The importance of archaeological developments can take a long time to register in the general public consciousness. This is perhaps because excavations take years, results are often published long after the work begins, the significance is not immediately apparent, or conclusions are denied when they run counter to conventional narratives. Keeladi, near Madurai, is a site discovered a decade ago; its significance was appreciated pretty quickly in Tamil Nadu, where it is located, but has rather flown under the radar internationally.
Archaeology
In few countries is the contrast between buried riches and visible squalor as great as in Afghanistan. Ancient towns like Balkh and Ghazna present scenes of desolation which belie the wonderful objects and architectural elements that archaeologists have recovered from them. Other rich sites, like Ai Khanum, lie below the surface of a featureless plain. Perhaps only Herat recalls to visitors the storied riches of this country, with its grandiose mosque and Sufi shrines. It is in a way surprising that Afghanistan attracted so many archaeological missions, though after the fact they were well rewarded for their efforts. In Ancient Civilizations of Afghanistan, Warwick Ball recounts how Afghanistan has historically been the center of many civilizations, and not the isolated, peripheral land it has become.
Quite a lot of archaeological water, to say nothing of history writing, has flowed under the bridge since Early Southeast Asia’s first edition in 2014.
The recently-opened exhibition at Hong Kong’s Palace Museum, “The Origins of Chinese Civilisation”, has a serious purpose, but one suspects that most visitors focus on the objects, as well they might.
New Book Announcement: “Daughter of Dunhuang: A Memoir of a Mogao Grottoes Researcher” by Jinshi Fan
Fan Jinshi, a distinguished archaeologist, has devoted her life to safeguarding and researching the Mogao Caves, an esteemed UNESCO Heritage site nestled in Dunhuang, Gansu Province, China, and considered one of the world’s greatest archaeological discoveries. Her significant contributions to the field of Dunhuang studies and her advocacy for the protection and promotion of the caves’ cultural legacy have earned global accolades.
Coming to the end of its run, this exhibition of Bronze Age artifacts is well-named: “gaze” is about all one can do at objects for which there are few if any visual or artistic touch-points. No culture is entirely unique, but second-millennium BCE Sanxingdui comes as close as any. And without any written records, very little is known about the culture, the people of the Kingdom of Shu, the political entity to which these archaeological sites in Sichuan are believed to have belonged; “mysterious” is, for once, an apt description. There’s a lot of gazing; quite a lot of information; rather less understanding.
The venerable Charles Allen left perhaps his most contentious subject for his last (and posthumously-published) book. The Aryans: The Search for a People, a Place and a Myth is a wide-ranging discourse on history, science, archaeology, linguistics, the history of all four, interleaved with commentary on some two centuries of highly-objectionable politics and political discourse: he opens with a chapter titled: “The Rise and Fall of Superman: Aryanism and the Swastika”.
It helps to come to Islands & Cultures—a collection of essays focusing largely if not exclusively, as goes the subtitle, on “sustainability”—with at least some background on Polynesia, not because such background is necessary to follow the arguments in the various papers, but because otherwise one will be spending a great deal of time on the Internet chasing down one interesting reference after another.
“Ancient Iran and the Classical World”, an exhibition currently running at the J Paul Getty Museum, is the second in a series that examines how ancient Greece and Rome interacted with the other civilizations of the Mediterranean, the Middle East and beyond. A sequel to the inaugural exhibition, “Beyond the Nile”, the current exhibition considers the significance of ancient Persia (Iran) and follows interactions between Persia and the Classical world from the Achaemenid Empire (550-330 BC) through the Arab invasion in 638 BC.
In one sense, this book is the story of Agnès Benoit’s decades-long fascination with a princess, whose statue of chlorite and steatite beguiles us from a distance of 4,000 years. Her mysterious sisters began to appear in antique shops in Kabul in the 1960s. In the beginning, we knew little to nothing about the civilization that produced them. They dazzled with their fine workmanship, the elegance of their shapes, the feminine beauty and power they conveyed.
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