Occupation forces find $650M in cash

Two Army sergeants went searching for saws Friday to clear away branches that were blocking their Humvees. But they stumbled across a sealed-up cottage that aroused their curiosity — and ultimately led to the discovery of an estimated $650 million in cash.

The sergeants tore down a cinder-block and concrete barricade at the cottage door and found 40 sealed galvanized aluminum boxes lined up neatly on the stone floor. Breaking open one box, they were stunned to discover 40 sealed stacks of uncirculated $100 bills — $100,000 per stack, or $4 million in the box. In all, the 40 boxes were assumed to contain $160 million. But there was more.

In an adjacent cottage in an exclusive Tigris River neighborhood where senior Baath Party and Republican Guard officials had lived, the sergeants found another 40 aluminum boxes assumed to contain another $160 million in currency. In a matter of minutes, they had uncovered $320 million in cash. . .

Their discovery set off a nighttime search of abandoned estates tucked among parks and canals. By 11 p.m., soldiers of the 3rd Infantry Division had found two more cottages containing at least 84 more boxes presumed to hold $336 million in cash, for a total of $656 million.

The loot apparently was hidden by fleeing Baath Party members and senior Republican Guard commanders who had lived in the wooded neighborhood just east of Saddam Hussein's Presidential Palace. Commanders scrambled to secure the area overnight before word of the discoveries triggered a crush of fortune seekers.

From the LA Times.

Cloisters acquires 14th-century secular ivories

Meant to post this NY Times notice the other day, but better late than never:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has acquired a group of intricately carved ivories of hunting scenes, knights, castles and lovers from the early 14th century for the Cloisters, its medieval branch in Fort Tryon Park.

"Occasionally there has been a single piece available for sale, but for a group of this quality and importance to come along is especially rare," said Peter Barnet, the curator in charge of medieval art at the Metropolitan and the Cloisters. "Together they represent the most important acquisition of secular ivories in at least 50 years."

Secular Gothic ivories have been a serious gap in the Cloisters collection, Mr. Barnet said. The last group of medieval ivories that the museum acquired was bought from Ernst Kofler, a Swiss dealer, in 1970 and '71. The group, which included 13th- and 14th-century religious ivories, lacked any secular objects.

The latest acquisitions come from the collection of the princes of Oettingen-Wallerstein, who had them on view for decades at the family's castles in southern Germany. While the museum won't say where it bought the ivories, art experts say they came from Rudigier Alte Kunst, Munich dealers who were representing members of the Oettingen-Wallerstein family.

Museum looting eyewitness

Just spotted this account by Baghdad archeologist Muhssein Kazum, published in Le Figaro (in French) a couple of days ago. Translation is ours, for what it's worth:

"At the beginning, I was convinced that the people were coming to steal the air conditioners and the office furnishings. They were armed, and I was not. Quickly, the crowd grew. It was an invasion. They broke the heavy statues, the Babylonian lions, and the Neobabylonian frescoes. They took fragments, heads, Sumerian funerary masks. It was horrible. I cried out, "It's our patrimony, not Saddam's!"

"Then they beat me. I left to ask for help from the Americans who were holding a position not far away with their tanks. They had a Kuwaiti interpreter, and they told me that, unfortunately, they were not able to protect the museum. I do not understand why they didn't do anything for us, while they placed tanks at the oil ministry and the interior ministry."

"Many rioters broke things to unburden themselves. When a piece was too large to be moved, they angrily destroyed it. The crowd was mostly composed of poor and uneducated men, stealing in haste. But within the crowd there were certain well-dressed figures who gave orders. They knew exactly what they wanted to take, as if they had prepared their move. Their gangs had break-in tools and saws. It wasn't just the galleries but the storage areas that were broken into. The bulkheads and the walls in the basement areas were knocked down to get into the vaults. When it was all over, I cried. . . . "

Avebury megalith

Archaeologists working at the ancient Avebury stone circle have uncovered what could be one of the largest standing stones in the country. Experts at English Heritage and the National Trust say the stone could weigh in at 100 tons, rivalling the largest megaliths at its fellow site in Wiltshire, Stonehenge.

