ARTEFACTS UNDER ATTACK
March 13, 2015 3:48 pm
Simon Schama
The Isis destroyers of the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud would have
loved William “Basher” Dowsing. From the winter of 1643 through to
the following summer, authorised by an ordinance of England’s Long
Parliament to remove “all monuments of superstition and idolatry”,
Dowsing, a Puritan officer who was provost-marshal of the armies
of the Eastern Association during the first civil war, made it his
personal mission to obliterate as much as he possibly could of sacred
art in the churches and colleges of East Anglia.
He was so proud of this godly work that he kept a detailed journal
scrupulously recording the achievements of his demolition squad. At
Pembroke Hall, Cambridge university, in December 1643, “we broake and
pulled down eighty superstitious pictures”, he wrote; at the village
of Clare in Suffolk, a thousand paintings were destroyed along with
wooden figures of the 12 Apostles on the roof. You stood up to Basher
at your peril. At Swaffham Bulbeck, a village in Cambridgeshire, John
Grange, who was reported to have got drunk and laughed at the “round
heads”, had his house burnt down the next morning for his temerity.
Angels in any form — paint, plaster or wood — had Dowsing foaming
at the mouth and calling for the mallets.
The assault on “idolatrous” images in England had begun in earnest
a century earlier with the Protestant Reformation. One thing you
didn’t see in Wolf Hall were the sledgehammer gangs unleashed by
Thomas Cromwell during the dissolution of the monasteries. In this
first phase, the wreckers’ targets were works said to promote foolish
devotion to spurious miracles. But, from 1547, during the reign of
the boy-king, Edward VI, a much more aggressive onslaught was launched
on all images equated with “idolatry”. It has been estimated that by
the time this state iconoclasm ended, with Edward’s death in 1553,
England had lost as much as 90 per cent of its Christian art.
Those who believe images are an offence against God all argue in much
the same way as those Puritan iconoclasts. Jewish purists through
the centuries take the second commandment’s order against “graven
images” to mean an absolute prohibition on pictures in synagogues and
prayer books (other than the Passover Haggadah) rather than a ban on
the sculptures that were objects of pagan worship. Jews and Muslims
shared the objection to giving human likeness to a single faceless,
formless, supreme deity and (along with some Christians) believe that
making images of the world was a presumptuous trespass on the divine
monopoly of creation.
But the image-haters never got their way in any of the three great
monotheisms: in the first five centuries of their existence, the floors
of Jewish synagogues were carpeted with mosaics, including likenesses
of figures from the Bible, glowing images that only disappeared at the
same time as the coming of Islam; the dogma that Islam itself forbids
images of the Prophet is belied by his appearance in countless Muslim
books, albeit with his face often veiled or disguised by a flame;
and not all Protestants believed images were a desecration of the
purity of the Gospel word. Luther was relaxed, even enthusiastic,
about their power to stir piety.
Angels in any form had the Puritan soldier ‘Basher’ Dowsing foaming
at the mouth and calling for the mallet Tweet this quote
In the face of the Basher Dowsings, then, it was still possible to
resist wholesale mutilation and destruction. When the Parliamentary
governor took York in the summer of 1644 he gave specific orders
against defacing any church monuments, a sensibility that preserved
many of the surviving glories at York Minster. More modern political
obliterators, determined to wipe their cultures clean of any competing
sites of devotion, have often met their match from conservators within
their own camp. For example, to prevent French revolutionary mobs from
ripping out and smashing up the royal tombs at St Denis and anything
else associated with the centuries of the old regime, the 18th-century
French archaeologist Alexandre Lenoir made pre-emptive swoops on
the medieval objects, storing them in the abandoned monastery of the
Petits-Augustins, which he renamed the Museum of French Monuments.
Images taken from a video showing Isis militants destroying artefacts
last month in Mosul, Iraq
The obliterators — whether at Nimrud or Bamiyan, where the Taliban
destroyed ancient colossal Buddhas in 2001 — all act from the same
instinct of cultural panic that the supreme works of the past will
lead people astray from blind, absolute obedience. Neither beauty
nor history have the least interest for them because they live in and
force others to inhabit a universe of timeless subjection. The mere
notion that the achievements of humanity might rise to the level
of sublimity is itself a sacrilegious affront. In a way this is a
backhanded compliment to the power of images. And yet when this puerile
and fearful instinct leads to irreversible acts of annihilation,
it is not only their own immediate culture that is the victim but the
entirety of humanity, which loses a piece of its memory as surely as if
a slice of our collective brain had been removed by a mad lobotomist.
