Former Bamiyan governor assassinated

Maulavi Mohammed Islam Mohammadi, who was the Taliban's governor of Bamiyan province when the fifth-century Buddha statues were blown up with dynamite and artillery in March 2001, was killed on his way to Friday prayers in Kabul, said Zulmai Khan, Kabul's deputy police chief.

Mohammadi was elected in 2005 to represent the northern province of Samangan in Afghanistan's parliament.

After he was elected, Mohammadi said he should not be held responsible for the destruction of the statues, which the Taliban considered to be idolatrous and anti-Muslim.

``It was foreigners like Chechens and Arabs with the Taliban who made the decision. They were crazy people,'' Mohammadi told The Associated Press at the time. ``Even though I was governor, I had no power.''

From the Guardian.

Egyptian mystery text identified as Canaanite

A magic spell to keep snakes away from the tombs of Egyptian kings, adopted from the Canaanites almost 5,000 years ago, could be the oldest Semitic text yet discovered, experts said Tuesday.

The phrases, interspersed throughout religious texts in Egyptian characters in the underground chambers of a pyramid south of Cairo, stumped Egyptian experts for about a century, until the Semitic connection was found.

In 2002 one of the Egyptologists e-mailed the undeciphered part of the inscription to Richard Steiner, a professor of Semitic languages at Yeshiva University in New York. Steiner discovered that the phrases are the transcription of a language used by Canaanites at some point in the period from 25th to the 30th centuries B.C.

From Discovery News.

Gladiator reliefs seized

The article focuses on the seizure, but the reliefs themselves are spectacular:

Italian police have unearthed the hidden cache of a group of grave robbers, recovering ancient Roman marble reliefs depicting stunningly lifelike gladiators locked in mortal combat.

The 12 panels were found buried in the garden of a private home near Fiano Romano, 25 miles north of the capital, and officials hailed the recovery as a major archaeological find and a blow to the illegal antiquities market.

The relief dates back to the late 1st century B.C. and is believed to have decorated a tomb, yet to be located, in the nearby Roman settlement of Lucus Feroniae, said Anna Maria Moretti, the superintendent for antiquities in the area north of Rome.

Another good picture here.

Nazi-looted posters reclaimed

Peter Sachs was only a year old in 1938 when the Nazis seized his father's collection of rare posters and the Jewish family fled to the United States.

He returned to Germany on Tuesday for the first time in nearly seven decades to try to recover the thousands of first-run prints that could be worth as much as $50 million. . .

Sachs, 69, of Sarasota, Fla., will testify Thursday at a government commission that will determine if the collection should be returned to him or stay at the museum, which inherited it from East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

From the Guardian. It sounds as if the museum will be fighting to keep the collection; no mention of working out a purchase arrangement, which would be the most sensible thing overall.

The pen is mightier than the lion

. . . the mountain lion, at least:

A 65-year-old Californian woman has saved the life of her husband, 70, by fighting off an attacking mountain lion with a small log and his pen.

Jim and Nell Hamm were walking in the Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park when the cougar wrestled Jim to the ground.

Nell started hitting the animal with the log but it kept hold of Jim's head. She then tried to stick the pen in its eye. The cougar eventually let go.

Canopic or not?

or over 100 years, four blue-glazed jars bearing the nametag of Rameses II (1302-1213 B.C.) were believed to contain the Egyptian pharaoh's bodily organs. But analysis of organic residues scraped from the jars has determined one actually contained an aromatic salve, while a second jar held the organs of an entirely different person who lived around 760 years later.

Full story here.

Palatine finds, continued

Work on Rome's Palatine Hill has turned up a trove of discoveries, including what might be the underground grotto where ancient Romans believed a wolf nursed the city's legendary founders Romulus and Remus.

Archaeologists gathered Tuesday at a conference to save crumbling monuments on the Palatine discussed findings of studies on the luxurious imperial homes threatened by collapse and poor maintenance that have forced the closure of much of the hill to the public.

While funds are still scarce, authorities plan to reopen some key areas of the honeycombed hill to tourists by the end of the year, including frescoed halls in the palaces of the emperor Augustus and of his wife, Livia.

