Mariachi High School

Not necessarily a forthcoming movie title, but listen up:

Across the country, more than 500 public schools now offer mariachi as part of the curriculum . . .

The music is flourishing in San Antonio, where a high school mariachi class has been offered since 1970, and at Chula Vista High School here, six miles north of the border with Mexico and where the student body is 78 percent Hispanic. But mariachi has also taken root in Milwaukee, Chicago, Tucson and Albuquerque, and in small towns with large migrant populations like Wenatchee, in eastern Washington.

Shakespeare portrait revealed as fake

Historians have disagreed about the origins of The Flower Portrait, which bears the inscription 1609.

Not everyone has been convinced that the portrait, owned by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), was painted during the playwright's lifetime.

Now National Portrait Gallery experts in London confirm it is a fake which dates back to the early 19th century.

From the BBC.

Boycotting Israeli universities

Will the British Association of University Teachers (AUT) vote to boycott three Israeli universities? Etgar Keret weighs in on collective punishments in the Guardian, and Norm Geras has posted an open letter by Eve Garrard.

AND don't forget the extensive commentary at Paleojudaica.

UPDATE: Yes on the boycott for two of the three universities; further links and commentary here. Further update here with yet more links, including this excerpt from the Times of London:

The decision by the Association of University Teachers (AUT) to boycott two universities in Israel is a mockery of academic freedom, a biased and blinkered move that is as ill-timed as it is perverse. . .

British Museum return of Ethiopian loot proceeding on schedule

Followup on a story previously noted here.

The British Museum has agreed to transfer its Ethiopian tabots (or holy tablets) to a church in London. Later this year the Ethiopians are expected to take over a redundant Anglican church, and a crypt or secure room will then be set aside to house the symbolically-charged wooden objects, which represent the Ark of the Covenant. The museum has agreed to a five-year extendible loan and the tabots may well never again return to the museum. The arrangement has the blessing of the Patriarch, Abba Paulos. . .

Meanwhile, the University of Edinburgh has rejected a request for the return of five manuscripts which were seized at the battle of Maqdala. The claim was made by Afromet, based at the University of Addis Ababa. However, the Court of the University of Edinburgh decided that Afromet did not represent the original owner, Emperor Tewodros (Theodorus).

From the Art Newspaper.

DNA across the ocean

A SAMPLE from the bones of a Suffolk woman buried 400 years ago is to be exhumed by scientists seeking to discover more about an English explorer who is the unsung founding father of America.

Archaeologists are to crosscheck DNA from remains they believe belong to the explorer Bartholomew Gosnold with samples from his sister, who was thought to have been buried in a Suffolk churchyard in the 1600s. . .

Although Captain Gosnold died within three months of arrival on American soil in 1607, he is credited with laying the foundations for the American legal system and government that remain to this day. He is also credited with naming Cape Cod after the fish that he found there and Martha’s Vineyard, the island off the southern Cape coast, in remembrance of his daughter, who died in infancy.

From the Times of London.

Anglo-Saxon bowl hunt

Not everything that is found stays found:

Readers will just have to take it on trust that an ashtray-sized silver bowl, featuring an anxious looking little creature peering up from a tangle of rich Anglo-Saxon ornament, really was "the most remarkable piece of pre-Conquest plate ever found in England", as an expert described it over 150 years ago.

The Witham Bowl was fished out of a river in Lincolnshire in 1816, displayed at an exhibition in Leeds in 1868 - and has never been seen in public since. . .

The Society of Antiquaries of London never owned the bowl, but commissioned [a picture of it] in the 1860s, and then lost it until it turned up in the 1960s in a drawer at its headquarters at Burlington House. It has now put out an international missing water monster alert.

The society has form on losing things: Cromwell's wart, once the pride of the museum, has not been seen since a long dead secretary took to wearing it as a watch fob.

From the Guardian; the BBC also has a writeup which includes a color picture not provided by the Guardian. The Society of Antiquaries website has nothing bowl-related up as yet.

Erasing the past: Temple Mount destruction update

Some things just escape me. Ariel Sharon visits the Wailing Wall and all hell breaks loose. The Islamic Waqf illegally removes truckload after truckload of artifact-laden soil from the too-sacred-to-excavate Temple Mount, and no one dares to make a peep.

This is an ongoing story, and it should be repeated front page news, accompanied by howls of outrage from all quarters. Yet the silence echoes on, even among archeologists and religious leaders.