But the wringing of hands over this loss to humanity will have no
effect on those for whom it is as nothing compared with the claims
of divinity. It is understandable that, when asked on BBC Radio 4
if he would countenance military intervention to save Nimrud, the
Assyriologist John E Curtis answered in the affirmative. But a Unesco
strike squad belongs, alas, to comic book dreams. Even before its
planes could be fuelled, the bulldozer boys will be congratulating
themselves on having reduced masterpieces to rubble and dust.
Simon Schama is an FT contributing editor. He will be in conversation
with the editor of FT Weekend Caroline Daniel at the Oxford Literary
Festival on Saturday March 21
IRAQ
This month, militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant,
known as Isis, bulldozed and looted the ancient Tigris river sites
at Nimrud and Hatra, Iraqi government officials have confirmed. This
followed the release last month of Isis video footage of its supporters
taking sledgehammers to Ottoman-era shrines and statues at an ancient
history museum in the northern city of Mosul, which has been under
the group’s control since June last year.
What next? Aware of the importance of Iraq’s rich archaeological
heritage, the government brought forward the reopening of the national
museum in Baghdad. It has also called on the US-led military coalition
to bomb Isis positions in the country in an attempt to protect
ancient treasures from further looting and destruction. Among the
sites thought to be most vulnerable to attack is the ancient city of
Uruk, in the south, which, according to experts, contains the world’s
oldest examples of monumental architecture and urban life.
“Your heart is breaking because nobody even knows what exactly has
been destroyed,” says Peter Pfälzner, a German archaeologist working
with authorities of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government
(KRG) to preserve historical sites. “This is destruction of cultural
heritage but it is also destruction of an identity, to create a
completely new identity.”
Pfälzner and his colleagues are concentrating their efforts on
finding and recording the locations of northern Iraq’s most significant
archaeological sites, especially in Dohuk, one of the three provinces
of the mountainous KRG adjacent to Mosul. “As soon as they know
about ancient sites and their surroundings, [people] are proud and
absolutely ready to protect it. They just need to know about it.”
Borzou Daragahi is the FT’s Middle East and north Africa correspondent
SYRIA
One of the tragic outcomes of Syria’s civil war has been the
destruction of historic sites, from fortresses to medieval souks,
that have been commandeered in war zones. Rebels unable to fight the
regime’s overwhelming air power have increasingly turned to “tunnel
bombs”, which target army positions from underground. The rebels dig
a tunnel under an army position, pack it with explosives and then
set off a blast.
According to archaeologist Michael Danti, who works with the
American Schools of Oriental Research at Boston University, such
explosions not only destroy these beautiful pieces of architecture,
they also destroy layers of unearthed artefacts buried beneath the
sites. In Aleppo’s ancient souks, a Unesco World Heritage site, the
al-Sultaniyah madrassa, established in 1223, collapsed in October last
year; according to reports, the Khasrawiya madrassas and mosques,
whose construction spans the 13th to 15th centuries, collapsed two
months later after being hit by tunnel bombs.
What next? Archaeologists say there has been little international
outcry over this kind of destruction compared with, say, Isis’s
destruction of ancient Assyrian antiquities in Syria’s eastern Hasaka
province. This is despite the fact that almost 90 per cent of Syria’s
heritage destroyed by Isis and others has been Islamic artefacts,
including mosques, shrines and tombs from the 13th and 14th centuries.
International organisations are trying to support Syrian archaeologists
and other locals in protecting sites not yet damaged.
According to Cristina Menegazzi, Unesco’s programme specialist on
Syria, while there is little they can do for many buildings, they are
working hard to protect moveable items and museums. All the country’s
museums have been closed and items that cannot be moved have been
surrounded with concrete walls, wooden frames and sandbags.
Erika Solomon is the FT’s correspondent in Beirut
MALI
Timbuktu’s ancient mosques and monuments, built of mud and limestone
bricks, have endured centuries of coruscating desert winds and flash
storms, thanks, in part, to the town’s inhabitants, who have dedicated
themselves to maintaining the sites. It was only in 2012 that their
future looked in question when Islamist extremists from the Ansar
Dine group swept across Mali’s north, capturing most of the main
towns alongside allied extremists from al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
Intolerant of the city’s mystical Sufi traditions, they banned music,
and took hoes, pickaxes and bulldozers to the shrines where saints
were buried, and which they considered idolatrous. Sixteen mausoleums
were destroyed, including two that sat alongside the vast 14th-century
Djingareyber mosque.
What next? Many parchment manuscripts were saved from burning thanks to
the bravery of residents who began spiriting them away in metal crates
by canoe and truck to the capital Bamako, and to the intervention of
the French, who sent troops to help crush the Islamist insurgency. But
tens of thousands of manuscripts are now at risk from another source:
humidity.
