Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

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Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

Postby admin » Thu Oct 27, 2022 9:52 am

"The gentle art of forgery"
by Morley Safer
60 Minutes
Feb 23, 2014

Back in the 1970s, Morley Safer interviewed art forger David Stein, who divulged the secrets of his trade



Transcript

In his lifetime the
0:05
great French impressionist painter Koro
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painted 2,000 canvases of that number
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more than 3000 are in the United States
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the subject tonight is forgery the
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gentle art of forgery a fascinating
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subject that is as old as art itself and
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what makes it fascinating is that we
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know so little about it we can only talk
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about unsuccessful forgeries how many
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successful ones are hanging in museums
0:31
and private collections we can only
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guess all those Kouros are a case in
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point the thing about forgers is that
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they hit us in the two most sensitive
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parts of our Anatomy our pocketbook and
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our aesthetics and they play upon our
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least attractive quality greed one
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hundred thousand I have it a hundred
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thousand dollars for now a hundred
0:52
thousand dollars 100,000 100,000 and
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practically every major sale new record
0:57
prices for artists for periods of art
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are established that saw the bees and
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Christie's in London at Parke Bernet in
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New York old master works are knocked
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down at auction for millions of dollars
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nine hundred thousand 1 million get is
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11 hundred thousand three hundred
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thousand over here now two feet of
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canvas can be inch 4 inch the most
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valuable commodity in the world it's not
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surprising then that the art market has
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quietly attracted dollar-for-dollar
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some of the world's most talented
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scoundrels there's hardly a museum in
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the world that has not in good faith
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hung great master works actually painted
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by great master forgers Rembrandt was
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for a long time a tempting favorite for
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Dutch forgers trained in the traditional
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academic style of the master Botticelli
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the preserve of the very very rich and
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the very important museums has had some
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remarkably talented admirers this is an
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original by the great florentine master
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this is a forgery made in the 30s not
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discovered until the 60s and even what
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must be the most famous painting in the
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world La Gioconda the Mona Lisa
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every few years a new one turns up whose
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owner claims is the real one the
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Leonardo is this the real one or is this
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the da Vinci both are copies this is the
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Mona Lisa the one hanging in the Louvre
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which experts agree may not be the best
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but is certainly the first detecting
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forgeries of old masters has become a
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relatively easy job technology can date
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pigment and canvas even the dust and
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soot that great forgers use to give the
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impression of three or four hundred
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years of time forgers of the period and
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there have been forgers as long as
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there's been painting are almost
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impossible to detect then it becomes a
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question of style over which generation
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after generation of experts go to their
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graves still arguing but the most
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difficult mint catches the forger of
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20th century paintings the
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post-impressionist masters Picasso
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Chagall Matisse and Modigliani walk into
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any decent art shop you can buy the same
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paper they use the same canvas the same
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paint it could be argued that you don't
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even have to be much of a painter to
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paint in the manner of some of the
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modern masters and that is the essence
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of all art forgery not to simply copy a
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painting by say Picasso but to sit down
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and create out of the whole canvas an
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entirely new Picasso one that he might
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have painted some examples is this the
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Chagall or this
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is this the fake 20 glee Ani or this
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did only Matisse paint this one or this
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one
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all the fakes we've seen were painted by
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the same man his name
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well I called from a confidential French
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Interpol file number 506 stroke six one
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only haddad born coulomb france alias
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fille du crest born dijon alias George
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de Launay born en France alias Michele
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Laroy born niece his best known as David
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Stein born Alexandria Egypt one of the
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most charming villains ever to take
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brush in hand and stroll down the seans
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Alizee and Park Avenue and through the
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salons of Palm Beach David Stein made a
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career and a fortune out of selling
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cut-rate paintings in the manner of the
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modern masters it took one of the
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artists he was forging to finally catch
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him out and now Stein or Haddad or
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whatever his name is has served prison
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sentences in the United States and
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France he lives in Paris David Stein is
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still painting but today he paints under
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his own name and signs these pictures
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with his own name he no longer signs
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Chagall or Modigliani or Picasso but for
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the purposes of this broadcast we asked
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him to paint for us a Chagall David how
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would you have presented it to a gallery
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or private collector well as an original
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gouache by Marc Chagall David how did it
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all start how did you get into art