Just how rich the destroyed archeological deposits were is being demonstrated by the excavation of the dumped soil -- a project the Israeli government would not undertake, and probably wishes would just go away. According to this recent article, significant Jewish finds relating to the Temple have been made. The article should really be read in full, and I will confine my excerpts to the following:

During the illegal excavations and dumping on and from the Temple Mount, the police and the government Antiquities Authority refused to interfere, citing concerns of violence by Muslims who deny that Temples ever stood on the Temple Mount. Tzachi Zweig, then an archaeology student, called a press conference to publicize the extent of the archaeological havoc being perpetrated. Zweig caused a stir in the media by displaying an assortment of artifacts that he had easily scooped out of the piles. . .

The dirt itself into which the Waqf had mixed garbage was meanwhile ignored, and the Antiquities Authority refused to fund an examination of the tons of rubble. . .

Because such a sensitive excavation of material had never before taken place, and because the material had been purposely mixed with garbage and other matter, Zweig and Barkai had a difficult time estimating how much time the excavation would take. Despite six months of work, to date only 15% of the rubble has been examined. . .

They now estimate that it will take four more months to finish sifting all of the material, but their initial grant of $65,000 has nearly run out. $61,000 more is needed to finish the project, something the two say could be accomplished by the end of the summer using the methods they now use.

Considering the importance of this work, the amount needed is paltry. The article provides this contact address for those interested in helping support the excavation: zachifm@miac.com.

Via Palaeojudaica, which has been giving this story continuous attention (along with the closely related issue of Temple denial).

Air Force Museum theft update

Blasting previous administrators of the National Museum of the Air Force, a federal judge Wednesday imposed a one-year sentence on a former chief of collections who sold an armored vehicle stolen from the museum in 1996.

Scott A. Ferguson also was ordered to pay the federal government $29,000 in restitution, reflecting U.S. District Judge Walter H. Rice's calculation of the value of the Peacekeeper he said Ferguson sold to a friend. . .

Federal prosecutors sought to increase Ferguson's penalty, and others sent letters contending it was "common sense" that Ferguson was responsible for 200 other items missing from the museum, including wooden mold patterns for the 1903 Wright brothers' engine reported missing in January 2001.

One letter seeking a stiff penalty for Ferguson came from the chief executive officer and president of the American Association of Museums. It said one recent museum theft netted the offender 15 years in prison, Rice said during the sentencing hearing. . .

The Dayton Daily News reported in November 2003 that more than 3,500 items, medals, ribbons, helmets, machine guns and air-to-air missiles were missing, stolen or not properly accounted for at the museum.

Full story here. Hat tip to reader Don Burton.

A Tale of Two Roberts

Robert Hughes and Robert Crumb on stage together? You had to be there. Alas, I wasn't -- only read about it here.

Another Michelangelo claim

Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof. My first reaction upon spotting this piece was, "how did she manage to get the Times to publish this?":

A scholar has suggested that "Laocoön," a fabled sculpture whose unearthing in 1506 has deeply influenced thinking about the ancient Greeks and the nature of the visual arts, may well be a Renaissance forgery - possibly by Michelangelo himself.

Her contention has stirred some excitement and considerable exasperation among art historians in the Classical and Renaissance fields.

This eccentric notion was first publicly presented in a lecture a few weeks ago. I rather doubt we'll be hearing much more about it.

Early Egyptian tomb find

American archaeologists working in southern Egypt have found what they think is the tomb of a prehistoric ruler from the middle of the 4th millennium BC, the government's antiquities service said on Wednesday.

A team led by Egyptologist Renee Friedman found the tomb at the site of ancient Hierakonpolis or Nekhen, close to the modern town of Edfu and one of the first places in the world identifiable as the capital of a significant political entity.

The government's Supreme Council for Antiquities said in a statement that the rectangular tomb contained a wooden offering table and four bodies in a poor state of preservation. The tomb had clearly been looted in ancient times. . .

The tomb dates from the Naqada II period about 3,600 BC, several hundred years before the unification of Egypt under the first pharaohs and the invention of hieroglyphic writing.

From Reuters.

MORE all over the place, including this from the BBC:

Archaeologists say they have found the largest funerary complex yet dating from the earliest era of ancient Egypt, more than 5,000 years ago.

The necropolis was discovered by a joint US and Egyptian team in the Kom al-Ahmar region, around 600 km (370 miles) south of the capital, Cairo.