Abdul Kader Haidara, who runs one of the city’s private collections,
says the manuscripts are now being preserved and digitised in Bamako
in preparation for their return journey. “They will come back to
their previous owners, in Timbuktu,” he says. Funding has come from
international sources ranging from German foundations to the more
innovative crowdfunding initiative of a computer programmer from
Washington state in the US.
Lazarus Eloundou, head of Unesco in Mali, estimates that at
least 370,000 manuscripts were smuggled out of Timbuktu during the
insurgency. He laments the “incalculable loss” of around 4,200, which
were either burnt or looted. In the past few weeks, Unesco has also
begun reconstructing some of the mausoleums.
William Wallis is the FT’s African affairs writer
EGYPT
The Malawi Museum in Minya province, Upper Egypt, was ransacked amid
the chaos that engulfed Egypt in August 2013, when security services
forcibly dispersed two Islamist protest camps, killing hundreds.
Looters broke into the museum, which housed antiquities from the
surrounding region including relics from Tel el-Amarna, an extensive
Egyptian archaeological site. Hundreds of objects were stolen, while
those too big to be taken away, such as sarcophagi, were smashed. The
damage included the destruction of valuable gypsum masks from the
Greco-Roman period and a painted Old Kingdom statue of Pepi Ankh, a
nobleman, shown embracing his wife, which was knocked over and broken.
More than 900 of the 1,089 artefacts in the museum were stolen
or damaged.
What next? The looting happened during a particularly turbulent period
in Egypt’s recent history — the killing of the protesters came
six weeks after the military ousted the elected Islamist president
Mohamed Morsi and sparked wider violence across the country — and
was overshadowed by other events, including the burning of churches
and attacks on police stations.
“There was too much happening,” says Monica Hanna, a lecturer in
Egyptology at the American University in Cairo. Hanna and other
independent academics called for scholars who had worked with the
museum to send photographs of the objects in order to compile a
register. It was circulated to the Egyptian police and army and to
Interpol. The list was also sent to international bodies that combat
trafficking in antiquities so the objects could not be sold on.
Egyptian police managed to retrieve many objects; in October last year,
the government announced that 950 had been recovered. Though there
were plans to repair and reopen the museum by the middle of 2014, it
remains closed. “Unfortunately nothing was done [to safeguard other
sites] after the Malawi attack,” says Hanna, pointing to recent damage
to a museum in Arish in the northern Sinai, as a result of a bombing
attack by Islamist militants targeting nearby installations belonging
to security services.
Heba Saleh is the FT’s Cairo correspondent
AFGHANISTAN
In March 2001, the Afghan Taliban, then in power in Kabul, bombarded
and blew up two colossal Buddhas carved into a cliff in the Bamiyan
valley in the Hindu Kush mountains. Until their destruction, they
were two of the largest standing Buddhas in the world — one 53m tall,
the other 35m. They were also among the oldest, hewn out of the rock
in the sixth century when Bamiyan was a renowned Buddhist centre as
well as a key point in the ancient trade networks linking China to
Europe and central Asia to India.
So vast were the monuments that they took days to destroy, first
with anti-aircraft guns and other artillery, and then with explosives
planted in holes drilled into carvings.
What next? The statues form part of the Unesco World Heritage Site
in the Bamiyan valley and the Taliban’s actions were decried as a
crime against culture and humanity.
The Taliban regime was overthrown in 2001 by a US-backed rebel assault
on Kabul following the 9/11 terror attacks on New York and Washington
masterminded by al-Qaeda. Japan, among other donors, has promised
money to reconstruct the Buddhas from the damaged remains. Bamiyan,
dominated by Shia Muslim Hazaras hostile to the Taliban, is among
the most peaceful places in Afghanistan but, elsewhere, the country
is wracked by civil war in the form of a renewed Taliban insurgency.
Victor Mallet is the FT’s south Asia bureau chief
LIBYA
On the surface, it is just a cave, though a particularly large one,
nestled amid eastern Libya’s Green Mountains. But scientists believe
it may unlock key questions about our ancestors and how they survived
some 200,000 years ago.
Discovered in the 1950s, the ancient cave at Haua Fteah remained
largely unexplored until the 2000s. Now it is in grave danger; it
may already have been damaged or looted. No one is sure because no
one has been there. Located close to war zones in Benghazi and Derna,
many worry it is in danger of being struck by errant missiles, looted
by profiteers or damaged by zealots.
Other sites are in danger too. An Ottoman-era castle in the southern
city of Sabha was struck and damaged last year by a missile during
fighting between Tebu and Arab militias. At many sites across the
country, including the spectacular seaside Roman ruins at Leptis Magna,
observers have noted illegal construction and building, with squatters
taking advantage of a lack of governance to build houses.
