I’ve mentioned a number of cases where Christian groups are being banned by universities on one pretext or another.  Of course, in a secular way, such persecution is disgusting.

But if we look at it from the perspective of eternity, it looks very different.

God is allowing these hateful and malicious persons to reveal themselves.  He is allowing them to target the real Christians on campus.  And He is allowing them to say, thereby, “These are the real Christians, the ones whom the world hates.  These are the ones who are despised, who won’t conform, who we fear and hate.”  He is making the world proclaim the truth of the Gospel.

Most universities have a range of groups onsite which call themselves Christian.  These range from chaplaincy groups, to denominational societies, down to groups of unbelievers with a religious bent.  Quite often, the unbelievers point to these, and ask rhetorically, “why do you think you’re special?”

But now God has allowed a persecution to take place.  And … some are found worthy, and some are not.  And the judgement is proclaimed on university noticeboards, and in the press.

Praise God that Exeter University Christian Union was found worthy a couple of years ago.  And that the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship at Tufts University has been found worthy as well.

Always good to see God vindicating his name!

SourceFlix has just released a new video short, “Follow Me,” with some great footage of sheep and shepherds.

Hezekiah’s Pool (aka Patriarch’s Pool) in the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem has long been a swampy dump. The area was cleared last year and recently it held what Tom Powers believes is the first public gathering in its history.

Wayne Stiles: Beersheba epitomizes the faith God required to live in the Holy Land….God used this unassuming, barren place to shape some of the most significant lives in the Bible.

Heavy rains in the Eilat mountains and southern Aravah led to flooding of the Hai-Bar Yotvata Nature Reserve. Workers safely evacuated animals in danger of drowning.

Peter James answers some difficult questions about the Step Pyramid of Saqqara and the Bent Pyramid of Dashur based on his years of repairing damaged structures in Egypt.

The Penn Museum is opening to visitors its conservation process of ancient Egyptian mummies.

Back issues of Christian History magazine are available as free pdf files.

Here is what looks to be like an interesting lecture this evening (in Hebrew): “The Tomb of David on Mount Zion? Pierotti's Cave?”
Amit Reem, IAA. At the Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem, 7:30pm. Free with museum admission.

HT: Jack Sasson

The Bent Pyramid of Dashur

The Department of Anthropology at the University of Northern British Columbia recently finished excavating the remains of an ancient fishing village on the Babine river 100km northeast of Smithers. The project was part of a continuing partnership between the Department, the University, and the Lake Babine Nation (LBN).

“We recovered a tremendous amount of interesting data, including over 400 artefacts made from stone, bone, bark and metal,” says UNBC Anthropology Professor Farid Rahemtulla who directed the project. “The nature of these materials indicates potentially a large time span of use for the house, from ancient times to European contact and into more recent times.”

One of many long houses

A crew including several UNBC student volunteers spent six weeks in July, August, and September excavating the remains of one of the many long houses at the ancient fishing village.

“Contributing to such a project at an undergraduate level was extremely valuable in developing skills and experiencing the time, work, and emotions that are put into a project,” says UNBC Anthropology student Delaney Prysnuk. “Understanding and applying the concepts and politics that we are taught in class in a real life situation is very important.”

1300 year old settlement

In 2010, the village was the focus of UNBC’s Archaeology Field School, which revealed that the settlement was at least 1,300 years old. As a result of those findings, the LBN invited the Department to conduct a more research-intensive excavation, funded by the LBN Treaty Office.

Lake Babine Nation expressed its appreciation for the efforts of Dr. Rahemtulla and said it is pleased to see the protocol agreement between Lake Babine and UNBC resulting in such mutually beneficial projects.  “These findings confirm the histories that our elders have passed on to us,” says Chief Wilfred Adam of Lake Babine Nation. “It is gratifying to see multi-year projects such as this one moving ahead. We look forward to working with UNBC on many more projects in the future.”

Dr. Rahemtulla says the next step will be to conduct a number of analyses, and some of the UNBC graduate students on the crew will use the information for their thesis research. When the results become available, the group plans to publish the work and give public presentations about the project.

Source: University of Northern British Columbia

More Information

Lake Babine Nation website

For Archaeology News – Archaeology Research – Archaeology Press Releases

interdīco, interdīcere, interdīxī, interdīxus: forbid
Interdīco (forbid) gets a note of it’s own in A&G because it’s case constructions have varied over time.

• Earlier writers present interdīco + dative Person & ablative Thing Forbidden
• Later writers use interdīco + dative Person & accusative Thing Forbidden

Exempla

• They forbade him fire and water: aquā et īgnī eō interdīxērunt.*
• Shall we forbid the women from wearing purple: fēminīs purpurae ūsū interdīcēmus?
• He forbade the actors from appearing on the stage: histriōnibus scaenam accedere interdīxit.

*This was the standard formally for expressing ‘he is banished’

Also, I discovered during the construction of this post that ‘forbid’ is never the past tense of the English ‘forbid.’ It is usually ‘forbade’ and rarely ‘forbad.’ I hope I wasn’t the only person making this mistake… for 21 years…

The Essential AG: 365n1

As loyal readers of this blog know, tomorrow is the fourth annual Cyprus Research Fund Lecture. The arrival of Dimitri Nakassis from the Department of Classic at the University of Toronto in the great state of North Dakota will official increase the number of (traditionally trained) professional classicists, ancient historians, and art historians in the state by 33% (at least by my count).

