Culture

“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.

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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. . . . .

Art I Love: Sensoji Temple

“Sensoji Temple in Edo” (1809)

War’s many victims

“War’s many victims”

**via “The Economist“**

IF YOU know anything about the laws of conflict, you probably know that destroying or stealing the cultural and spiritual heritage of an enemy or an occupied land can be a war crime, especially if it’s done in a systematic way. That principle is laid out with ever-growing clarity in every modern document that aspires to set limits to the way people fight. You can find it in Abraham Lincoln’s code of conduct for the American civil war, in the Geneva Conventions, and in the statutes of modern war-crimes tribunals.

Still, that can seem like an awkward point to raise in situations where many other unspeakable things are happening. When the Pakistani Taliban is massacring children, should we also worry about the fact that it has physically eliminatedmany traces of the Buddhist heritage of its home region? During the Balkan wars of the 1990s, some locals were exasperated by media coverage of the shelling of old Dubrovnik by Yugoslav forces. Bad as it was, didn’t this cultural loss pale compared with the human suffering that was unfolding in the region? More recently, the built heritage of Mali and Syria has suffered terrible damage, but surely that is less significant than the killing and uprooting of human civilians?

In reality, the two kinds of atrocity can’t be separated. That point was made vividly in London this week at a House of Lords event organised by Elizabeth Berridge, a lawyer and peeress who chairs the All Party Parliamentary Group on International Religious Freedom, and Walk of Truth (WOT) a Hague-based NGO which campaigns to protect spiritual and cultural treasures from crime and war. (Full disclosure: I gave some informal advice when WOT was set up in 2011.) Persecuting people and harming or grabbing the things they call holy are two misdeeds that have gone hand in hand throughout history. If anything the interconnection is getting closer.

Islamic State (IS), the ultra-zealous force which under various names has run amok in Iraq and Syria, makes no secret of its intent to wreck or appropriate places of worship, monuments and sites that belong to belief systems other than its own narrow reading of Islam. That contrasts with early Islamic history, in which there were some famous acts of self-restraint: Caliph Omar held back from offering Muslim prayers in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, thus ensuring that it would remain a Christian place of worship. But no such spirit of self-limitation inhibits IS, for whom destroying the enemies’ holy things serves a double purpose. On one hand, it consolidates the group’s monopoly on power, by demoralising rival groups, and ensuring that they flee forever. On the other, cultural vandalism has a more immediate aim, that of raising money to fund further violence.

IS and similar groups either trade in antiquities themselves or license others to do so. Amr al-Azm, a scholar at America’s Shawnee State University, reported after visiting the area that IS was creaming off 20-50% of the proceeds of criminal looting. You can’t always distinguish between cultural vandalism in the name of religious zeal, and the more opportunistic kind. The result is the same: objects and images which are holy to some people are wrenched from the places where they were created and offered to auction houses and galleries in prosperous Western cities.

Tomb of previously unknown pharaonic queen found in Egypt

“Tomb of previously unknown pharaonic queen found in Egypt”

via “AFP“

Czech archaeologists have unearthed the tomb of a previously unknown queen believed to have been the wife of Pharaoh Neferefre who ruled 4,500 years ago, officials in Egypt said Sunday.

The tomb was discovered in Abu Sir, an Old Kingdom necropolis southwest of Cairo where there are several pyramids dedicated to pharaohs of the Fifth Dynasty, including Neferefre.

The name of his wife had not been known before the find, Antiquities Minister Mamdouh al-Damaty said in a statement.

He identified her as Khentakawess, saying that for the “first time we have discovered the name of this queen who had been unknown before the discovery of her tomb”.

That would make her Khentakawess III, as two previous queens with the same name have already been identified.

Her name and rank had been inscribed on the inner walls of the tomb, probably by the builders, Damaty said. . .

The Mystery of the Magical ‘Ulfberht’ Viking Sword – Researchers Close in on the German ‘Supermonks’ Believed to have Forged the Superstrong Weapons

“The Mystery of the Magical ‘Ulfberht’ Viking Sword – Researchers Close in on the German ‘Supermonks’ Believed to have Forged the Superstrong Weapons”

by Mark Prigg via “Daily Mail“

It was the sword of choice for the discerning Viking – superstrong, and almost unbeatable in battle.

Yet mystery surrounds a small number of Viking swords researchers have uncovered.

They are all inscribed with a single word – ‘Ulfberht’, which experts believe may reveal their maker.

a single word – ‘Ulfberht’ – on the blade of a Viking sword. Experts believe a German monastry may have been responsible for the product of the superstrong weapons.

About 170 Ulfberhts have been found, dating from 800 to 1,000 A.D. They are made of metal so pure it baffled archaeologists, who thought the technology to forge such metal was not invented for another 800 or more years, during the Industrial Revolution.

HOW A SWORD IS MADE

In the process of forging iron, the ore must be heated to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit to liquify, allowing the blacksmith to remove the impurities, known as ‘slag’

Carbon is also mixed in to make the brittle iron stronger.

Medieval technology did not allow iron to be heated to such a high temperature, so slag was removed by pounding it out, a far less effective method.

The Ulfberht, however, has almost no slag, and it has a carbon content three times that of other metals from the time.

It was made of a metal called ‘crucible steel.’

It was thought that the furnaces invented during the industrial revolution were the first tools for heating iron to this extent.

According to Ancient Origins, researchers are now closing in on the mysterious maker.

‘New research brings us closer to the source of the swords, to the kiln in which these legendary weapons were forged,’ it claims.

About 170 Ulfberhts have been found, dating from 800 to 1,000 A.D.

They are made of metal so pure it baffled archaeologists, who thought the technology to forge such metal was not invented for another 800 or more years, during the Industrial Revolution.