The surprise discovery was made during work at the 4,500 year-old stone circle to straighten two stones known as the Cove, which have begun to lean over the last 300 years and experts feared might collapse. The team from the Universities of Wales, Leicester and Southampton found the stone was buried much deeper beneath the ground than previously thought. They found that one of the stones, which stands at 14ft high above the ground, exists at least 7ft below the surface and could possibly go down to 10ft.

From Ananova; also covered in the Guardian, which notes:

The site at Avebury is larger and older than nearby Stonehenge. John Aubrey, the 17th-century antiquarian, said it exceeded Stonehenge as a cathedral does a parish church.

Let them eat gazelle

US marines in Iraq are hunting gazelles with rocks and pistols - to avoid having to eat ready-made military rations. The soldiers at a base outside Tikrit say they are enjoying eating the unusual meat from Saddam Hussein's personal hunting preserve. . .

Each of the squadron's platoons has been limited to killing one gazelle a day to make sure the herd is not depleted.

The soldiers have been allowed to use 9mm pistols to hunt after initially being forbidden to use firearms for fear that gunshots in the woods might be mistaken for enemy fire.

From Ananova.

Loot from Baghdad museum seized at Jordanian border

Jordanian customs officials have seized 42 paintings believed to have been looted from Iraq's national museum, government officials said Saturday. Ad-Dustour, Jordan's second-largest daily newspaper, broke news of the seizure Saturday, quoting Mahmoud Qteishat, the director general of the Jordanian customs department.

According to the report, a group of journalists had tried to carry the paintings across the Karameh border post earlier this week, but they were discovered by officials and sent to the main customs department in Amman.

The full article is here. Meanwhile, from Reuters:

Jordanian customs said on Saturday they had confiscated 41 photographs documenting the life and times of former President Saddam Hussein that were stolen from Iraq's national museum amid the wave of looting after the U.S. seizure of Baghdad.

Customs Bureau chief Mahmoud Qutaishat said the photographs and four oil paintings were seized at the Karameh border post from a Western traveler arriving from Baghdad.

"They are rare pictures of the former Iraqi president taken during his years of exile in Syria and Egypt and other pictures of his childhood home along with audiences with world leaders and more recent pictures," Qutaishat told Reuters.

Qutaishat said the traveler, whom he declined to identify, confessed on Thursday to having taken the items from the museum.

Training bacteria in stone conservation

Common soil bacteria could help protect ancient stone monuments and marble statues from corrosive pollution, scientists in Spain report. The research team's new germ-based technique "mimics what nature has been doing for eons" and promises to be inexpensive, geologist Carlos Rodriguez-Navarro of the University of Granada in Spain said. . .

In the past two decades, researchers suggested harnessing mineral-secreting germs as an environmentally friendly, low-maintenance art conservation workforce to harden rock. Most soil bacteria secrete calcium carbonate to help balance out internal body acidity.

Scientists previously tried using the common soil bacterium Bacillus cereus, which can cause vomiting or diarrhea if it contaminates food. Unfortunately, the calcium carbonate layer didn't cement the interior of the rock together, since it only penetrated a few microns deep -- approximately the width of a human blood cell. . .

The researchers then tried using another common soil bacterium, a harmless germ known as Myxococcus xanthus, which can glide en masse over surfaces and penetrate deep into the stone's pores. . .

Rodriquez-Navarro and a team of crystallographers and microbiologists experimented with a highly porous limestone often used in Granada's most outstanding yet crumbling landmarks. In findings appearing in the April issue of the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology, the new cement their bacterial soup formed "is exceptionally hard, even harder than the original," Rodriquez-Navarro said. . .

X-rays and scanning electron microscopy revealed the crystal layers created by the new technique were as porous as the rock below them, and developed fast, mostly within five to 10 days. . .

The researchers are now in the process of implementing field-testing at selected buildings in Granada. Rodriquez-Navarro said his team also plans to see if the bacteria can be used to fill cracks in marble and protect non-chalky rocks such as granite and sandstone.

From UPI.

Safeguarding Baghdad's treasuries

This article gives some insight into the difficulty of keeping the most determined looters at bay:

U.S. Marines with machine guns and tanks stood watch Friday over what they estimated was $1 billion in gold — safeguarding bank vaults that withstood direct rocket-propelled grenade hits by robbers determined to fight their way in.

