Vote for fountain pen commemorative stamps!

Pen historian Rob Astyk notes at the Lion & Pen forum that 2008 will be the centennial of Walter A. Sheaffer's first pen patent, and will also mark the 125th anniversary of the founding of the Waterman company, and the 120th of Parker -- and suggests a letter-writing campaign to the Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee promoting the idea of a series of stamps commemorating historic writing instruments. Sounds most appropriate, and probably long overdue.

As usual, actual letters get more attention than emails, so if you want to put in your vote, here's the address:

Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee
c/o Stamp Development
U.S. Postal Service
1735 North Lynn St., Suite 5013
Arlington, VA 22209-6432.

Spanierman Raphael sells for record price

New York art dealer Ira Spanierman's Raphael painting sold last night for 18.5 million pounds ($37.3 million) with commission, more than 100,000 times the price he paid for it.

The portrait of the Florentine ruler Lorenzo de' Medici set a record for the Italian painter at the Christie's International sale in London. Spanierman bought the work for $325 at a 1968 New York auction when scholars didn't believe it was by Raphael. Dealers said he tried and failed to sell it himself before consigning it to Christie's.

A contest between two telephone bidders took the price above the presale high estimate of 15 million pounds, showing how Christie's and rival Sotheby's are winning business from galleries for top works as new millionaires pitch bids from around the world.

``There aren't that many buyers for old masters at these prices,'' said New York dealer Richard Feigen after the sale. ``The hedge funds pay a lot more for contemporary pictures, but they aren't buying old masters.''

From Bloomberg. A presale interview with Spanierman here.

In goes IKEA, out go the ancient Chinese tombs

About 10 ancient tombs dating back nearly 1,800 years have been destroyed by construction workers building an IKEA branch in Nanjing in southeastern China, a city newspaper said on Tuesday.

The tombs -- from the "six dynasties" period from AD 220 to 589 -- were uncovered on the outskirts of the ancient capital in Jiangsu province, the Nanjing Morning Post said.

Full story here.

Bulldozing Ireland's ancient past

A summary of the situation in Eire, where roadbuilding is threatening to erase a host of ancient sites and landscapes:

On June 14, 2007, construction resumed on a four-lane highway near the Hill of Tara in central Ireland. Traditionally the seat of the high kings of Ireland, the landscape is littered with burial mounds, rock art, earthen enclosures, and stone monuments. Tara, which has been described as Ireland's equivalent of Stonehenge, was named one of the 100 most endangered sites by the World Monuments Fund this year.

Given Tara's cultural significance and national monument status, it is not surprising that the Irish government met resistance when it announced plans for a 60 km road running straight through the Gabhra Valley between Tara and the nearby Hill of Skreen. Archaeologists and historians claimed that the entire valley, not just the hill, contains historical monuments and artifacts and should therefore be protected. In its defense, the National Roads Association (NRA) argued that a new road was necessary because the existing N3 highway is deteriorating, thereby making travel dangerous and inefficient for drivers between Dublin and Navan. A deal was signed with Eurolink, an independent contractor, and construction began in Spring 2006.

From Archaeology, with many further links.

Dinosaur soup

Villagers in central China dug up a ton of dinosaur bones and boiled them in soup or ground them into powder for traditional medicine, believing they were from flying dragons and had healing powers.

Until last year, the fossils were being sold in Henan province as "dragon bones" at about 4 yuan (50 cents) per kilogram (2.2 pounds), scientist Dong Zhiming said Wednesday.

Dong, a professor with the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said when the villagers found out the bones were from dinosaurs they donated 440 pounds to him and his colleagues for research.

From Discovery News.

"China's most famous painting"

News from Hong Kong:

Trying to foster nationalistic pride in China’s heritage among Hong Kong residents, the Chinese government has sent 32 artworks here for an exhibition to mark the 10th anniversary of Britain’s return of Hong Kong to China on July 1, 1997. Among them is Zhang Zeduan’s “Along the River During the Qingming Festival,” a scroll painted in the early 12th century.

“Qingming Festival” is famous partly for its involvement over centuries in palace intrigues, theft and wars, and partly for its detailed, geometrically accurate images of bridges, wine shops, sedan chairs and boats beautifully juxtaposed with flowing lines for the depiction of mountains and other natural scenery. It is routinely covered in courses on Chinese history, art and culture, across China and in the West.

“ The ‘Qingming Festival’ is probably the single most widely known work in China,” said Marc F. Wilson, a Chinese specialist and the director of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo.

He added that the painting was “like China’s Mona Lisa. ”

Because of its fragility, the scroll is seldom displayed, even in Beijing, and has never been lent for an overseas exhibition.

It was briefly exhibited in Shanghai in 2003, where it drew lines that snaked for a quarter-mile outside the museum, and in Shenyang, China, in 2005.