The talk is at 4pm CST in the luxurious and exotic East Asia Room in the magnificent Chester Fritz Library on campus. The talk is so huge, that it has appeared on the University of North Dakota’s homepage and in a Marilyn Hagerty column.

If you can’t make it to campus to hear the talk, do not fear! You can watch the talk LIVE on the INTERNETS. I would love to see an active and interested online audience.

Here’s the flyer:

The talk is sponsored by the Department of History and the Cyprus Research Fund. For those of you who don’t know, the Cyprus Research Fund began as a fund supported by a loyal group of private donors who are committed to expanding the presence of Mediterranean Archaeology (and related fields) on campus and providing opportunities for University of North Dakota students to get field work experience abroad. Since its beginnings, however, the Fund has sponsored a wide range of related activities. In fact, its first impact was the purchase of server space for digital and new media projects on campus (and this server space ultimately contributed to founding of the Working Group in Digital and New Media). It has also funded eight speakers or exhibits on campus, three artist in residence on Cyprus, and helped to fund over 10 UND students time in Cyprus. This past year the Cyprus Research Fund co-sponsored the publication of a small book documenting the history and architecture of the oldest standing wood-framed church in town before it was demolished. The book was written by a University of North Dakota Doctor of the Arts student Chris Price and is titled The Old Church on Walnut Street: A Story of Immigrants and Evangelicals.

Here’s a snazzy book mark:

One last thing, if you are in Grand Forks, you need to check out the Arts and Culture Conference: Binary Inventions. There’s a panel discussion today at 3:30 pm in the Memorial Union and tonight at 7:30 (with a 7:00 reception) the fabulous Empire Theater. Be sure to check out the closing reception at the Third Street tomorrow night at 7 pm.

Richard Mourdock, a Republican candidate running to represent Indiana in the Senate, has caused a great deal of controversy with a remark he made in the context of a discussion of whether abortion should be allowed for rape victims. His reply included the following:

I know that there are some who disagree and I respect their point of view but I believe that life begins at conception. The only exception I have to have an abortion is in that case of the life of the mother. I struggled with it myself for a long time but I came to realize that life is a gift from God, and I think that even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape that it is something God intended to happen.

Here is a video, lest it be suggested that his words are being misrepresented:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Not surprisingly, Mourdock’s opponents have pounced on the statement, and Mourdock himself has been quick to try to offer qualifications. He subsequently said:

What I said was, in answering the question form my position of faith, I said I believe that God creates life. I believe that as wholly and as fully as I can believe it. That God creates life. Are you trying to suggest that somehow I think that God pre-ordained rape? No, I don’t think that. That’s sick. Twisted. That’s not even close to what I said. What I said is that God creates life.

The lesson? It is advisable to figure out your theology before running for office. The problem is that, while Christians with unreflective theological views of the sort Mourdock holds regularly speak about God being in control in all things, or God being the one who creates life, they (1) do not give any thought to how to reconcile that with the natural causes they also accept as being at work, and (2) often balk at saying that God is responsible when bad things happen.

The result is an incoherent mess that leaves people offering meaningless platitudes which conservative Christians would say “Amen” too, only to find themselves apologizing for them and backtracking on them soon afterwards if pressed.

If what you mean is that something good can come out of even something tragic or evil, then say that and not words which don’t mean that.

Perhaps something good will emerge from the mess that Mourdock has gotten himself into with his statement. Perhaps he and others will actually decide it is finally worth the time to think about what they believe God does and how they believe God does it, and not just continue repeating traditional phrases and language which, when pressed, they say they don’t actually mean.

If you don’t think so, you’ve clearly never looked at them carefully:

No human being should have the power to obliterate anything from the beginning of time…

We’ve been referring to the Homo floresiensis as the ‘Hobbit’ since its discovery, but now it seems that the estate of J. R. R. Tolkien is legally blocking the use of the term – by preventing a public lecture in New Zealand to use the word ‘Hobbit’.

photo: Mamoritai

Hobbit makers ban uni from using ‘hobbit’
3News, 24 October 2012

Be careful how you use the ‘H’ word’ – it’s the latest taboo in the English language.

A New Zealand scientist has been legally banned from using the word ‘hobbit’ to describe a group of miniature humanoids who lived on an Indonesian island tens of thousands of years ago.

Victoria University’s Brent Alloway has organised a free public lecture on Homo floresiensis, a species closely related to humans which lived on Flores Island, but has been told he is not allowed to call the free public lecture ‘The Other Hobbit’.

The volcanologist wrote to the estate of Hobbit author JRR Tolkein about the event on December 1 as a courtesy, but was told by Wellington lawyers AJ Park representing the estate that he was not allowed to use the word.
Mr Alloway says scientists have been using the term to describe the species ever since its discovery in 2003.

Full story here.

By Laurent Dissard

The southeastern provinces of Turkey will soon be home to a series of new, state-of-the-art, archaeology museums. Such buildings are being (or have already been) planned, constructed, remodeled, or expanded. The Gaziantep Museum, for instance, houses many of the Roman mosaics of Zeugma unearthed before the construction of the Birecik Dam. Other mosaics, discovered during the expansion of Şanlıurfa’s sewage system, will be displayed in an Arkeopark near the city center.

Diyarbakır, a third city in southeastern Turkey, is not lagging behind. Work is underway to transform its citadel (içkale) into an archaeology museum. Recent finds at sites threatened by the Ilısu Dam will make up a large part of its collection. Hence, the displaced antiquities will slowly find their ways to a new home. A win-win situation for Turkey, it would seem. As the country develops its infrastructure, investing in dams, roads, and sewage systems, it is simultaneously seen as protecting its past. A paradox, nevertheless, since it is these attempts to modernize that are threatening the country’s cultural heritage in the first place.