"Fort Knox doesn't have security like this," Staff Sgt. Jack Coughlin of the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines said in a bank lobby, as shots rang out outside — U.S. snipers dealing with robbers armed with AK-47s still roaming Baghdad's pillaged banking district.

Days of audacious daylight robberies, thwarted by Marines, have left two blocks of the district a gutted ruin. Scorch marks crowned the windows of several banks, shattered glass crunched thickly underfoot, and scattered documents lay heaped up and down the sidewalks.

Broken glass was inches deep in the Central Bank — a burned-out shell of a building, its interior buried in twisted metal beams from the collapse of the roof and all nine floors under it. The bank, by some accounts, holds some of the most precious items in Iraq: ancient gold artifacts that were taken from the National Museum for safekeeping before the U.S.-led war started, and stashed in the bank's vaults. Some Marines suffered from smoke inhalation when entering the burned building. U.S. forces have deemed it too unsound structurally to investigate at length, said Marine Capt. Tim Walker, a 3rd Battalion company commander standing in Friday as Iraqi bank overseer. So it remained a mystery whether museum artifacts were stashed there and survived.

At least nine huge vaults in the banking district were not destroyed, Walker said. . . One of the nine room-size steel vaults showed the marks of a head-on RPG hit, Walker said. He stood beside a small safe that hadn't fared so well. Its layers of metal were peeled back, its contents gone. Robbers running through the district with acetylene torches and axes made easy work of such safes for days.

Medium-size vaults had fallen too, Walker said — but to robbers who apparently had inside knowledge. "We found a lot with the keys in them, open and looted," he said.

To keep the surviving vaults safe, Marines on Friday stood guard at every street and every sewer cover, and snipers were deployed on roofs. . .

Marines fought some of the most intense battles of the war around the banks. Finally, by Friday, they had beaten back robbers who had come on relentlessly with welding torches, explosives and automatic weapons.

Points to note: the robbers have been heavily armed, quick to shoot, and not easily deterred; there has been extensive insider involvement; and finally, the most secure vaults have successfully defied all break-in attempts. This emerging picture (along with the report noted here that armed intruders had been firing at US forces from the national museum) poses a further challenge to the assumption that the looting of Baghdad's museums and libraries could easily have been prevented, and was thus the direct result of American negligence.

Thanks to CPO Sparkey over at Sgt Stryker for the reference.

"Oldest art" dating questioned

If the rock art in the Chauvet cave is 30,000 years old, it is the most ancient example of human art in existence and the implications for the evolution of culture are immense. This date is accepted and celebrated by archaeologists. But could it be wrong?

"I would be astounded if this date proves to be correct," leading archaeologist Paul Bahn says now. "It flies in the face of all we know about ice-age art." He has reignited the debate about the age of the paintings at Chauvet by questioning the science that says they are so old. The controversy is currently dividing the archaeology community. . .

People are generally wary of stylistic dating, explains Paul Pettitt, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford. So once the more "scientific" radiocarbon results were available, most researchers dismissed the more recent date suggested by the paintings themselves.

Instead the carbon data was used to support the revolutionary theory that sophisticated art developed extremely rapidly once modern humans arrived in Europe, and archaeologists who thought culture evolved over millennia were sidelined. . .

But archaeologists must also be wary of radiocarbon dates, argue Pettitt and Bahn in a paper that appeared in Antiquity last month. Bahn's suspicions were aroused when he translated the latest coffee-table book on the Chauvet cave into English. Around 30 radiocarbon ages are presented in this book, but the measurements were all made at the same French laboratory. Using results from only one team, however skilled, just is not scientific, says Bahn.

Worse, the same laboratory is currently embroiled in an argument over the age of the artwork in another cave, Candamo in Spain. They dated black dots on its walls to 30,000 years ago, but Geochron Laboratories in Cambridge, Massachusetts, estimated the age of a second sample to be just half that.

From New Scientist.

Are you really into paintings?

A technique developed by Microsoft has given unique access to the world of the Old Masters, allowing people to virtually explore every aspect of a painting such as The Flagellation of Christ by Renaissance master Piero della Francesca.

Researchers at Microsoft's UK research lab based in Cambridge have developed algorithms that generate new views of a painting or portions of it, allowing art historians to analyse the shape and proportion of objects.

The technique can also create a three-dimensional reconstruction of the whole painting.