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forgery well I was working for a French
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newspaper one day I wanted to find out
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really where it was all about as far as
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dealing with paintings and I did a
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little bit castle drawing and I went to
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see you and I'll dealer I knew in Paris
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and I had sort of built up a story that
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I got it from my aunt in turn and she
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added from the castle in the South of
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France and without any paper
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authentication or nothing and just
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bought it for $2,000 you think it's a
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genuine Picasso any boat a forgery
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and he bought it so easily that it's
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unbelievable then I carried on from
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there eventually I became successful in
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Paris in the South of France and I went
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to Italy Spain Austria England and I
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sold all in all these countries how much
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money do you think you made in the
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United States when the investigation was
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found out exactly how much spending
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where sold and how much business we did
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was exactly eight hundred and fifty
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seven thousand dollars if close to a
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million how come the dealers were so
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easily fooled over the years well
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because they want to make money they
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don't you know they were very scrupulous
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about making money so to say close their
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eyes
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if it if they have some suspicions about
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a painting do you think that goes on
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today still Oh
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I said this is the hole out market is
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like that what's the most anyone ever
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paid you for a forgery there was a
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painting which was a cigar oil which
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went for eighty four thousand dollars
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Lloyd
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where is it now well I don't know
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because actually this painting never
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came up in the investigation to us all
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in the United States
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to whom
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each was sold to a collector by the name
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of LD Cohen this is hanging on his walls
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today I don't know
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LD Cullen lives in Palm Beach Florida
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Palm Beach is considered one art dealer
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told me as a con man's paradise the old
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and the new money that has retired along
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this Gold Coast may not know much about
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art but it can afford just about
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anything and like most of the very rich
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they are constantly vigilant for a
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bargain
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so in David Stein seasoned art forger
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went down to Palm Beach it was written
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in the stars that he would meet LD : new
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art collector
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tell me about Stein it was his in my
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appeal to you Stein is an absolute
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genius this man is a in the common
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parlance a con man par excellence he
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suave he's good-looking he's talented he
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has a flair for conversation now we had
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a piano here he sat down he played
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Chopin's music as beautifully as you
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seen Rachmaninoff he's a great piano
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player and on the moment's notice he can
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toss off a Chagall or a Picasso you
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never know the difference
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and he met society here he was destitute
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he immediately bought a Rolls Royce
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which he never paid for he has Const
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themself in a beautiful apartment and
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the finest hotel the colony he
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surrounded himself with beautiful women
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and before you know it he was giving
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great paintings to charity so he get in
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the limelight and he enticed a lot of
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people of ions he's really was a master
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showman Stein says that you bought a an
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eighty four thousand dollar oil by
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Chagall from hell what an eighty four
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thousand dollar oil painting I never
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paid eighty four thousand dollars for
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any painting in my life nor did I buy
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any should go the highest I paid for a
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French penny
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was $45,000 for that vault at that you
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saw I never bought any French rot
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outside that one painting why would why
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would Stein make that claim he said that
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that was one of the counts that didn't
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come up against him was never good it's
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entirely new to me what you're saying
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because I never water Chagall not price
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range row we had little sketches ago
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it's two three thousand dollars what
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were prompted to say that I don't know
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what benefit he would get in saying that
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they do some other color Colin are cones
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of common names no he said LD cold and
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we called the other paintings I brought
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my girls and the the doofy which was
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good and the de Kirikou and the Picasso
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but never bore a shag on that range
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price range at all
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at no time I forget how many counts the
11:03
word gets David to the original
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indictment ninety or a hundred something
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like that but do you think that there
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were more people who bought pictures
11:10
from him who refused to come forward at
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the time it's common knowledge nobody
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hates to be the florid and usually when
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they afford the hate to tell you they
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were reported so I think there were
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numerous amount of people here that were
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taken in by Stein and will never report
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people have an abhorrence to show they
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would that they were fleeced you know
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that that Seagal that you sold to mr.