It was during the restoration of the palace of Rome's first emperor that workers taking core samples from the hill found what could be a long-lost place of worship believed by ancient Romans to be the cave where a she-wolf suckled Romulus and Remus, the abandoned twin sons of the god of war Mars.

From Discovery News.

Really old biplanes

The first flying dinosaurs took to the air in a similar way to a World War I bi-plane, a study shows.

A fresh analysis of an early feathered fossil dinosaur suggests that it dropped its hind legs below its body, adopting a bi-plane-like form.

This contrasts with earlier reconstructions showing the dinosaur maintaining its wings in a tandem pattern, a bit like a dragonfly.

From the BBC.

Undiplomatic immunity

After decades of passivity and indifference, governments worldwide are finally taking illicit antiquities trafficking seriously. But will this extend to curtailing the too-often-abused privileges of their own representatives?

Diplomatic bags are being used to smuggle antiquities, both in Afghanistan and elsewhere, according to the Dutch researcher Jos van Beurden. In an unpublished paper, he has gathered anecdotal evidence suggesting that diplomatic privileges are regularly abused.

The 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations states that bags should “not be opened or detained”. Although the bag (or pouch) was traditionally used for correspondence, it can contain other items, and luggage of diplomats normally passes through customs without being searched. Professor Colin Renfrew has stated that diplomatic bags provide “an important route” for smuggling antiquities, and he has called for them to be used only for papers.

Professor Ahmad Hassan Dani, chairman of the Society for the Preservation of Afghanistan’s Cultural Heritage, was once asked about potential buyers of looted antiquities, and he responded: “Mostly foreign diplomats”. . .

Similar accusations have been made elsewhere. Masha Lafont, in a study on the illicit trade in Khmer art published two years ago, blames diplomats. Mr van Beurden says that the head of the Unesco office in Phnom Penh told him a year ago: “Diplomats are a bigger danger than tourists. Very many diplomats have their houses full of ancient Cambodian objects. When they move to their next post, they probably take all of it with them.”

From the Art Newspaper.

Danger from Samarra

Some ninth century Iraqi artists may have literally died for their art, suggests new analysis of Iraqi stucco fragments from this period. A fragment, taken from the ancient palace-city of Samarra, contains three arsenic-based pigments that are known to be poisonous and may cause cancer upon exposure. . .

"The fragments are stored in a locked cabinet and only handled as little as possible by curators in the Museum’s Middle Eastern section who wear nitrile (special sturdy rubber) gloves," Mariam Rosser-Owen, curator of the Middle East collections at the museum, told Discovery News.

Lucia Burgio, a conservation scientist at the museum, added that researchers also might wear face masks and work in a "fume cupboard." If the object should go on display, it would be placed in a special case "to avoid any accidental contamination of members of the public."

From Discovery News.

Record attendance at the Louvre

Over 8 million in a year!

Iran fails to reclaim Persepolis fragment

Iran on Friday lost a legal battle against an 85-year-old French widow over a piece of carved limestone from the ancient Persian capital of Persepolis.

London's High Court ruled in favour of Denyse Berend, who bought the artefact in 1974, in a case brought against her by the Iranian government which sought to reclaim the relief fragment.

After a week of legal argument, Mr Justice Eady decided Berend was the legal owner of the piece, originally part of a wall frieze from the Northern Facade of the Eastern Staircase of the Apadana, or audience hall, at Persepolis.

Berend bought it at a New York auction in 1974 and decided to sell it through London auctioneers Christie's in 2004.

From Reuters. More detail on the background to the case in an earlier article in the Telegraph; though the case was being tried in London, a key issue was whether title was to be determined according to French or Iranian law:

Iran based its title to the fragment on two sources — historic title and Iranian statutory law. However, Paul Lowenstein, for Mrs Berend, said she bought the fragment through an agent and took possession of it in "good faith".

The barrister also argued that the collector obtained "good title" to the relief "by proscription" under French law as it was in her "continuous and open possession for a period of over 30 years" before she sent it to Christie's for sale.

So if the piece had not been held openly (the relief had been purchased at public auction in New York in 1974), Iran might well have prevailed, even under French law.