"You feel yourself present in the painting and could even find yourself next to Christ," explained Antonio Criminisi, one of the researchers on the project.

An amusing gimmick, but I'm not sure the VR people appreciate quite how peculiar the notion of actually entering the picture would have been to Renaissance artists. Then as now, there are some things better beheld than participated in. From the BBC.

Oldest DNA

The oldest ever DNA has been found preserved in ice in Siberia. The record-breaking samples are from plants which lived there 400,000 years ago. The genetic material is probably three or four times older than any other ancient DNA found on the planet.

Soil frozen into the ice has also yielded fragments of DNA of large prehistoric animals, including the woolly mammoth, reindeer and musk ox.

From the BBC.

Pop-up book master John Strejan obit

Mr. Strejan (the name is pronounced STREE-jen) was an artist from childhood, who discovered that he could figure out how things worked and then draw them with a knife. His nickname [Silverblade] referred to his dazzling speed and skill with an X-Acto blade.

There are only a few dozen paper engineers in the world, all self-taught. It is hard not to marvel when a flat book opens and out comes a fully rigged galleon, a half-dozen dinosaurs or a breathing coral reef with eels swimming through the lacy boughs; pulling tabs can make shells open or tentacles wave. But the exacting mechanics of how it is done are hard to explain.

"I took paper, smashed it in a book and saw how it folded," he once said of his early experiments.

Complex constructions like Mr. Strejan's, which must be assembled, slotted in, and glued by hand, contain hundreds of individual pieces of paper, each precisely cut to fit and fold exactly, and hundreds of glue points.

Books with moveable parts can be traced to the 1300's, but the 19th-century Germans Ernest Nister and Lothar Meggendorfer are credited with the modern form, which then languished until the 1960's.

Robert Sabuda, an author and illustrator of recent pop-up titles like "The 12 Days of Christmas: A Pop-Up Celebration," called Mr. Strejan "a grand master of the generation when pop-up books entered their second golden age." Mr. Sabuda said Mr. Strejan's work "is so good that today I still can't figure out how to do some of it."

From the NY Times.

Earliest writing found in China?

Signs carved into 8,600-year-old tortoise shells found in China may be the earliest written words, say archaeologists. The symbols were written down in the late Stone Age, or Neolithic Age. They predate the earliest recorded writings from Mesopotamia - in what is now Iraq - by more than 2,000 years.

The archaeologists say they bear similarities to written characters used thousands of years later during the Shang dynasty, which lasted from 1700-1100 BC. But the discovery has already generated controversy, with one leading researcher in the field branding it "an anomaly".

The site has been radiocarbon dated to between 6,600 and 6,200 BC.

From the BBC.

War trophies seized at Heathrow

A gold-plated gun given to one of Saddam Hussein's henchmen has been seized at Heathrow Airport, it was reported. The Kalashnikov AK47 found yesterday was similar to the one uncovered at Uday Hussein's palace in Baghdad last week, according to a newspaper report.

The loaded machine gun was discovered along with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, six bayonets and a sniper rifle in packages marked as computer equipment, the newspaper claimed.

A spokesman for Customs and Excise said: "A quantity of arms was found at Heathrow and investigations are ongoing." No further details were given. The newspaper said the arms are believed to have been stolen for the US black market in war trophies.

An unnamed source told the paper that the gun was loaded, bubble wrapped along with a spare magazine and was bound for an address in the US but was picked up by an X-ray machine.

From the Mirror.

John Paul Getty II dead

Many obits coming out; here's one from ITV, and another from the BBC:

Philanthropist billionaire Sir John Paul Getty II , who has died at the age of 70, gave generously to the arts since making his home in the UK.
He donated millions to various galleries and institutes but rarely sought publicity for the money he gave away.

Among the beneficiaries was the National Gallery in London, which received £50m in 1985 to support its bid to buy national treasures. A statement from the gallery said: "The trustees, director and staff of the National Gallery are deeply saddened to hear of the death of Sir Paul Getty, one of the greatest benefactors that this country has ever known."

The large donation allowed the gallery to acquire major masterpieces such as Caravaggio's Boy Bitten by a Lizard and Poussin's The Finding of Moses. The National Gallery was also able to purchase Bermejo's St Michael and the Devil, and Holbein's Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling, ensuring they remained in the UK.

