not survived at all.

The manuscript comprises four large-format bifolia (16 pages), handwritten by the composer himself in brown and black ink. The title is written above the first page of music: ‘Festo Ascensionis Xsti, Auff Christi Himmelfahrt allein’, preceded by Bach’s personal epigraph ‘J.J.’, which stands for ‘Jesu Juva’ (‘Jesus, Help’). This is Bach’s composing score, a working document in which the composer made many corrections and revisions, especially in the opening chorus. The manuscript also contains some annotations by Bach’s eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann, and a few faint pencil marks made by the printers as they prepared the work for its first publication in 1878.

As Cantor of the Thomasschule in Leipzig, Bach was expected to compose a new cantata for practically every Sunday of the church year, as well as special festivals like Ascension Day. Much of the writing betrays signs of great haste: for example, bar lines straggle down pages and there is little attempt to maintain the vertical alignment of the different parts. It is also interesting to see how Bach achieves his alterations by a variety of means: sometimes by scratching out the text with a pin, or simply by crossing through with his pen. The smudges made accidentally by his hand or sleeve before the ink was dry add a personal touch to the manuscript. Occasionally, where Bach has deleted notes or passages and heavily gone over various sections with his pen, the acidic ink has eroded the paper. This is unfortunately a common problem with the surviving Bach autographs, but this example is better than most, presenting fairly limited signs of erosion.

Characteristically, Bach does his best to condense the maximum amount of music into the minimum space, keen to avoid wasting valuable paper wherever possible. Every corner of the page is filled, the music flowing right to the edge. The dramatic immediacy on the page and the evident haste in which the composer wrote down his music, impart a sense of urgency and creative energy to Bach’s scores, which are often extremely beautiful in their own right. This manuscript is no exception.

The Kohn manuscript went on display March 15th in the Weston Library’s Treasury as part of the Write, Cut, Rewrite exhibition which runs through January 5, 2025. The full manuscript has been digitized and uploaded to the library’s online collection, Digital Bodleian. A performance of the work to celebrate the 300th anniversary of its first performance in 1725 is being planned.

Well-preserved Ming Dynasty tomb found in Shanxi

A well-preserved tomb from the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) has been unearthed in Xinzhou city, Shanxi province, North China. The tomb is more than 430 years old, but its contents are intact and in excellent condition, including the wooden coffin and elaborate funerary furniture. It is rare for a tomb in such good condition with well-preserved wooden furnishings to survive in Shanxi.

The Shanxi Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology discovered the tomb when excavating sites in coordination with a highway construction project. The excavations have uncovered the remains of structures from the Longshan Period (2900-2100 B.C.) and the Warring States Period (475-221 BC), and 66 tombs from the Han, Tang, Jin, Yuan and Ming and Qing dynasties.

Among them was an intact Ming Dynasty tomb discovered on the west terrace of Hexitou village in Xinzhou’s Xinfu district. It is a brick chamber tomb 83 feet long from east to west and 21 feet wide from north to south, with a sloping entry passageway 66 feet long ending in a gatehouse with a pair of heavy doors. The gate is stone carved to imitate a wood structure. Two dragon heads look outwards on each end of the roof. The stone slabs above and on each side of the doors are carved with florals.

Inside, the tomb consists of a main chamber, a smaller back chamber and two niches, one on the north side, one of the south, of the main chamber. The niches contain porcelain vessels. There are four jars and five bowls. The vessels are filled with grains, liquid or a lipid. The main chamber is paved with bricks. Grains are piled at the four corners of the room and in seven other spots.

In the middle of the main room are two wood coffins. The smaller one has collapsed outer panels and inscriptions on the lid. A porcelain vessel, an amulet and a porcelain bowl were placed on the cover. The inner coffin is in good condition and painted with flowers, grasses and birds in brilliant colors. The larger of the two has a well-preserved outer coffin painted with diamond-shaped patterns in gold against a tan background.

The smaller chamber is furnished with wooden altars, tables, chairs, candlesticks, lampstands, incense burners, tin pots, tin cups, tin plates, painted wooden figurines, inkstones, brushes, pen holders and other writing utensils.

On the north wall of the entry passage near the doors is an epitaph which reads: “The epitaph of the prince of Ming Confucian Hou’an… Gongbaluo, whose courtesy name is Benyi, is also the nickname of Hou’an… Hou Xingong Rongxian, the clansman Those who have borrowed money to become prosperous should not be arrogant, and they should change their appearance and courtesy when meeting people of all ages.” Another inscription on the wall is a land purchase certificate. From the epitaph and certificate, archaeologists have identified the occupant of the tomb as Wang Luo, a famous eunuch king of Xinzhou in the Ming Dynasty. He was born in 1533 and died in 1588.