From the NY Times.

Goddess demoted

Does she get to put "ex-divinity" on her resumé?

A 10-year-old girl who is worshipped as a living goddess in Nepal has been stripped of her title for defying tradition and visiting the US.

Sajani Shakya was one of the three most-revered Kumaris, who are honoured by Hindus and Buddhists alike.

From the BBC, which notes:

. . . she provoked the ire of temple elders by travelling to the US

So it's pretty clear where the power really lies in this particular tradition.

More on the medieval manuscripts of Timbuktu

The Guardian reports on how the cataloguing project is coming along:

With South African money, a £3.5m home for the Ahmed Baba Institute, featuring a museum, archive and rooms for scholars, is being built in the heart of the city, and will open next year. Meanwhile workers are trying to safeguard the institute's growing stock of 30,000 manuscripts.

In a large room with fans whirring overhead, a team is building made-to-measure cardboard boxes for every manuscript that will provide protection from the dust. Fragile pages are being carefully affixed to special Japanese paper to stop them crumbling.

Across the courtyard, researchers sit in front of computers documenting the contents of each manuscript. Then, with the help of computer scanners, ancient knowledge is uploaded into the 21st century. "We are creating a virtual library," said Muhammad Diagayete, 37, a researcher who was busy documenting a 1670 text on astronomy written in blue, red and black ink. "We want people all over the world to be able to access these manuscripts online."

Private collections are also being restored. Outside interest, and funding, has helped to create more than 20 libraries in Timbuktu, from tiny collections with a few hundred documents to Ismael Haidara's Fondo Kati Bibliothèque, which has more than 7,000 leather-bound manuscripts dating back to 1198. Many were brought from Andalucia, Spain, by his ancestors, who came to Timbuktu in the 15th century.

A few doors down is the Mama Haidara library run by Abdel Kader Haidara, no relation to Ismael, the best-known curator in the city. With funding from US foundations, he is also digitizing his 9,000-document collection, and is building extra rooms for scholars and tourists, as well as an internet cafe.

We first reported on the manuscripts of Timbuktu here; there is also an extensive article in the December issue of the Smithsonian magazine.

Dracula slept here

Not much, though:

A Habsburg heir is hoping someone will take a bite of his offer Monday to sell ``Dracula's Castle'' in Transylvania.

The medieval Bran Castle, perched on a cliff near Brasov in mountainous central Romania, is a top tourist attraction because of its ties to Prince Vlad the Impaler, the warlord whose cruelty inspired Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, ``Dracula.''

Legend has it that the ruthless Vlad - who earned his nickname because of the way he tortured his enemies - spent one night in the 1400s at the castle.

Full story here.

How does a 150-pound bird fly?

"Poorly" might be the answer if this were a joke, but it isn't:

Few prehistoric animals have captured the imaginations of palaeontologists as has Argentavis magnificens, given its enormous size and predatory lifestyle. With a seven-metre wingspan the giant bird was the size of a Cessna 152 aircraft, had a formidable 20 inch skull and eagle-like beak.

As the world’s largest known flying bird the aerodynamics of Argentavis has been fertile ground for speculation for more than two decades. Using software originally written for helicopters, scientists have finally analysed the aerodynamic secrets of the giant bird to reveal how it took off, remained aloft and then landed.

Like today’s condors, it seems Argentavis was a lazy glider that relied either on updrafts in the rocky Andes or thermals, on the grassy pampas, to provide sufficiently lifting power, according to an analysis by Prof Sankar Chatterjee of the Museum of Texas Tech University, Lubbock.

From the Guardian. Note the recent publication of similarly systematic reconstruction of the biomechanics of ol' Tyrannosaurus Rex:

The team used a computer-modeling system to calculate the weight of a fossil specimen from the U.S. and then to estimate its running speed and turning ability, which has never been done before.

That fossil, an average-size adult, weighed between six and eight tons, and some individuals may have been as heavy as ten tons, the researchers said.

The team found the animal, hampered by a long tail and that heavy body, would have taken one to two seconds to make a quarter turn—far slower than a human.

"We now know that a T. rex would have been front-heavy, turned slowly, and could manage no more than a leisurely jog," Hutchinson, the lead study author, said.

Chinese tomb chamber

Chinese researchers say they have found a strange pyramid-shaped chamber while surveying the massive underground tomb of China's first emperor and theorize it was built as a passageway for his soul.

Remote sensing equipment has revealed what appears to be a 100-foot-high room above Emperor Qin Shihuang's tomb near the ancient capital of Xi'an in Shaanxi province, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Sunday.

The room has not been excavated. Diagrams of the chamber are based on data gathered over five years, starting in 2002, using radar and other remote sensing technologies, the news agency said.

From the Guardian.