Getty also was known to play the spoiler, frustrating purchases in Britain by the eponymous California museum founded by his estranged father.

UPDATE: One of the more comprehensive obits appears in the Telegraph.

Baghdad museum looting not so random

Iraqi museum officials and U.S. military authorities now think that the much-publicized looting of antiquities from the world-renowned Iraq Museum was most likely a well-executed theft, perhaps planned before Baghdad fell.

Museum officials have determined that most of the looting that did take place at the museum, home to more than 170,000 artifacts of human civilization, was focused on office machines and furniture, as at other government buildings, and that only selected antiquities were taken.

``The people who came in here knew what they wanted. These were not random looters,'' said Donny George, the director general of Iraq's state board of antiquities. As he spoke Wednesday in front of the museum he held up four glass cutters -- red-handled with inch-long silver blades -- that he found on the looted museum's floor.

He pointed out that replica items -- museum pieces that would have looked every bit as real to an angry mob as authentic items -- were left untouched. The museum's extensive Egyptian collection, which is valuable, but not unique to the world, also was left alone.

The news cheered some experts in the United States. Clemens Reichel, a University of Chicago archaeologist who specializes in Mesopotamia, said the idea that the theft might have been carried out by knowledgeable thieves lessened the likelihood that priceless artifacts would be melted down for the value of their metal.

Read more here.

UPDATE: Here's more just in from the Guardian:

Some of the looters who ravaged Iraqi antiquities appeared highly organized and even had keys to museum vaults and were able to take pieces from safes, experts said Thursday at an international meeting. . .

The U.N. cultural agency gathered some 30 art experts and cultural historians in Paris on Thursday to assess the damage to Iraqi museums and libraries looted in the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion. Although much of the looting was haphazard, experts said some of the thieves clearly knew what they were looking for and where to find it, suggesting they were prepared professionals. . .

Officials at the UNESCO meeting at its headquarters in Paris said the information was still too sketchy to determine exactly what was missing and how many items were unaccounted for. The experts, which included Iraqi art officials, said some of the most valuable pieces had been placed in the vault of the national bank after the 1991 Gulf War, but they had no information on whether the items were still there.

One panel participant was quoted as being convinced that the thefts had been organized from outside Iraq, but his statement that "if a good police team was put together, 'I think it could be cracked in no time''' does not exactly inspire confidence in his familiarity with the realities of art theft or criminality in general. Smart money still seems to be on the involvement of Ba'athists and/or museum employees. The extent to which these categories overlap has been danced around so far, but until everything has been properly sorted out, it might be wise to remember how other totalitarian states have coopted cultural institutions, enlisting the past to remake the future.

UPDATE: The chorus of blame continues. Several essays on today's NY Times op-ed page, in one of which Connie Lowenthal and Stephen Urice start off:

The looting of Iraq's national museum in Baghdad could have been prevented. The American and British forces are clearly to blame for the destruction and displacement of its cultural treasures.

I do not know Dr. Urice, but I have the highest regard for Dr. Lowenthal and her work with IFAR. The thrust of their essay -- that there should be something like the US Army's WW2-era Monuments, Fine Arts & Archives Section established for Iraq -- is eminently sensible, but their first lines are counterproductive, to say the least. Many will see it as blaming the policeman instead of the thief, in a case where the theft may have been more difficult to prevent than anticipated, and where the policeman was already overburdened with chasing down a gang of murderers.

Meanwhile, we see some rather misplaced America-bashing by Boris Johnson in the Telegraph, where he works himself up into a lather over the thought that looted Iraqi antiquities will end up sold off "to the tiny minority who can afford to buy them, principally in the conquering country", adding in some cheap swipes at uncouth American nouveaux riches. Yet as noted by Jerome Eisenberg, publisher of Minerva and owner of Royal-Athena Galleries, there isn't much of a market for Iraqi antiquities in the USA, where Roman, Greek, and Egyptian artifacts are preferred. Eisenberg mentions London, Paris, Belgium, and Switzerland as likely transit points for the stolen goods.

AND MORE from the Paris UNESCO conference, via the Washington Post, while the BBC reports that three members of the President's Advisory Committee on Cultural Property -- Martin Sullivan, Richard Lanier, and Gary Vikan -- have resigned in protest over the cultural losses in Iraq.