Last year vandals reportedly damaged the ancient, precious, prehistoric
cave paintings at Tadrart Acacus, in southern Libya.
What next? Nothing much. Libyan officials of the two rival governments
now fighting each other in an escalating civil war say they have
bigger worries than archaeological sites. Complicating matters, some
in power sympathise with jihadis who consider such sites sacrilegious.
Islamist politicians in Tripoli look the other way as their extremist
allies tear down cherished urban monuments and Sufi shrines. Speaking
to a western journalist last year, Omar al-Hassi, prime minister of
one of Libya’s self-proclaimed Islamist governments in the capital,
praised one al-Qaeda-linked jihadi group’s bleak vision as “beautiful”.
Savino di Lernia, an Italian archaeologist who has spent a quarter of
a century studying Libya, says: “Libyan archaeology is particularly
rich and diversified, being in a very strategic location from the
Mediterranean to the Sahara. The landscape and geography are very
important. The archaeological record is very old.”
And, last month, in an article for the scientific journal Nature,
he warned: “Perhaps the greatest threat to Libya’s diverse heritage
is the trafficking of archaeological materials, for profit or to fund
radical groups.” More action was needed to protect and to conserve
Libyan artefacts and sites, he wrote, otherwise “archaeological
research in Libya, already moribund, will soon die. It would be gravely
disappointing and paradoxical if, after years of neglect under the
Gaddafi regime, Libyan archaeological heritage is once again to
be abandoned.”
Borzou Daragahi
———————————————
The longer view: Daniel Dombey, the FT’s Turkey correspondent, on the
continuing dilemma Turkey faces in its efforts to conserve a historic
Armenian church
In 1951, a young journalist called YaÃ…~_ar Kemal came across an
ancient Armenian church set upon an island in Turkey’s Lake Van,
otherwise famous for its swimming cats.
The church, built on the island of Akhtamar by King Gagik I in the
10th century, had been abandoned since the Ottoman empire’s 1915-18
massacre of as many as 1.5m Armenians, widely described as a genocide.
It had been pillaged, used as a sheep-pen and was about to be destroyed
by the Turkish army. One adjoining building had already been partly
demolished. And yet, as Kemal appreciated, the building, known as the
Church of the Holy Cross, is a masterwork. Its reddish dome echoes
the snowy peaks behind it to majestic effect. The stone reliefs on
its exterior of rabbits, griffins and warriors are beyond compare.
Aghast at such an act of cultural eradication, Kemal travelled to
Ankara, where he managed to persuade the authorities to stay their
hand. But the church remained derelict for a further half century.
Cengiz Aktar, a Turkish commentator who visited the site in the 1970s,
remembers its defaced and pitted walls at that time.
Things changed when an Islamist-rooted government came to power in
2002. The new leaders, principally now-president Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
had much more ambivalent feelings than their predecessors about the
disintegration of the old Ottoman empire. They often celebrated
that vanished multicultural world and sometimes took on Turkish
nationalist taboos.
Hopes were also high that Ankara’s negotiations to join the EU would
progress, and any sign of a more ethnically tolerant Turkey would
surely help.
And then there was the question of the Armenian massacres. Erdogan’s
2005 announcement of the renovation of the church came the day after
a summit in which Armenia demanded that Turkey recognise that the
killings amounted to genocide. The 2007 reopening of the church as a
museum, after restoration work that cost some $1.5m, became part of
Turkey’s response to questions about the past slaughter of Armenians.
But permission to affix a cross to the dome was only given in 2010;
the church is only permitted to hold one main service a year. Some
ethnic Armenians have complained that aspects of the restoration —
ceiling and floor tiles, for example — were insensitive, and that
funds could also have been spent restoring the many ravaged smaller
churches in the area. There have also been objections to the use of
the island’s Turkified name, Akdamar.
All the same, the restoration is markedly superior to many of
Turkey’s reconstructions of Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman buildings,
which frequently reinvent or destroy major features, use machine-cut
slabs or the wrong colour stone.
“The problems were overcome through international technical support,
especially from Armenia,” says Zakaraya Mildanoglu, an architect
who advised on the restoration. Restoring frescoes from the residues
of eggs, watermelons and bird droppings was not a major difficulty,
he says, though finding qualified stonemasons was.
But he adds that even today, security guards stop people from praying
inside the church except on the designated day of worship.
YaÃ…~_ar Kemal, the man who saved the church, died on February 28 this
year, one of Turkey’s most loved writers. But the country’s Armenian
legacy is unfinished business. On April 24, Armenia and other states
will mark what they say is the 100th anniversary of the genocide.
Turkey’s response has yet to be decided.
From: A. Papazian