A view from Diyarbakır’s içkale

With its citadel now being converted into a space where visitors will be able to contemplate the carefully selected and sanitized representatives of the region’s rich archaeology, the city of Diyarbakır makes a particularly interesting site to think about Cultural Heritage in the Near East, the October theme of this ASOR Blog. But, what kind of cultural heritage will the new museum display? Other museums in Turkey suggest that the emphasis will be placed on the city’s “10,000-year-old” past. In this historical narrative, cities (such as Diyarbakır) usually trace their roots back to the Neolithic. Through the centuries and millennia, different civilizations have come and gone, each leaving behind a constitutive piece of the city’s mosaic of identity.

 What other stories are left out of this narrative?

In a recent New York Times article, Susanne Güsten writes about the contested heritage and “violent history” of the citadel. In the 1990s, the içkale was used as the headquarters of the Turkish army in its fight against the PKK (Kurdistan Worker’s Party). Today, Güsten explains, the “notorious prison, complete with torture chambers,” is still very much present and visible. How will this dark period of the city’s recent history be memorialized? Can a commemorative plaque, to mark the spot so to say, have enough explanatory and cathartic power? Should a separate museum be dedicated to these tragic events? Or, will it be easier to conceal these more recent memories for now, by simply shifting the emphasis to the seemingly more a-political objects of the Neolithic and Iron Age?

Indeed, contested heritage seldom feels at home in archaeological museums.

Efforts made by the pro-Kurdish Diyarbakır municipality over the past ten years have blurred the answers to these questions. By including Kurdish (as well as other ethnic and religious groups‘) heritage in their cultural policies, the city’s identity has been transformed. With these “activists in office,” to use Nicole Watts’ term, Newroz (the “Kurdish” New Year) has become more colorful each spring. Festivals celebrating Kurdish folklore have grown in popularity. Cultural centers, where the Diyarbakır youth studies Kurdish music and dance, have been thriving. Another tradition has also been revived. The dengbêjs are professional storytellers, elderly men, for the most part, who recite epic poetry in Kurdish memorized at a very young age. Themes range from the past heroic tales of warriors to the impossible romance of lovers. Filled with allusions to more contemporary affairs, their accounts can often take on a larger political dimension.

In the early 1960s, the tradition began to be frowned upon and was prohibited in Turkey. The dengbêjs thus embarked on a long period of imposed silence. In the 1980s, as villagers in southeastern Turkey, caught between the army and the PKK, began flocking to cities, many of them landing in Diyarbakır looking for safety and jobs, the tradition lost even more ground. Diyarbakır’s population has increased dramatically from 150,000 in the 1970s to at least 1,500,000 today. The internally displaced people moved to the poorest areas of Diyarbakır, in the outskirts of the city or in the center’s many gecekondus (a Turkish word for shanty that literally means “landed overnight”). Problems related to housing, health, and education followed the massive urban migration. Today, if a feeling of normality has returned, many social issues linger on.

After a 40-year hiatus, an ancient tradition has been revived, reinvented.

The rural exodus has profoundly altered traditional Kurdish life. As a remnant of village society that simply did not seem to fit within this modern configuration, the dengbêjs almost disappeared in the overpopulated cities. With the help of European Union funding, however, the municipality would allocate a refurbished traditional Diyarbakır house, built with the city’s characteristic black stones, to the dengbêjs in 2003. A “museum” dedicated to storytelling would see the light of day. Situated in the city center, the large open courtyard of the house makes an ideal place for the old “oral poets” to meet, drink tea, and chat. Occasionally, when visitors do enter the enclosure, these bards will very enthusiastically recite a few verses for them.

Perhaps, this constitutes a different kind of cultural heritage than archaeologists are used to. Oftentimes, a modern nation will stress concrete evidence and material objects to collectively imagine its past splendors. Here, we have a more malleable form of cultural heritage; spoken words barely audible among the noise of the urban sprawl. This more intangible type of cultural heritage has nevertheless also been used for national self-identification. Deprived of written archives, some within the Kurdish “imagined community” cling on to this link between their past and their present. Kurdish collective memory seems to be safely “archived” inside the mind of the dengbêjs who can perform these stories on demand to Kurds and non-Kurds alike. If they cannot offer a comprehensive national history, they constitute a great source of pride for Kurds.

The archaeology museum and the dengbêj house seem diametrically opposed.

In Diyarbakır’s new archaeology museum, the past will (most likely) be presented chronologically. Neatly ordered from earliest to latest, eras will follow one another in a continuous display of time. In the house, however, a contrasting temporality prevails. The dengbêjs adopt a distinctive strategy vis-à-vis time. They recite stories by lingering on certain events, improvising shortcuts, adding details now and then. In contrast to the museum’s apparent tidiness, narratives at the dengbêj house are fragmented, interrupted, and, sometimes, even forgotten.

The archaeology museum, on the one hand, will present the past through inanimate things. Protected behind glass, the objects will seem both distant and silent. On the other hand, the dengbêjs are “museum pieces” that talk back, answer questions, and drink tea with the visitors. Their voices embody the past. When dengbêjs recite, they engage their whole body to recall hidden memories, sometimes bringing themselves and the spectators to tears. In contrast to a sterile, air-conditioned museum, the dengbêj house is filled with sounds and emotions.