AND this from the NY Times, for what it's worth (the locals interviewed would obviously have strong incentive to say they saw no one taking anything of serious value):

In one possibly encouraging sign, several people in the Al Awi neighborhood that surrounds the museum said they did not see looters leave with any antiquities, even amid gun battles and looting that lasted two days.

An imam who lives behind the museum said he stood outside the museum for several hours on the first day of the looting, begging them to stop. "I kept reminding them that this is their country and it was against Islam to steal," said the imam, who asked not to be identified.

But he said the only items from the collection he saw stolen were several old rifles. Mostly, he said, he saw looters take chairs, typewriters, ceiling lamp fixtures and other items from the museum's offices, as happened at nearly every other government office in the capital.

Abed El Rahman, a museum security guard who lives on the premises, also said that rifles were the only items he saw stolen from the collections. "But many people were carrying boxes," he said. "I don't know what was in the boxes."

You can put an awful lot of cylinder seals in a small box. . .

UPDATE: Wall Street Journal is now reporting:

Donny George, the director-general of restoration at the Iraqi Antiquities Department, Wednesday said his staff had preserved the museum's most important treasures, including the kings' graves of Ur and the Assyrian bulls. These objects were hidden in vaults that haven't been violated by looters. "Most of the things were removed. We knew a war was coming, so it was our duty to protect everything," Mr. George said.

Cited by James Taranto, who also notes that Lt. Col. Eric Schwartz of the U.S. Army's Third Infantry Division has stated that the reason forces were pulled back from the museum was because they were being shot at from the museum itself, and neither wanted to be shot, nor were prepared to endanger the museum by shooting back.

André Breton sale begins

A batch of paintings owned by Surrealist master Andre Breton has been sold at auction in Paris for 13.2m euros (£9m). Five record bids were recorded among the first lots at the start of a marathon 10-day sale. Breton's collection, originally valued at about 30m euros (£20.5m), includes paintings by Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte and Joan Miro.

Breton's family opted to sell off his belongings after failing to convince the French government to take over his Paris flat. This has angered a group of intellectuals who have protested against the sale.

The French state has bought 17 lots at the sale for display in the country's national museums.

From the BBC.

UPDATE: Here's the BBC's postsale summary:

Auction house CalmelsCohen had predicted its 10-day sale of 5,500 objects would bring in 30m euros (£20.7m). But the sale of paintings alone - including works by Magritte and Miro - totalled 26m euros (£18m). "It's the biggest sale we've had at Drouot for 20 years," an auction house spokeswoman said. . . the French state was one of the biggest buyers, spending 12m euros to buy works for 33 different museums. . .

Intellectuals protested against the auction, accusing collectors of picking over the bones of Breton, who died in 1966. Stink bombs were let off and fake euro notes handed out with the legend "your money stinks of the corpse of the poet that you never dared to become".

The Odeon reconstructed (forget the cheap seats)

Theatre-goers can now take a virtual seat in the original indoor auditorium, Pericles' Odeon in Athens. But they might wish they hadn't bothered. "The sight lines were atrocious and it would have been quite dark," says archaeologist Drew Baker of the University of Warwick, UK. A forest of pillars would have prevented nearly half of the audience from getting any view of the stage.

Baker's team has reconstructed the Odeon from a combination of ancient Greek and Roman writings, archaeological records from the early twentieth century, and advice from modern architects. They used a lot of informed guesswork: a building site now covers the rubble of the auditorium. "It's one of the least-known classical buildings in Athens, and I doubt we'll ever get there again," says Baker. . .

The virtual Odeon is part of the Theatron project to build computer models of historic theatres, from the outdoor amphitheatres of ancient Greece and Rome to twentieth-century spaces such as the Royal Shakespeare Company's original building in Stratford-upon-Avon, UK. The computer models are used in research and teaching; subscribers can buy online access.

From Nature.

Turks try to stop tiles sale

Turkey's culture minister is trying to halt the sale of antique mosaic tiles at Christie's auction house later this month, saying they may have been stolen. Erkan Mumcu said the 17th-century Ottoman tiles may have been taken from. . . the Yeni Cami (New Mosque) in Istanbul. . .

The mosque first reported that tiles had been stolen in February 2002. Several people were arrested and some tiles were recovered.

From the BBC.

