Egypt to send delegation to Netherlands to bring home stolen antiquity
Mon Apr 8, 2:18 PM ET
CAIRO, Egypt - Egypt said Monday it is sending a delegation to the Netherlands to bring home an ancient statue stolen from the country 15 years ago.
The 50-by-33 centimeter (20-by-13.2 inch) statue of King Amenhotep III, who lived from 1417 BC to 1379 BC, was among 55 pieces stolen from a storage near a Karnak temple in the southern city of Luxor 15 years ago. It was then smuggled to the Netherlands, said Zahi Hawass, head of the government's Supreme Council of Antiquities. The international police force, or Interpol, found the statue in the possession of a collector in the Hague, Hawass said. The delegation from the council will be in the Hague next week, headed by a new department specialized in retrieving stolen Egyptian antiquities abroad. Meanwhile, Hawass said Egyptian Culture Minister Farouk Hosni approved a proposal to sever all scientific cooperation with foreign universities and museums that refuse to return stolen Egyptian antiquities. Officials have been working hard to have smuggled artifacts returned to the country. A number of pieces have recently returned, including the base of the sarcophagus of Akhenaten, one of ancient Egypt's most important pharaohs, which was handed back by German authorities in January. From: IntlArtCop@aol.com
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Physicists Outwit Antique Forgers
By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News The popularity of antique collecting has led to a surge in high-quality forgeries, making it difficult for even experts to identify priceless treasures from nearly worthless fakes. But a physicist has figured out a way to beat the forgers at their game. Using a process called thermoluminescence, physicist Doreen Stoneham can now tell the true age of objects made of pottery, terracotta, porcelain, stoneware and bronze, which often contain a clay core.
The process is described in the current issue of Physics World, the journal for the Institute of Physics. According to Stoneham, thermoluminescence (TL) is a reaction that occurs when heat is applied to clay, which naturally contains radioactive minerals like uranium. Heat causes the minerals to emit blue and ultraviolet photons of light.
Stoneham explained, "Geological clay emits a strong TL signal as electrons have been accumulating for millions of years. Once the clay artifact is fired by the potter, all the TL drains away. If a new artifact is heated a short time after it has been fired, no TL is observed, however, if heated after many years have elapsed, a TL signal is again seen."
Stoneham and her team can then determine the age of the object, as the light intensity is proportional to how many years have elapsed since the initial firing.
She told Discovery News, "Forgers try to beat the system using marriages of bits and pieces from unrelated ancient objects, by molding ground up ancient clay with a binder (no heating), and by artificial irradiation, to name but a few methods."
Because of such clever forgeries, even experts have a hard time dating objects. As a result, Stoneham's process has received interest from museums and auction houses such as Sotheby's and Christie's. But anyone can use the services of Stoneham's Oxford Authentication Ltd. in Oxfordshire, England, which run between about $360-$500.
Ann Wintle, professor of geography and earth sciences at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth, supports the use of thermoluminescence.
"We do not work on pottery here, but the principles are much the same as the work carried out by Doreen Stoneham," said Wintle, who uses the process to date lava, limestone, stalagmites, deep-sea sediments and sands.
Recently, Wintle and her colleagues used TL to identify the world's oldest known work of art, a 77,000 year-old piece of geometrically carved ochre found in South Africa. http://dsc.discovery.com/
Ancient Roman villa may hold world's richest literary treasure
By Robert Harris April 2 2002
Two thousand years ago, on the Bay of Naples, in the outskirts of the luxurious resort of Herculaneum, stood one of the grandest houses of the Roman world.
The Blenheim Palace extended more than 200 metres along the shoreline and included an Olympic- sized pool. The extraordinary construction, which has never been fully excavated, is now the subject of an academic controversy. Eight of the world's leading scholars of ancient literature, including four professors of Greek (from the universities of Bristol, Harvard, London and Oxford) have launched a campaign to recover what they believe the villa may still contain: one of the greatest cultural treasures of all time. Unless work starts soon, they warn, it could be lost for ever. The villa probably belonged to Lucius Calpurnius Piso, father- in-law of Julius Caesar and one of the rulers of the Roman republic. In AD79, a century after his death, it was buried under 30 metres of volcanic debris by the same Vesuvius eruption that wiped out Pompeii and Herculaneum. In 1738, it was rediscovered and the excavators removed statues and objets d'art. In the process, they threw away many lumps of what they took to be coal or charcoal. It was not until 1752 when they discovered the villa's library - neatly lined with 1800 rolls of papyrus - that they realised the discarded material had been books. It remains the only intact library to have survived from the ancient world and the palace became known as "the Villa of the Papyri".
These rolls of papyri were difficult to decipher and it was not until the 1970s that they began to receive proper scientific study from an international team of scholars led by Professor Marcello Gigante of the University of Naples. Hundreds of Greek works - including half of Epicurus' entire opus, missing for 2300 years - and some Roman odes were read for the first time. The author most commonly represented turned out to be Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher attached to Piso's household, who taught the greatest Latin poet, Virgil, and probably Horace. It was increasingly Professor Gigante's conviction that only about half of Piso's collection had been retrieved and that much more awaited discovery. Fresh attempts were made in the 1990s to explore the old excavations and these yielded an astonishing discovery. The villa was not merely built on one level, as had been previously thought, but was terraced down to the sea. It appeared that slaves had been trying to carry crates of books to safety when they were overwhelmed by the eruption. And the mosaic floors, frescoes and painted ceilings of these lower storeys supported Professor Gigante's belief in the existence of a second library. Unfortunately, the project ran out of money and Professor Gigante died in November. All that now remains of the exploration is a huge waterlogged hole in which float the syringes of local heroin addicts.
Several of the experts involved in the campaign to save the villa agree there may be lost plays by Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus, or even the lost dialogues of Aristotle, as well as works by many other Greek writers, in the lower level. A contemporary copy of the Lucretius poem On the Nature of Things - which has been recovered - suggests that the villa may yield copies of Virgil's Aeneid, or copies of Horace, or even Catullus. And it is possible that a family capable of owning such a villa also possessed a copy of Livy's History of Rome, of which more than 100 of the original 142 books are missing. In the words of the campaigners: "We can expect to find good contemporary copies of known masterpieces and to recover works lost to humanity for two millennia. A treasure of greater cultural importance can scarcely be imagined." In the meantime, the buried villa is threatened, in the short term by flooding, in the long term by renewed volcanic activity. What is needed is money to restart the excavation and sufficient will on the part of the Italian authorities to see the project through.
-Telegraph
This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/04/01/1017206183365.html