A view of the dengbêj house

Archaeological museums offer the promise of a cultural heritage forever preserved. In stark opposition, each dengbêj is a reminder that the past, like life itself, is ephemeral. If archaeology museums constantly need to reinvent themselves to attract visitors, the house rarely encounters this problem. As guests enter dengbêj territory and hear a first verse, their senses are immediately captured and become devoted to the recitations. Visitors are only allowed to return to their normal state at the end of the story. Behind museum doors, objects can lose much of their vitality. But, in the mouth of a dengbêj, the past takes a life of its own, mediated, improvised, and constantly reinvented by these modern-day storytellers.

 Undoubtedly, the archaeology museums in southeastern Turkey will be impressive. Like the new Ankara Civilizations Museum in the planning for the 100^th year anniversary of the Turkish Republic in 2023, they will use the latest digital technologies, be connected to new global networks of tourism, attract more and more visitors, and might even become financially sustainable. As I think about these new archaeology museums, however, I wonder if any of them will ever be able to transmit the past to future generations the way a small group of old Kurdish bards does in Diyarbakır’s dengbêj house.

Dengbej Boyaxci

 Laurent Dissard received his Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley and is currently an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. 

~~~

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African nations’ cultural objects have been harvested by foreign powers; attacked by religious movements and political factions; and, sometimes under duress, reduced to commodities and sacrificed for subsistence or survival. Still now, Nigerian ‘archaeological sites’ are ‘daily looted’; as Neil Brodie observed, nearly half of the objects on the International Council of Museums’ (ICOM) list of African ‘cultural goods most affected by looting and theft‘ are Nigerian artefacts.

In this post, I want to outline the nature of the illicit trade in Nigerian antiquities, and of the struggle against that trade. But it is tl;dr… (Also, evidently, scheduled posting is broken.)

Smashing and stealing: colonial plunderers, religious zealots, political activists and modern pirates

Africa

During the colonial period, a ‘priceless portion’ of the cultural heritage of many oppressed peoples was ‘robbed’, ‘plunder[ed]‘, ‘despoiled’. Simultaneously, foreign, “civilising missions” destroyed non-Christian ritual objects.

After independence, ‘greed[y]‘ ‘modern pirates‘ continued to plunder vulnerable cultural heritage sites around the world; and they continued to indulge in ‘large-scale theft and pillaging‘ at African archaeological sites, monuments and museums. And alongside the chronic problem of theft, there have been programmes of destruction – for instance, the Apartheid regime’s ‘war and destabilization’/'total strategy’ against guerrilla resistance, which involved destruction of churches, mosques and villages.

Nigeria

In Nigeria, local community Muslim iconoclasts have smashed idols, and looted for non-ideological profit. Primarily African Christian evangelists have smashed cultural objects (indeed, one evangelist leader, Uma Ukpai, ‘has boasted of overseeing the destruction of more than 100 shrines in one district in December 2005 alone’); and they have committed pillage-as-sacrilege. In addition to these activities, communities have been gouged by economic forces; they have been forced to tear their archaeological heritage out of the ground and sell it in order to subsist.

This family-splitting mess of motives and acts has happened in the context of ten coups and military junta rule between 1966 and 1979, and 1983 and 1998; and it is now happening in the context of a ‘war‘ between the secular state and Islamist militants striving to establish a Shari’ah state. Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram (whose name means “Western Education is Sinful”) have ‘claimed responsibility for bombing churches‘; Nigerian security forces have burned villages, and police have chosen not to stop other violence. In disturbances tied to elections, political factions have burned down churches and mosques.

An example of colonial plunder: the 1897 Benin Punitive Expedition

The looting of (now-)Nigerian antiquities began long before the birth of the independent Federation of Nigeria in 1960. In 1897, British rogue agents ignored requests and warnings not to interrupt a religious festival, and tried to plan an unauthorised invasion of the Kingdom of Benin to depose the king (oba).

The agents ‘hope[d] that sufficient ivory would be found in the King’s house to pay the expenses incurred in removing the King from his stool’. But the rogue force was literally stopped dead in its tracks. On the 4th of January, tribal chiefs ‘defied‘ the oba’s orders and committed the Benin Massacre (of 9 British officers and 250 African mercenaries).

Then, Britain decided to retaliate against the Kingdom of Benin for its insubordinate chiefs’ massacre of Britain’s insubordinate and aggressive soldiers. On the 10th of February, the British Admiralty sent British Marines and Niger Coast Protectorate troops on the Benin Punitive Expedition, to burn down and demolish Benin’s villages, its (religious) Juju houses and its (royal) palace; and to loot its cultural property, to pillage blood antiquities.

The conquest of Benin City began on the 18th of February; and, on the 21st, they ‘torched the city and burnt down practically every house’. British Marines plundered 900-1,000 ‘bronze plaques‘ (actually, brass plaques) from the king’s palace; and, in total (including other bronze, iron, ivory and wooden artefacts), they looted at least nearly 2,500, reportedly more than 3,000, pieces of cultural property. Absurdly, the plundered property was auctioned in Paris to cover the cost of its plunder; and the material is now scattered across Europe and North America.(1)

There are hints that the power relationship between Nigeria and market countries prevents Nigeria recovering its property from self-identified universal museums, which can provide or withhold programmes of capacity-building (for the preservation of cultural heritage still in Nigeria).

An example of museum robbery(?): ten terracottas and a piece of carved ivory