Pim Fortuyn assassin to be freed in 2014

Apparently neither premeditated murder nor political assassination is regarded as serious enough to warrant a life sentence in the Netherlands. Read about it here.

NOTE: Some more commentary here, thanks to Instapundit. Rumor now has it that Dutch prisoners get to spend weekends at home after nine years.

No sale for Braveheart

One of the earliest known portraits of Scots freedom fighter William Wallace failed to attract a buyer at auction on Monday. The painting, worth an estimated £30,000, dates back to 1640 and is one of the few pictorial representations of the iconic warrior. . .

The portrait by Scottish artist George Jameson was up for auction in Sotheby's sale of Scottish paintings at Hopetoun House, near Edinburgh.

Read more at the BBC.

Bottle-kicking and hare pie scramble

An ancient custom of "bottle-kicking" in a Leicestershire village is to go ahead this year despite a reduction in police cover. Organisers of the Hallaton bottle-kicking and hare pie scramble threatened to cancel the event after there was no one to marshal it. . .

The centuries-old tradition has only been cancelled once in its history - in 2001 because of foot-and-mouth restrictions. It begins with a parade through Hallaton with local people carrying a large hare pie and the three "bottles".

Parts of the pie are thrown to the crowd for the "scramble" before the bottle-kicking begins. That involves two teams, one from Hallaton and one from Medworth, trying to carry three separate "bottles" - which are similar to small beer barrels - to their respective villages. Each game can last more than an hour and at times resembles a huge rugby scrum.

From the BBC.

Iraqi libraries torched

Almost all of the contents of Iraq's national library and archives are reported to have been destroyed by fire, meaning the loss of priceless records of the country's history. The library, in central Baghdad, housed several rare volumes, including entire royal court records and files from the period when Iraq was part of the Ottoman Empire.

From the BBC.

Whitney Stoddard obit

From today's NY Times:

Whitney S. Stoddard, an art historian and influential teacher who taught for many years at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., died on April 2 at his home there. He was 90.

Mr. Stoddard wrote important studies tracing the origins and styles of medieval art and architecture. His "Art and Architecture in Medieval France" (Westview Press, 1966) remains a widely used textbook. But his influence as a popular, charismatic teacher may have been greater.

Along with fellow professors S. Lane Faison and William H. Pierson, he turned the art history department of Williams, the small, private college in western Massachusetts, into an unusually productive incubator of art world leaders.

The list of Mr. Stoddard's former students, many of whom did not begin college with the intention of majoring in art history, includes Earl A. Powell III, director of the National Gallery of Art; Thomas Krens, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art; James N. Wood, director of the Art Institute of Chicago; Michael Govan, director of the Dia Center for the Arts; Roger Mandle, president of the Rhode Island School of Design; and Kirk Varnedoe, former curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art and now professor of art history at Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Study. William J. Bennett, the former secretary of education, was a student as well.

Welfare to word

Joanne Jacobs has a post today on The Word Gap:

By the age of three, the child of educated parents has heard 30 million more words than the child of welfare parents, according to a study that taped parents and children over a 2 1/2-year period. By the age of three, the children of professionals were using more words in their conversation than the welfare parents.

Furthermore, the poor children heard mostly discouraging words, while the average child in a professional family heard encouragement by a 6 to 1 ratio.

Mourning the museums

Over the past months, many worried about the destruction of Iraq’s cultural heritage by bomb and shell. Informed opinion, however, was always most concerned about the prospect of opportunistic looting of museums and archeological sites upon the outbreak of war.

Now it appears the looters have done their worst. The museums of Iraq have been ransacked, and though reporters dutifully list the lost masterpieces, the greatest losses may lie elsewhere. As appalling as the damage and destruction may be, it is likely that most of the stolen artifacts will eventually reappear. Yet if the objects have been more dispersed than destroyed, the opposite is true regarding the information that they once embodied. The loss of museum records – which is surely no accident, but rather a matter of thieves covering their tracks – has been mentioned in passing, but is likely to prove the greatest loss of all. For archeology, despite popular misconceptions, is not a hunt for objects so much as a hunt for knowledge: archeologists typically destroy an excavation site at least as thoroughly as do most looters, but they do so systematically, in order to extract the maximum amount of information. The loss of artifacts and excavation records, many of which are either unpublished or only partially published, is tantamount to the loss of the site, and of all that it could have told us about its history, and ours.

