Theater of Dionysus to be restored at the Acropolis

by Sean McLachlan on

The Theater of Dionysus at the foot of the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, will undergo a major renovation over the next six years.

This theater was sacred to the god of wine and drama and in ancient times hosted the annual Dionysia, a festival in his honor. The festival included a competition for playwrights and the winners are a Who’s Who of Greek drama and comedy, including Sophocles, Euripides, and Philemon. Many scholars consider the Theater of Dionysus to be the birthplace of Classical theater. Plays were performed on this spot starting in the sixth century BC. The theater visible today was built in 325 BC and seated more than 14,000 people.

While the cult of Dionysus had the reputation of throwing wild orgies, it had a more serious purpose of acting as a sort of social pressure valve, allowing people to mock the rich and powerful and, on the stage at least, make dangerous political statements.

The project will cost six million euros (9 million dollars) and include a restoration of the marble seats and a strengthening of the remaining structure.

Ancient Buddhist caves under threat

by Sean McLachlan on

The Archaeological Survey of India has been struggling to control water damage to ancient Buddhist paintings in the Ajanta Caves in the state of Maharashtra.

The 29 caves in this UNESCO World Heritage Site are decorated with sculptures and paintings dating back as far as the second century B.C. They depict Buddhist tales and images of the Buddha and various Bodhisattvas.

The addition of new drainage systems has stopped some of the leakage of water through tiny cracks in the stone, but recent heavy rains have made the caves develop new leaks.

Archaeological Survey officials are monitoring the situation and trying to decide what to do next. Memories of a another Buddhist cave complex, the Bagh Caves, is making them tread lightly. Bad conservation methods at that site led to their almost complete destruction by seepage in the 1950s and 60s.

India is putting new emphasis on conservation as it tries to add more sites to the World Heritage List. Hopefully the folks at the Archaeological Survey of India will win the battle to preserve India’s heritage. I met some of their archaeologists the last couple of times I went to India and they’re a dedicated bunch, despite having to struggle with bureaucracy, insufficient funds, and the sheer vastness of their task.

Museum Junkie: Oxford’s Ashmolean reopens today

by Sean McLachlan on

The long wait is finally over for the grand reopening of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology.

After being partially or completely closed for the past three years, the museum’s vast collection is finally open to the public again, with twice the exhibition space it once had.

The Ashmolean is the oldest public museum in the world, having opened in 1683, and while there have been a lot of changes over the years, none have been as big as this £61 million ($101 million) project. The expansion includes four temporary exhibition galleries so the Ashmolean can host blockbuster traveling shows, something it couldn’t do with its previous space.

The permanent collection has gone through some major changes too. More of it is on display now, of course, but also the style of the displays has been revamped with the new idea of Crossing Cultures Crossing Time, which allows visitors to see how civilizations developed as parts of an interrelated world culture. This is an an improvement over the old-style way of displaying civilizations as separate entities when in reality they influenced one another on many levels. It also echoes the global perspective that Oxford’s other world-class museum, the Pitt-Rivers, brings to its own collection.

The museum is best known for its collections of Anglo-Saxon, predynastic Egyptian, Asian, and Renaissance art and artifacts, but has a good sampling of treasures from just about every period and culture, everything from crocodile mummies to medieval beer mugs. Museum junkies will not want to miss the new Ashmolean.

If the pictures in the gallery below aren’t enough for you, check out this collection of photos by yours truly and Mrs. yours truly.

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Met returns stolen Egyptian art

by Sean McLachlan on

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York announced this week that it will return a fragment of Egyptian sculpture to its homeland. Unlike the bust of Nefertiti or the recently returned frescoes that the Louvre gave up, the Egyptians weren’t calling for its return for months or years. In fact, the Met bought the item from a collector with the specific intent of repatriating it.

The move is being seen as an olive branch offered by the Met’s new director Thomas Campbell, and another victory for Egyptian head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities Zahi Hawass, who’s been getting tough with museums who own stolen Egyptian artifacts.

The artifact is a fragment of a naos, a shrine in the holy of holies of an Egyptian temple. It was dedicated to the 12th dynasty pharaoh Amenemhat I, who ruled from 1991 to 1962 BC, and was taken from a temple at Karnak, shown here.

History and art buffs face huge temptation when they enter an antiquities shop. Beautiful works of art and evocative everyday items from ancient civilizations are available for purchase, but this history and art buff has always resisted temptation. Much of what you see is either fake or stolen (witness the large numbers of Iraqi and Afghani artifacts on sale these past few years) and purchasing them encourages the destruction of irreplaceable archaeological sites by artifact hunters.

Once in Palmyra, Syria, a guy tried to sell me some “Roman” coins made of aluminum! Unfortunately the fakes are not always so easy to detect, as there’s a major worldwide industry making new things look old. Even if they are real artifacts, there’s a good chance they were stolen sometime in the past.

So congratulations to the Met and Dr. Hawass for a job well done. It’s a shame the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities is such a mess, but Dr. Hawass is working on fixing that too.

Photo courtesy of mikescrivener from the Gadling Flickr pool. Check out his really cool series from Egypt here.

World Monuments Fund announces list of endangered treasures

by Sean McLachlan on

The World Monuments Fund, a private organization battling to preserve the world’s great man-made wonders, has published a list of the most endangered monuments around the world.

It’s a depressing litany of priceless places that are under threat from a variety of factors, mostly related to human greed.

Some monuments are fantastic, such as the mountaintop monasteries of Phajoding in Bhutan, where centuries of peace and solitude are being disturbed by an increasing number of trekkers seeking peace and solitude.

Others are more mundane places that you might not even notice, yet they’re important artifacts of history, like the farm fields of Hadley, Massachusetts. When the Puritans first settled here in 1659 they replicated the system of open, narrow fields that they knew from England. The field system still exists today, but this legacy of America’s early settlers has now been rezoned for commercial and residential buildings, including a Wal-Mart Supercenter.

My own adopted country of Spain has seven entries to the list. The old medieval town of Avila (pictured here) is facing increasing pressure from new building, while Gaudí’s famous cathedral in Barcelona is threatened by the construction of a high-speed railroad right next to it. That a rich, moderately-sized country should have so many entries should come as no surprise to Spanish residents. “Developers” have been ruining the Spanish landscape for years, fueling a building boom that crashed last year and flung the country into a deep recession. The most glaring example of the rapacity of the Spanish real estate market is the coastline, where a ring of apartments, homes, and hotels encircle the country like a garrote. Some of this construction is illegal, but campaigners have had only limited success in stopping it.

The list has been published every two years since 1996 in order to bring attention to cultural heritage sites that are threatened by natural or man-made factors, although the bulk of them are man-made. Many of the sites that make it onto the list get sizable donations from the World Monuments Fund to help their caretakers preserve them.

Best of luck guys, given constantly expanding urban areas and a rising population, you’ll need it.

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