At least up until the 1990s, Nigerian museums had no alarms and no insurance, as well as impoverished employees. Thieves and a less-than-$3-a-day-waged museum guard took 200 million (perhaps 250 million) dollars’ worth of artefacts from the National Museum in Ile-Ife in a single heist; and it was robbed repeatedly. Thieves have ‘viciously attacked‘ and even ‘killed‘ museum staff.

According to the Director-General of the National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM), Mallam Yusuf Abdallah Usman (paraphrased by Tajudeen Sowole), Nigeria has ‘not recorded any theft of antiquities from its collections‘ since 1996. (Instead, the NCMM and reporting journalist Tajudeen Sowole have suggested that the objects could have been ‘loot[ed]‘ in historic or contemporary ‘illegal excavations‘ in northern Nigeria.)

First of all, it is immediately implausible that nothing has been stolen from any museum in Nigeria in the last sixteen years because, just in the last three years, there have been robberies of museums from Turkey, to Greece, to the United Kingdom, to the Netherlands, to India…

Second, Usman denied any thefts in response to an official statement by Nigeria’s own Consul-General in New York, Habib Baba Habu, that ten Nok terracotta statues and one piece of carved ivory had been ‘stolen from the National Museum‘ (and smuggled through Senegal and France into the United States), but (with my emphasis) that ‘there [had been] no such report from Nigeria that the items [had been] stolen’ (via Paul Barford).

Sources disagreed over whether there was an investigation into the Director-General of the National Museum or into the Director-General of Museums and Antiquities (that is, the Director-General of the National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM)). Nonetheless, Consul-General Habu stated that the (unnamed, possibly former) director-general was under investigation ‘because the items were in storage, inventories under his care’ (though the time of their theft is not publicly known).

Habu stated that the identities of the perpetrators ‘were known but would not be divulged’ until they had investigated the entire criminal network. Based upon the career trajectories of the people in the relevant positions at the relevant times, this could implicate some of the most senior cultural heritage professionals in the country.

Despite the public secrecy over the suspected time of the theft and the suspected identities of the perpetrators, and the public secrecy or simple confusion over the suspected identity of the responsible museum director, now-NCMM Director-General Usman has ‘denied being investigated as the [Consul]-General in the U.S. alleged’. Since no-one has been arrested, it is not clear how Usman can know that he is not under investigation.

Site digging

Village farmers are even more impoverished than museum guards; some farmers are forced to subsist on half-a-dollar-a-day. So, even larger than the robbery business is the digging economy.

Knowledge of Nok terracottas grew between the 1920s and 1960s. Then there was the famine-inducing Nigerian Civil War (or Nigerian-Biafran War) of 1967-1970; and when, in the 1970s, Nigeria began to suffer recurrent, severe droughts and floods, it also began to suffer chronic, large-scale looting and smuggling.

Now, according to the UNDP/UNICEF, the mean average income in Nigeria is about $5.50-$6 a day.(3)(4) However, 64% of Nigerians survive on less than $1.25 a day (N197) (5); 41% of under-fives suffer stunted growth; 14% suffer wasting; and 9% are severely underweight.

Itinerant antiquities traders travel from village to village, either buying already-found objects or supporting new searches (including to supply specialist orders); commonly, they pay about N1,000 (~$6) for every ‘good find’; and the diggers find around ten terracottas a day, but sometimes the traders pay the villagers two or more months’ wages for one antiquity. Naturally, when they do, this triggers an explosion in digging. A primary school teacher (and after-school digger), Abubakar Sala, observed ‘[f]armers let their crops rot because they were too busy digging for terra-cotta‘.

To get around the laws licensing excavation and export of antiquities, some looters and dealers have become ‘Accreditation Agents in mining‘; they pretend to dig for minerals, while actually unearthing artefacts. (Aside from the metaphor, I think that is why some reports talk about ‘artefact mines’.)

In 1993, a ‘consortium of European dealers‘ directed ‘many hundreds of diggers’. In 1994, a group of (seemingly local) traders oversaw thousands of diggers at one village; after police/army intervention disrupted that group’s endeavours, a couple of traders employed a thousand diggers each until the site’s archaeological resources were exhausted; then, between 1994 and 1995, they mined out site after site. And there has even been an increase in illicit excavations since then.

Those traders sell those objects to or through tourist markets in Nigeria and warehouses abroad, using government-licensed “handicrafts” and “contemporary arts”(2) as a cover for antiquities; and using the entire visible enterprise as a cover for under-the-counter (or behind-the-shop) sales of high-value goods. Specialist Nigerian dealers supply dealers, galleries, museums and collectors elsewhere in Africa, and in Europe and North America. Allied with and/or alongside these routes from source to market, there is online trading.

The whole body of material is riddled with over-restored pieces, or outright fakes/forgeries, some of which have doctored or completely fraudulent scientific authentications. (Archaeometrist Victor Bortolot has described the forgery process.)

Site protection

The Nigerian National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM) has reformed its anti-smuggling laws so that its antiquities inspectors can ‘search and arrest [suspects], with or without warrant’, and prosecute them; has instituted public ‘sensitisation programmes’ (which through police interference, community intervention and/or economic potential, have proved effective); and has arranged ’600 security and craftsmen’ to protect Nigerian archaeological sites (though it awaits funding) (via Paul Barford).

The Senate Committee on Culture and Tourism has called for the establishment of a dedicated department to combat antiquities trafficking, which would include (or involve, in parallel) expert staff at border points and extra staff for the NCMM, for both standard archaeological work and anti-trafficking activity (via Chasing Aphrodite). NCMM Director-General Usman wants to establish culture – especially cultural heritage – as ‘part of the development agenda’.