Faced with such a tragedy, the natural reaction is to protest that more could and should have been done. A Baghdad curator has been widely quoted as stating that a single tank or five Marines would have been enough to safeguard the museum. Yet would it have been quite so simple? When the looting began, the city was far from pacified, with active combat still under way and a constant threat of counterattack by guerrilla forces and suicide bombers. Leaving a small unit isolated on guard duty would not have been prudent, and there may not have been the manpower to spare to make up an adequate defensive force (that this minimum unit size was much larger than required for simply deterring looters was demonstrated by the cordon around the Oil Ministry, widely described as “heavily defended” even though the Marines were chiefly defending themselves). In hindsight, it is a pity that the United Nations did not take a more flexible approach to safeguarding Iraqi cultural properties, preparing contingency plans in case efforts to avert war failed. Where small units drawn from the invading army would be too vulnerable to enemy action if left as guards, neutral UN peacekeeping forces might have done the job quite nicely. On the other hand, it seems no one expected Baghdad to fall so quickly, and it is still not clear to what extent museum insiders may have played a role in the despoliation; for all the second-guessing, war has always been chaotic, destructive, and unpredictable, despite the best of plans and intentions.

ADDENDUM: For a comprehensive summary of art & archeology in Iraq amid recent events, look here (reference thanks to Dr. Weevil).

MORE here questioning how much of the looting was truly random mob action. There is certainly ample grounds for suspicion from what has been reported so far.

AND NOW more confirmation that the thefts were planned, along with more questions about how much is actually missing. I suspect we'll be on this story for some time to come, so take a look at our main page for the latest.

Edinburgh fire excavation

Archaeologists have discovered a lost district in the centre of Edinburgh, believed to be the city’s first example of classic Georgian architecture. The team, examining the Cowgate site destroyed by fire last December, believe they have unearthed remnants from Adam Square, the prototype design which led to the development of New Town.

Although the square was referred to in 18th-century maps, planners had, until now, been unable to pinpoint its precise location because it was destroyed by the development of Chambers Street. Probing beneath layers of later architecture, the team discovered a corner of the square in a small area of the site. . .

Rob Maxtone Graham, a historical researcher who is writing a report on life in the area from the 16th century, said the findings bring to light a fascinating district. “It was the posh suburb of its day, but a place where lawyers and lords lived above local crofters. French coins that we have found show that European money was in common use at the time.”

The square was designed by John Adam, brother of Robert who was responsible for much of the subsequent New Town architecture. Both had been greatly influenced by a “grand tour” around Europe, where they were impressed by ancient Greek and Roman architecture.

Built in the 1760s, Adam Square was the first leafy square demonstrating this Palladian influence. Although it was destroyed by the development of Chambers Street a century later, it created a following for the family. Thirty years later, Robert Adam’s designs for the unified, classic architecture of Charlotte Square, in New Town, created new standards for urban design.

The archeological team has also discovered remnants of ancient closes and Britain’s first examples of toll roads, from as early as 1527. Tenants would have had to pay an annual charge to the land owner for use of the road to get to their homes behind.

From the Sunday Times of London.

Return of the mummies?

Human remains from around the world acquired by museums in Britain — including shrunken heads, Egyptian mummies and countless bones — could be repatriated under a plan to be considered by the government. A working group set up by the culture department is expected to recommend setting up a commission to consider claims to the remains. But the plan — in a report soon to be delivered to Baroness Blackstone, the arts minister — is likely to bring complaints that it will open the way to a torrent of claims.

The commission, which would be independent but overseen by the culture department, would recommend returning remains in cases where repatriation would not seriously harm academic research in Britain.

Some groups have already demanded the return of remains. These include the Chitimacha tribe from Louisiana, some of whose female ancestors are at the Natural History Museum in London. Groups in Ecuador and Peru are seeking the return of shrunken skulls from the Jivaro Indians, some of which are held by the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford.

National museums are prevented by law from selling or returning any artefacts. The working party is expected to recommend a change in legislation. Until now the government has been cautious for fear that any change could force the return of items such as the Elgin marbles.

Maurice Davies, deputy director of the Museums Association and a member of the working group, said: “We are looking at legislation permitting museums to return bones if they wish to do so.”

From the Sunday Times.