Middle East

Coming Exhibition: Connecting continents: Indian Ocean trade and exchange

“Connecting continents:Indian Ocean trade and exchange”

Who:

The British Museum

When: Nov. 27, 2014 – May 31, 2015 (Hours Vary)

Where:

The British Museum
Great Russell Street
London, WC1B 3DG

More Information: Here.

This small display features objects showing the long and complex history of Indian Ocean trade and exchange, from ancient times to the present.

For thousands of years, the Indian Ocean has been a space through which people, objects and ideas have circulated. The navigable monsoon winds enabled merchants to travel between Africa, the Middle East and Asia, exchanging valuable commodities such as textiles, spices and ceramics. From early coastal trade between the great ancient civilisations of the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia through to the heyday of European East India Companies and to the present, the Indian Ocean has remained a dynamic economic maritime zone.

This display presents objects from across different sections of the British Museum’s collection, including a 19th-century boat from Indonesia, created entirely from cloves and a Roman necklace made from sapphires and garnets, to tell this long and fascinating history of global interaction.

UNESCO welcomes UNSC resolution to protect cultural heritage in Syria, Iraq

“UNESCO welcomes UNSC resolution to protect cultural heritage in Syria, Iraq”

via “KUNA“

PARIS, Feb 13 (KUNA) — The Director-General of the UNESCO Irina Bokova welcomed on Friday the adoption of a new UN Security Council Resolution 2199 that condemns the destruction of cultural heritage and adopts legally-binding measures to counter illicit trafficking of antiquities and cultural objects from Iraq and Syria.
“The adoption of resolution 2199 is a milestone for enhanced protection of cultural heritage in Iraq and Syria, extending to Syria the prohibition of trade of cultural objects already in place for Iraq since 2003,” Bokova said.
“It is also a clear recognition that the pillage, destruction and trafficking of cultural heritage are more than a cultural tragedy – this is also a security and political imperative to be taken into account in all peace efforts,” she added.
Bokova warned that the pillage of Iraq’s and Syria’s culture has reached an unprecedented scale in Iraq and Syria, adding that the revenues of such as fuel the conflicts by providing money for armed groups and terrorists.
“This resolution acknowledges that cultural heritage stands on the frontline of conflicts today, and it should be placed at the frontline of security and political response to the crisis”, she said.
She also welcomed the strong call to the responsibility of all parties in the conflict to protect cultural heritage. She commended also the overwhelming support by Security Council Members in favor of this resolution.
“The protection of the cultural heritage of Syria and Iraq has strategic implications – it is fundamental for the identity and social cohesion of all Iraqis and Syrians and it is a precondition for future reconciliation and recovery”.
Welcoming the explicit role attributed to UNESCO by the Security Council, Bokova reaffirmed the Organization’s commitment “to stand by Member States to ensure the full respect of the UNESCO 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property”.
“The destruction of the unique cultural heritage of Syria and Iraq is a loss for all humanity and it is our common responsibility to stand up for its protection,” she concluded.

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“Why Preserving Pakistan’s Cultural Heritage Should Matter to the United States”

by Rick Olson via “Huffington Post“

We walked beside the now dusty wash that once contained the mighty but ever shifting Indus River, puzzling out the names of long-deceased members of royal dynasties now barely remembered. I was visiting the necropolis of Makli Hills with Yasmeen Lari, a conservation architect and herself a national treasure of Pakistan. The monuments at Makli chart the history of Islam in Sindh province, one of the cradles of civilization, dominated by the alluvial plain of the Indus, from which Sindh gets its name. I was there to announce that the U.S. Government is helping to conserve two of its most magnificent monuments.

ambassador rick olson

As the U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan, I live in a country facing political, military, and humanitarian challenges on many fronts. One front that has not received sufficient attention in Western media is the war on cultural heritage and how this matters to the people of Pakistan.

One of the ways in which ISIL has consolidated a reign of terror in Iraq and Syria is by erasing any heritage of religious diversity. Their atrocities are not confined to military battlefields. Groups like ISIS have another important ideological objective: they are threatened by the existence of a rich cultural heritage and a history of pluralism and tolerance. They seek to destroy it.

***

Islam came to Sindh in 711 c.e. via the invasion led by Muhammad bin Qasim. And its dominance on the culture was fixed by the Sufi scholars who accompanied the central Asian invaders of the 16th century. The history of this long conversion is etched in the stone of tombs at Makli Hills. The oldest ones, at the north, show a robust Hindu influence, including elaborate rosettes, with the inscriptions written in the austere Kufic script of early Islam. The later tombs, to the south, become more Persianate, with the slanting script replacing the more linear Arabic and more delicate floral and venial depictions. These ancient monuments enrich and inform today’s Pakistan and connect us to our cultural origins.

Wind and sun have taken a severe toll on the monuments, as has vandalism and looting, all perhaps part of the toll that more than a decade of fighting terrorism has inflicted on Pakistan. Treasures of Moghul artistry lie scattered and broken on the ground. Some of the elaborate sepulchers have lost their foundations and are visibly splitting apart. Even the large tombs that are structurally intact have lost their turquoise tiled roofs and cladding and now reveal their baked brick skeletons. . . . .