Less reassuringly, the NCMM has also made ‘thinly-veiled legal threat[s]‘ against cultural heritage professionals who have highlighted the ‘crisis in Nigerian antiquities’…

Artefact rescue

At the same time, because Usman believes that archaeological resources ‘cannot be allowed to remain outside the protection of the National Commission for Museums and Monuments’, the NCMM purchases looted artefacts from ‘registered antiquity vendors’ in order ‘to prevent the objects from being sold to foreigners and private collectors’.

Some international cultural heritage professionals support similar ideas, such as conservator Patrick Darling, who has advocated a ‘temporary amnesty on all Nigerian antiquities in Europe‘. However, it resembles the Cypriot amnesty incredibly closely, and unfortunately I expect it would be equally unsuccessful.

Yet, ‘due to dwindling financial resources’, the buy-back programme is dysfunctional even on its own terms. The NCMM is still acquiring objects, while negotiating compensation with the antiquities dealers, and applying for compensation funds from the federal government. The Artefacts Rescuers Association of Nigeria is apparently owed N190m ($1.2m) (via Culture Advocates Caucus).

“Rescuer” Reverend Akindele said that the NCMM always owed money, and always tried to pay less than it owed, so it ‘destroyed [rescuers'] capital’. Tajudeen Sowole thus speculated that ‘some desperate rescuers’ (‘some of whom could be illegal artefacts dealer[s]‘) could illegally export their archaeological finds and sell them on the international black market in order to restore their lost capital.

Artefact recovery

Reluctantly advising against the return of cultural property to Nigeria, the former Honorary Surveyor of Antiquities for Nigeria and Archaeologist and Curator of Ife Museum, Prof. Frank Willett, complained that his successors were ‘not only not taking care of their heritage, but… exploiting [it] by allowing its illicit export to dealers and collectors in the West‘.

Indeed, journalist Sara Persson observed that even previously-returned objects, ‘especially [in] Nigeria, [had] disappear[ed] or end[ed] up being re-sold on the black market‘.

In fact, ‘a top source close to the National Museum management’, ‘a very experienced manager of antiquities’, told the Guardian (Nigeria) that the NCMM had stopped the inventorying of archaeological artefacts and the recording of clearance permits, not as an austerity measure, but in order ‘to allow for more looting‘ by the country’s “rescuers”.

Conclusions

Despite the theoretically strict (1979) National Commission for Museums and Monuments Act, European and North American private antiquities collectors continued to drive the ‘systematic rape‘ of Nigeria’s archaeological heritage for almost 40 years, from the 1960s through to the 2000s; and there is still ‘[g]overnment indifference’ and ‘[c]orruption at the top’, as well as a simple lack of cultural heritage professionals and ‘proper policing’.

Practically stricter export laws have made illicit export more difficult; and the forgery industry has made collecting less appealing. So, the simplest problems in Nigeria are implementation and enforcement: effective law enforcement could target those few key traders and stem the flow of artefacts.

Nonetheless, the greatest threat to Nigeria’s cultural heritage has been, is and will remain economic. Recently, the Boko Haram insurgency has caused a farming-and-herding refugee crisis, which has exacerbated an existing food crisis; and now that there has been yet another flood, famine is looming over the country once more. There is a threat of a fearful humanitarian crisis, which may have awful cultural (and long-term economic) consequences.

Notes

Unfortunately, not all of the data are from the same time period (e.g. 1990s illicit antiquities market research; 2000s poverty research; etc.); but far more unfortunately, there is no sign of significant change in either market or poverty (nor of any change in the relationship between poverty and looting).

Footnotes

1: According to legal adviser Dr. Kwame Opoku (via Elginism), (some of) the Benin Bronzes are in:

• England, in
  • the British Museum (which had between 700 and 900, 203 of which had been received from the British Colonial Office in 1898; however, between 1950 and 1972, it sold 24 back to Nigeria and exchanged 1 with it; sold 1 to either Nigeria or the Gold Coast (now, Ghana); sold or auctioned 6 to private buyers; and exchanged 5 with private dealers/collectors) in London;
  • the Horniman Museum in London;
  • the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford and the Pitt-Rivers’ country residence, Rushmore, in Farnham (which have 327);
• Scotland, in
  • the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow;
  • St. Mungo’s Museum of Religious Life (which has 22) in Glasgow;
• the Netherlands, in
  • the State Museum of Ethnography (Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, which has 98) in Leiden;
• France, in
  • the Musée du Louvre in Paris;
  • the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris;
• Germany, in
  • the Ethnological Museum in Berlin (which has 580);
  • the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum in Cologne (which has 73);
  • the State Museum of Ethnography (Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde, which has 182) in Dresden;
  • the Ethnographic Museum (Museum für Völkerkunde) and Museum of Arts and Crafts (Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, which has 196) in Hamburg;
  • the Ethnographic Museum (Museum für Völkerkunde, which has 87) in Leipzig;
  • the Linden Museum (State Museum of Ethnography (Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde), which has 80) in Stuttgart;
• Austria, in
  • the Ethnological Museum (Museum für Völkerkunde) in Vienna (which has 167); and
• the United States, in
  • [the Museum of Fine Arts (which has 32) in Boston;]
  • the Art Institute (which has 20) in Chicago;
  • the Field Museum (which has 400) in Chicago; and
  • the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (which has 163).

Other material remains hidden away in private collections. For example, the Benin Ivory Pendant Mask and other property of Queen Mother Idia was to be sold at Sotheby’s, but it was ‘withdrawn from sale at the request of the consignors [sellers - private collectors/dealers]‘. The material may be returned to its original owners; or it may be retained by its current possessors, auctioned at another time in a different place, or sold privately.

