“A collection of 32 ancient Egyptian artefacts is to return back to Egypt in June after Egypt successfully asserted ownership of the objects.
Ali Ahmed, director of antiquities repatriation, told Ahram Online that the objects included limestone and wooden statues as well as a collection of limestone blocks from chapels across dfferent pharaonic periods.
The objects were seized by the Swiss police within the framework of a bilateral agreement between Egypt and Switzerland that prohibits the illegal import and export of cultural properties.
Minister of Antiquities Mamdouh Eldamaty said the objects are to be handed over to Egypt’s ambassador to Switzerland at the Federal Office for Culture in Bern during an event to mark tenth anniversary of the passage into Swiss law of a prohibition on illegal trade in cultural property.”
History in shambles: World Heritage sites after the Nepal earthquake
A handout photo provided by the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) on 26 April 2015 of rescue workers sifting the ruins of a building for possible survivors in Kathmandu, Nepal, 25 April 2015.
The centuries-old monuments spread throughout the Kathmandu Valley were heavily damaged in the massive earthquake that struck Nepal on Saturday, a United Nations official said on Monday. Some of the sites suffered “extensive and irreversible damage.”
Irina Bokova, director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), said she was “shocked” by the earthquake’s devastating impact on Nepal’s cultural heritage in the country, in particular the “extensive and irreversible damage at the World Heritage site of Kathmandu Valley.”
A photo shows devastation at the World Heritage site in Kathmandu after a earthquake toppled monuments and temples on April 25, 2015.
The sites are made up of seven separate groups of monuments. They include the Durbar Squares of Hanuman Dhoka (Kathmandu), Patan and Bhaktapur, the Buddhist “stupas” of Swayambhu and Bauddhanath and the Hindu temples of Pashupati and Changu Narayan.
The Nepalese government describes the seven sites as “medieval royal palace complexes” or “religious temple complexes,” calling them “archaeologically, historically, culturally and religiously very important” to the Kathmandu Valley.
The Kathmandu Valley was removed from the UN’s list of World Heritage in Danger in 2007, and the government has undertaken a series of conservation efforts to protect them from encroaching development since then.
Three of the sites were “almost fully destroyed”
According to a preliminary assessment done by the organization, the Durbar Squares of Patan, Hanuman Dhoka (Kathmandu) and Bhaktapur, were “almost fully destroyed” in the earthquake.
A general view of the Basantapur Durbar Square that was damaged in Saturday’s earthquake in Kathmandu, Nepal, Sunday, April 26, 2015.
Some of that destruction was captured by Kishor Rana, who flew a drone above the sites in the hours after the earthquake struck.
“These are desperate times but we must all unite together in times like these,” said Kishor Rana on Facebook, who has pledged to shoot more of the sites. “Out of respect to the victims family, I did not take footages of live rescues taking place. We not only lost many lives and homes but we lost many pieces of our cultural heritage, our history.”
Ex-fugitive Tommy Thompson has agreed in a plea deal to turn over $425,380 seized in his case to U.S. District Court.
The agreement, obtained by The Dispatch yesterday, was filed on Thursday as part of a criminal contempt-of-court case against the former treasure hunter. The document says that Thompson will plead guilty to one count of criminal contempt.
It also says that he will help the parties to a 2006 federal lawsuit against his shipwreck-search companies to identify and recover assets and that he will answer questions under oath about those assets, including 500 commemorative gold coins.
The coins were minted from gold bars Thompson brought up from the SS Central America shipwreck and were valued in 2007 at $1 million to $2.5 million.
Thompson also agrees in the document to answer questions and provide information to investigators, including identifying anyone who helped him while he was a fugitive.
If he pleads guilty to the single contempt charge, the document says, the U.S. attorney will not charge him with other offenses arising from the case, “including federal criminal offenses related to fraud and unjust enrichment.”
It also says that Thompson “claims to suffer from a rare medical condition that requires specialized treatment” and that the government agrees that Thompson’s medical condition will be a focus of the presentence investigation.
Thompson and his girlfriend, Alison Antekeier, were ordered in 2012 to appear before Judge Edmund A. Sargus in Columbus as part of the federal lawsuit over the treasure brought up from the shipwreck off the East Coast in the late 1980s.
Instead, the pair fled, and contempt charges were filed against them. They were returned to Columbus after they were arrested by U.S. marshals in southern Florida in January. . . .
Will the world do nothing to stop extremist groups from destroying some of civilization’s most treasured monuments?
The question has confronted Western governments with stark urgency in the weeks since the Islamic State released a video of militants smashing ancient sculptures at the Mosul Museum. In early March, following reports that extremists attacked the ancient Assyrian sites of Nimrud and Hatra, Iraqi officials pleaded for American airstrikes to stop them. But so far the United States and its allies have wrung their hands.
Secretary of State John Kerry described the devastation as “one of the most outrageous assaults on our shared heritage that perhaps any of us have seen in a lifetime.” Irina Bokova, the director general of Unesco, said: “This is not just a cultural tragedy. It’s also a security issue, with terrorists using the destruction of heritage as a weapon of war.” The United Nations Security Council condemned the “targeted destruction of religious sites and objects” by the Islamic State and the Nusra Front.
But the United Nations says it is largely powerless to deal with the threat, and Western governments claim they have more urgent military objectives.
This is dangerously wrong. By loudly deploring this “war crime” and doing nothing, the world may be playing into the extremists’ hands. “ISIS is doing it because they can,” Amr Al-Azm, an Ohio-based Syrian anthropologist, told me. “They are striking at things the international community holds dear, but is impotent to do anything about.”
Since 2011, five of the six Unesco World Heritage sites in Syria have suffered significant damage; four have been requisitioned for military purposes by different groups, in direct violation of international protocols. Tunnel bombs have devastated Aleppo’s old city; thousand-year-old minarets have been detonated; medieval forts have been shelled; Parthian and Hellenistic sites have been pillaged.
Then came the Islamic State, which turned such attacks into an explicit strategy. Taking over archaeological sites near its stronghold, the northern city of Raqqa, the group turned local looting brigades into large-scale businesses. And it has used social media to broadcast the carefully choreographed destruction of mosques, cemeteries, libraries and other monuments belonging to any groups or sects it regards as deviant.
The two images below show the same archaeological site, the ancient city of Apamea, in Syria, firstly as captured by Google Earth on 20th July 2011, and then on 4th April 2012. The scale of looting in between the months when the images were taken can be seen clearly.
These images are reproduced here with kind permission from Dr Ignacio Arce, Director of the Spanish Archaeological Mission to Jordan, who originally took the images from Google Earth.
The Cultured Muse 