Inside the tombs, the archaeologists found a cow's head carved from flint and the remains of seven people. They believe four of them were buried alive as human sacrifices.

Axum obelisk heading home at last

Ethiopians yesterday welcomed home the first of three giant sections of the 1,700-year-old Axum Obelisk, one of their most prized antiquities looted by Italy's fascists in the 1930s.

Priests chanted and church bells rang out as a huge Antonov cargo jet returning the monument's first 60 ton chunk landed safely after flying over the runway four times, watched anxiously by a crowd of thousands.

From the Telegraph.

Speaking ill of the dead

Normally, not good form -- but how to eulogize an author whose still-influential writings speak ill of you?

Most of the Andrea Dworkin obituaries I read seemed well balanced. They were quickly followed, however, by a host of tributes and eulogies that were anything but. Cathy Young has now attempted to restore the big picture in a wide-ranging essay posted here. There is also a link in the comments to an article in the Times of London, which highlights how in recent years Dworkin came to embrace and be embraced by certain prominent right-wingers in a classic convergence of extremes.

Young, in an update, notes:

. . . one of the curious aspects of Dworkin's "legacy" is the extent to which appropriating her language helped social conservatives attack freedom and equality for women without appearing anti-woman. . .

In a way, it makes sense. The MacDworkinite focus on violent male abuse of women completely obscured the fact that at least in Western history, patriarchy far more commonly took the form of paternalism and special protections for women. Thus, it played straight into the hands of the neo-paternalists.

L'art du vandalisme

An artist who randomly vandalised nearly 50 cars for a project said the owners should be happy they were part of his "creative process".

Mark McGowan, 37, will exhibit pictures of himself scratching the vehicles' paintwork in London and Glasgow. He said he had "keyed" 17 cars in Glasgow's West End in March and 30 in Camberwell, south London.

From the BBC.

A young 101

A 101-year-old dancer who first appeared on Broadway in 1918 is to perform at the New York theatre where she began her career.

Aged 14, Doris Eaton Travis was in the famous Follies show run by Florenz Ziegfeld - regarded as Broadway's first glittering song and dance extravaganza.

She will be back at the New Amsterdam Theater to perform in the 19th Broadway Cares fund-raising gala on Monday. . .

Travis starred on stage opposite Al Jolson in 1926, the song Singin' in the Rain was written for her to sing in 1929 and she starred in a string of Hollywood movies in the 1920s.

Full story at the BBC.

Pompeii: the prequel

Swedish archeologists have discovered a Stone Age settlement covered in ash under the ruins of the ancient city of Pompei, indicating that the volcano Vesuvius engulfed the area in lava more than 3,500 years before the famous 79 AD eruption. . .

"It was a real fluke," Leander Touati said, explaining that the group was emptying a well to determine its use when it made the find.

"We realized that the well was a lot deeper than we thought, and we sent a guy down into the well. He moved some of the earth and suddenly he was in prehistoric times," she said.

Full story here.

Oxyrhynchus breakthrough?

Such amazing news that one wonders if it is too good to be true:

For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure - a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible.

Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.

"Revealed", however, may not mean "recovered". Don't be too disappointed if much turns out to be fragmentary. Still, what fragments!

In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. . .

Christopher Pelling, Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford, described the new works as "central texts which scholars have been speculating about for centuries". . .

The previously unknown texts, read for the first time last week, include parts of a long-lost tragedy - the Epigonoi ("Progeny") by the 5th-century BC Greek playwright Sophocles; part of a lost novel by the 2nd-century Greek writer Lucian; unknown material by Euripides; mythological poetry by the 1st-century BC Greek poet Parthenios; work by the 7th-century BC poet Hesiod; and an epic poem by Archilochos, a 7th-century successor of Homer, describing events leading up to the Trojan War.

From the Independent; expect to read more on this soon.

ADDENDUM: More commentary and links at Palaeojudaica.

AND SKEPTICISM here.

STRANGER AND STRANGER: Many questions, not many answers.

AND AT LONG LAST some clarification, via the Yahoo! textualcriticism newsgroup; via Palaeojudaica, which summarizes thus:blockquote>This does seem to confirm that the project has made "significant advances" recently, including identifying new fragments of classical authors. It clarifies that both the Oxyrhynchus and the Herculaneum texts were involved. . .

[Dr. Obbink] will be presenting the results in Berkeley this month and Oxford next month. I hope that means that something will go up on the Oxford Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project website soon as well.