2: The National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM) certifies material as legally-acquired (through either artisanal creation of cultural products or licit purchase of ancient artefacts) and thus legally-saleable and -exportable.

3: $2,069-$2,160 a year (~N326,487-N340,847). The “N” is the symbol of the Nigerian naira; also written as NGN.

4: The minimum daily wage had been about $1.50; while there was a proposal for a national minimum of $6.25-a-day, the Nok region’s minimum has only just been raised to $3.75-a-day. (The minimum annual salary had been N7500 a month; the 2009 proposal was N30,000 a month; and the 2012 minimum wage in the Nok region is N18,000 a month.)

5: less than $456.25 (N71,995) a year.

Sleeve Band

While this sleeve band is made from a linen material, it was created in imitation of Sassanian silk or Byzantine design. The iconography is that of a “Propitious Portrait” or “Wealthy Woman” that is surrounded by a floral border. The object is dated between 600-799 AD.

Penn Museum Object #E634B

See this and other objects like it on Penn Museum’s Online Collection Database

The Arabic Papyrus, Parchment & Paper Collection at the J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah is the largest of its kind in the United States. It contains 770 Arabic documents on papyrus and more than 1300 Arabic documents on paper, as well as several pieces on parchment.

Professor Aziz Suriyal Atiya, founder of the Middle East Center and the Middle East Library, compiled the collection. Dr. Atiya and his wife, Lola, purchased the collection over a period of several years from dealers in Egypt, Beirut, and London. The bulk of the collection originated in Egypt, in addition to a small group of fragments from the University of Chicago. A large number of pieces date to the period between 700 and 850 CE. The collection includes a significant number of documents from the pre-Ottoman period and thus offers unique source material on the political, economic, religious and intellectual life of Egypt during the first two centuries of Islamic rule and the period up to Ottoman domination. 

The collection has yet to be catalogued. 

For more information about this collection please see the Arabic Papyrus and Paper Inventory

New Open Access Article- Ofrendas atacameñas en la Colección de Monseñor Campagner (Treviso, Italia)

http://redalyc.uaemex.mx/redalyc/src/inicio/IndArtRev.jsp?iCveNumRev=23173&iCveEntRev=315&institucion=

If it has not already happened during your star spangled career, you can be assured that eventually your phone will ring…

…(making a sound akin to a swan gargling rusty coins) and at the end of the line the silken tones of Sister Mary Reversible (or similar) will warble ominously down the blower.

‘I believe you are an archaeologist,’ she will opine coyly, like a werewolf who has just devoured a jambalaya of newly ordained priest.

‘I was wondering if you would come and visit the children at our convent school and give them a wee lectureen about how jolly things were in the good old beforeyesters and all that historical caveman mumbo jumbo.’

And oh how your heart skips a beat! Nay, it skips not – but instead leaps. You are all of a flutter. Imagine! You have been chosen to inspire the next wave of infantry to fight in the noble war of heritage! The next contingent in the firing line for a career full of low pay and high blood pressure.

And so you arrive at the school and are placed alone before a lethargic class of children sporting blotchy, scurvaceous skin, with as much interest in your shaggy dog story as in a good beating. And who can blame them?

And so you begin your ‘derrynge do’ tale of mudlarking among extinguished folks filth, but unfortunately the munchkins’ torpid demeanor proves invulnerable – and in an ill-judged attempt at seizing their attention you wander blithely off topic onto the subject of your lumbago and haemorrhoids . . .

Then the bitterness takes hold and you’re no longer steering the wagon. . .

The bitterness ends and a scirocco blows across your vocal chords, you feel slightly silly, confused – you have forgotten what it is you do for a living, so you take the last refuge of the damned and throw the floor open to questions . . .

And the questions come thick as a sack of pell-mell:

Question Time

But there is no answer. The little angels are too busy soaking their desks in petrol and stacking them in the middle of the room. Every window is smashed and all electric cabling has been chewed through. (One enterprising child is even laying land mines.) You desperately attempt to intervene but someone ‘blows you a kiss’. . .

Closing Remarks

The ankle biters have long departed by the time you bolt from the burning building leaving only Sister Mary Reversible waving cheerfully in the doorway.

‘Do come again,’ she grunts as the establishment explodes and she shoots skywards to her eternal reward.

That’s a score of 1-0 to the atheists.

All in all a minor success!

Mis pantalones tienen un sombrero llamado piano!

(With gracious thanks to the cartoon stylings of George Booth.)

For Archaeology News – Archaeology Research – Archaeology Press Releases

Here on awilum.com I am putting together a curated collection of open-access resources to supplement my course on Ancient Near Eastern Culture that I am teaching as part of the Master of Liberal Arts program at Houston Baptist University in the Spring of 2013. Here is a description of the course:

This course will survey the history and culture of the civilizations that inhabited the areas from Iran to Egypt from the Neolithic period (ca. 10,000 BCE) to Alexander the Great (ca. 323 BCE). Topics of study include art, literature, religion, law, politics, geo-political effects of climate change, health care, economics and commerce, war and peace, and women. Special attention will be given to exploring the significance of the study of the ancient world for contemporary society as well as for biblical interpretation.

Starting in January, each week I will post a list of resources that pertain to one of eleven selected topics: art, literature, religion, law, scribal culture, geo-political effects of climate change, health care, economics and commerce, war and peace, and women. The lists will contain links to open-access resources such as interviews, lectures, essays, pictures, and online exhibits. For instance, here is the list for the first topic, art:

• Read: “The Manufacture of Metal Statuary: ‘Seeing the Workshops of the Temple’” by Deborah Schorsch, pages 189-199, in Gifts for the Gods: Images from Egyptian Temples.
• Watch: Charlie Rose interview of Dorothea Arnold and Phillipe de Montebello of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the art of ancient Egypt.
• Read: “Popular Art at Susa” by Agnes Spycket, pages 183-196, and “Susa in the Achaemenid Period,” pages 215-252, in The Royal City of Susa: Treasures in the Louvre.

τίς εἶπεν αυτ̣[....]λ̣ε..ρ.[....].
“σὺ πεντάμετρα συντίθει, σὺ δ̣’ ἡ̣[ρῷο]ν,
σὺ δὲ τραγῳδε̣[ῖν] ἐκ θεῶν ἐκληρώσω̣”;
δοκέω μὲν οὐδείς.

Who said [...], ‘You – compose elegiac verses; you – heroic verse; and you – the gods have assigned you the writing of tragedy’? No one, I think!

"During the summer of 1919, a delegation under the leadership of Oberlin College President Henry Churchill King and Chicago businessman Charles R. Crane travelled to areas of the former Ottoman territories. Their mission was to determine the wishes of the people of the region as their future was being determined by the major powers at the Paris Peace Conference. The King-Crane Commission, as it became known, met delegations and invited written petitions from various religious and political groups. This digital collection unifies the archival records of Commission members for the first time. It also includes resources on conducting research in the collection.
To learn more about the collection, please read the full introduction to the King-Crane Commission digital collection."

The Arabic Papyrus, Parchment & Paper Collection at the J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah is the largest of its kind in the United States. It contains 770 Arabic documents on papyrus and more than 1300 Arabic documents on paper, as well as several pieces on parchment.

Professor Aziz Suriyal Atiya, founder of the Middle East Center and the Middle East Library, compiled the collection. Dr. Atiya and his wife, Lola, purchased the collection over a period of several years from dealers in Egypt, Beirut, and London. The bulk of the collection originated in Egypt, in addition to a small group of fragments from the University of Chicago. A large number of pieces date to the period between 700 and 850 CE. The collection includes a significant number of documents from the pre-Ottoman period and thus offers unique source material on the political, economic, religious and intellectual life of Egypt during the first two centuries of Islamic rule and the period up to Ottoman domination. 

The collection has yet to be catalogued. 

For more information about this collection please see the Arabic Papyrus and Paper Inventory

Temple Scroll

When the Discovery Times Square Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit was running, I was asked some personal and scholarly questions about the Dead Sea Scrolls for the museum’s blog:

When did you first become interested in the Dead Sea Scrolls?

I began working on the Dead Sea Scrolls when I wrote my senior honors paper at Brandeis University in 1970. Then, when I was looking for a topic for my doctoral dissertation that would combine my fields of interest in Bible and rabbinic literature, I realized that the Dead Sea Scrolls were a perfect area of research for me. Of course, at that time only about one-quarter of the material was available, but there was still a lot of work to do.

Over your decades of study, what’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned about the Dead Sea Scrolls?

For me the most surprising thing was to realize that there was an entire library of texts that somehow didn’t enter the mainstream of Jewish literature and thought throughout the ages but that had been part of Jewish culture in Second Temple times, and which did in fact have important influences on Judaism and Christianity. It was amazing to learn how much could be learned from these texts about the history of Judaism and background of Christianity.

What do you think is the most important question that today’s Dead Sea Scrolls scholars need to answer?

I think we face the challenge of synthesizing what we are learning from the Dead Sea Scrolls with the related fields of study of Hebrew Bible, New Testament and the history of Judaism. The problem that we really face is that we have a small cadre of scrolls experts who have finally brought the material to the light of day and have achieved an amazing amount in creating the necessary research tools for wide dissemination of this new knowledge. We just have to make sure that this knowledge gets to the audience that needs it and can contribute most to its wider understanding. That’s why it’s so gratifying to see so many people coming to the exhibit and learning about the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Do you have a favorite scroll? If so, what is it and why?

My favorite scroll is the Temple Scroll. I’ve published two books on the scroll and I am planning a new addition and commentary on the scroll that I’ve really been working on for more than 35 years. It’s a rewrite of the Torah to which the author adds his own interpretation and laws and seems to represent a very valuable window onto the Sadduceeanpriestly trend of biblical interpretation and Jewish law. There’s so much to do in restoring, translating, and analyzing this text that it has absorbed me for years.

If you could go back in time and talk to the composer of one of the Dead Sea Scrolls—to  find out why he wrote what he did—what scroll would it be and why?

I would love to speak to the authors of the document we call MMT, which is a foundation document of the Qumran sect, identified by most scholars with the Essenes. I’d love to ask the author of the MMT if I’m correct the issues of Jewish law pertaining to the Temple, and if [disputes over issues of] sacrifices and purity are one the fundamental causes of the schism between the Qumran sectarians and the authorities of the Temple.  I would love to know if I’m right in claiming that the Qumran sectarians followed the approach of the Sadducees and oppose the approach of the Pharisees, which at that time had been adopted by the priestly leaders in the aftermath of the Maccabean Revolt(164-168 BCE).

Source: Scroll Expert Shares His Personal Experiences  and More From Our Scroll Expert, Dr. Lawrence Schiffman