ISIS and the Decimation of a Culture

“ISIS and the Decimation of a Culture”

by Eileen Toplansky via “American Thinker“

In the foreword to Catastrophe: The Looting and Destruction of Iraq’s Past, Gil J. Stein, director of the Oriental Institute, writes that “when we think of the awful consequences of war, the deaths of the soldiers and civilians always remind us that futures have been destroyed[.] But war in the third millennium AD has brought us an entirely new and different horror – the destruction of an entire past.”

In 2003, the world’s attention was focused on the looting of the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad. The 15,000 stolen artifacts had, for the most part, been “scientifically excavated and carefully recorded and identified by trained professional archaeologists and museum staff.” Thus, there existed the scientific knowledge of their archaeological context, or a means to reconstruct “how an ancient civilization developed and functioned.”

Archaeological context refers to the “immediate material surrounding an artifact such as gravel, clay, or sand; its provenience or horizontal and vertical position within the material; and its association with other artifacts.” But once an artifact is ripped from the ground by looters and/or terrorists, context and association with other artifacts is irretrievably lost. In essence, the wholesale destruction of the artifacts being stolen or totally demolished results in a “creeping annihilation of an entire culture.”

As a result of the looting of the Iraqi National Museum, a web-accessible database was established to document the destruction and theft of the artifacts. The database is accessible here. Though “as many as 5,000 objects were reported to have been recovered[,]” other pieces will “remain difficult if not impossible to recover.”

Fast-forward to ISIS, that “JV” organization that Obama so nonchalantly dismissed. How is it being financed? What does an Islamic caliphate have to do with the wholesale destruction of historical and cultural artifacts? And are we seeing an instant replay of Nazi looting of museums less than a hundred years later vis-à-vis Islamic jihadists?

According to the Guardian, in June 2014, the seizure of 160 computer flash sticks that “included names and noms de guerre of all foreign fighters, senior leaders and their code words, initials of sources inside ministries and full accounts of the group’s finances” was a key discovery into the workings of ISIS.” Amazingly, in a mere three days, “ISIS [had] seized control of Mosul and Tikrit.” Before Mosul, ISIS cash and assets were $875M. After ISIS robbed banks and looted military supplies, total cash and assets rose to $1.5B.

ISIS’s massive cash flow comes from the “oilfields of eastern Syria which it had captured in 2012, the smuggling of raw materials pillaged from the crumbling state, as well as priceless antiquities from archaeological digs.”

Looting Is the Greatest Threat to Our Cultural Heritage in Syria

“Looting Is the Greatest Threat to Our Cultural Heritage in Syria”

By Franklin Lamb via “Foreign Policy Journal“

Can the worst patrimonial disaster since World War II be stopped?

No matter how badly this observer periodically assesses the threat to our cultural heritage as he travels across Syria, the reality always turns out to be worse.

As we enter 2015, much of Syria has been reduced to apocalyptic landscapes. During the 45 months of the Syrian crisis, war destruction inflicted from all sides has created massive damage to our shared global cultural heritage that has been in the custody of the Syrian people for more than ten millennia.

Few would dispute the fact that the level of destruction of Syria’s archaeological sites has become catastrophic. Unauthorized excavations, plunder, and trafficking in stolen cultural artifacts in Syria is a serious and escalating problem and threatens the cultural heritage of us all. Due to illicit excavations, many objects have already been lost to science and society.

Today, the single greatest threat to our cultural heritage in Syria is looting. It is rampant and being done from many sources. One virulent source is Da’ish (IS) and like-minded jihadists who desecrate and destroy irreplaceable artifacts and lay siege to and loot more than 2000 archeological sites under its control in Syria and double that number in Iraq.

Jihadists in Syria are estimated to have reaped more than $20 million from looted artifacts during 2014, and they rationalize their frenzy of wonton obliteration by sighting religious obligations. Also increasingly active in looting Syria’s cultural heritage are local residents who, with no jobs, income, or tangible economic prospects, are increasingly turning to age-old plunder taking advantage of a growing cash market to feed their families.

The trade in looted Syrian cultural artifacts has become the third largest market in illegal goods worldwide. Current laws at the national and international level are woefully inadequate to prevent the illicit traffic in looted antiquities and even less, to effectuate the return of stolen antiquities to their countries of origin. In the 1960s, according to experts, it was a buyers’ market as there were few national collectors interested in Islamic art or other antiquities in Syria. But that that has now dramatically changed since the Gulf countries Qatar and Abu Dhabi started collecting, and it is also now a seller’s market.

Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and a crossroads for trade and culture for countless centuries, has been particularly hard hit. Its vast labyrinthine souk was gutted by fire in 2012. The Citadel, a castle that dates back to 3000 BC, has also been damaged, while the minaret of the Umayyad Mosque was toppled by fighting in 2013. But hundreds of other sites have also been looted and shops selling Syrian antiquities dot the Turkey side of the border just 40 miles north of Aleppo. . . .