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Cohen of Palm Beach how long did it take
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you to paint that picture about three or
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four days and was that how long normally
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did it take you to knock out a say a
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Chagall drawing or a Picasso join or
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just a few you know just a morning or an
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afternoon essence a few hours how do you
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think the artists themselves react
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towards forgeries maybe you know the
12:02
story about the Picasso's and Gertrude
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Stein one day he comes to Gertrude
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Stein's place and then she said that she
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just lost a little painting by Cezanne
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representing an apple so I said she was
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all lost about it you know furious and
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so he said well don't worry I'll come
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back in a couple of hours and I will
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have this little painting done for you
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which is what he did he came back and he
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had painted a little Cezanne
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it's probably now over somewhere in the
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museum or in the collection as a Caesar
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in fact he's a Picasso and it's a
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forgery too
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Stein did not believe in beginning small
12:39
one of his first acts on arriving in the
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United States was to set himself up in
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an expensive apartment and gallery on
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Park Avenue he was penniless
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his only collateral an armload of
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paintings Stein proceeded to as they say
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make the scene in New York net the right
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people went to the right parties and
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sold pictures to well-established
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galleries when he was finally caught he
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was indicted on 97 counts of grand
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larceny
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none of the dealers to whom he sold
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pictures care to comment about Stein the
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art business or forgery David Stein has
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no compunction about talking do you
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think that in principle the art dealers
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the art world is anxious to expose
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forgers like yourself no no I think that
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they want to avoid all this a because it
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kills their business because the old all
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the business is wrong you see as far as
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this ridiculous prices you put on
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paintings or drawings when why these
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artists - who has such a high quotation
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and other artists who have real talent
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as well can't make it because it's just
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a speculation is to start sort of the
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stock exchange with the Magnificent
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collection you have why do you collect
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art about four years ago when I started
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the stock market was at a notoriously
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high figure so I sold the stock in the
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market and I bought the art the market
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went down the Aquanaut David who are the
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real victims are there really victims
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the dealer's so you couldn't say that
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the dealers are really victims you know
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they make so much money anyway and that
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they are they can't be victims so what
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you were doing was playing on their
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greed yes you can say that by offering
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them cut-rate Picasso's and sugar and
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other to Matisse and doofy and Vlaminck
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and then down again and Cocteau's and
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quite a bit quite a lot once you were
14:59
exposed did people refuse to believe
15:03
that they'd been taken were they just as
15:05
happy to look at a painting on the wall
15:07
and say that is not a David Stein it is
15:09
a Pablo Picasso yes I think that a lot
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of people wanted to keep these paintings
15:16
that they even even knowing sometimes
15:19
that they were my fraud read like I have
15:21
an example for friend of mine he I sold
15:27
her had sold her a Chagall the people of
15:30
the District Attorney's Office went to
15:32
see her and asked her to give this
15:35
painting for evidence and she says no
15:38
it's not going to leave my walls I want
15:40
to keep this painting I don't care if
15:42
his side Marc Chagall or whatever I said
15:45
I like the painting I want to keep it
15:46
the woman who bought this picture is
15:48
Anki Johnson a wealthy New York
15:50
businesswoman she is a former wife of
15:53
Charles Revson the cosmetic tycoon when
15:57
David Stein admitted that he painted
15:59
this Chagall why did you not want to
16:02
bring charges against him why did you
16:04
prefer to keep the picture because I
16:06
loved to picture and I always liked your
16:09
girl and I couldn't see any difference
16:13
as a matter of fact when it was hanging
16:16
in my apartment of the shariah
16:18
Netherlands a very well-known AIA dealer
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who I wouldn't say by name right now
16:25
because I don't think that would be fair
16:26
taught me that is Oh anchor you have a
16:29
marvelous Chagall there so and I think
16:33
why should you destroy something that
16:35
you like very much
16:36
so it doesn't make any difference - as
16:38
it really doesn't know I think a picture
16:41
if you like it if it's painted by a
16:45
Chagall or by David Stein at this time I
16:49
don't think it makes any difference
16:50
nobody can tell the difference it's just
16:53
the idea maybe that it's not worth the
16:56
money but I don't know I don't think
16:59
that's very important don't you think
17:01
it's extraordinary every victim of his
17:04
that I've spoken to yourself another
17:06
victim
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everyone who's met it myself the
17:11
district attorney at the time was now a
17:14
judge not one of these people have a bad
17:17
word to say about this man well it's a I
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suppose he is a nice man it's just that
17:25
I think if he would have had a very rich
17:26
father that he wouldn't have had to do
17:28
this he just liked to live very well and
17:30
it was an easy way of making a lot of
17:32
money in a short time he didn't want to
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take the time to really do his own work
17:38
and paint and you know started like the
17:42
starving artist that's not David Stein
17:44
style he would like to write around in a
17:46
Bentley live on Park Avenue
17:49
like we all like to do and he want to do
17:51
it in a hurry okay it's pretty much done
17:54
now the fine took this painting into a
17:57
gallery how much do you think a dealer
17:59
would offer me for it
18:01
well actually a painting like this one
18:05
we have quoted about thirty thousand
18:08
dollars now of course if you would take
18:10
it to a Gary yourself
18:11
they're probably bargained with you down
18:14
to twenty thousand or something do you
18:16
think there's any chance that if I
18:17
walked out of this studio now down
18:19
saint-germain and into a gallery I could
18:22
see a David Stein under the name of
18:24
Picasso for sale well there there's at
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least it could be about two or three
18:29
hundred chances David Stein was finally
18:33
caught when he was in the process of
18:35
selling three Chagall's to a New York
18:37
dealer Marc Chagall himself happened to
18:40
be in New York at the time and was asked
18:42
to confirm or deny diabolical was all he
18:45
said but Madame Chagall was more
18:47
cautious she asked the dealer first
18:50
how much he paid for the pictures when
18:52
he quoted a bargain price she said how
18:55
could you believe there were Chagall's
18:57
at that price
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Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

Postby admin » Fri Oct 28, 2022 11:08 am

Part 1 of 2

Was Europe's First Advanced Civilization Faked? The Secret of the Phaistos Code.
A Film by Michael Gregor
Odyssey - Ancient History Documentaries
Oct 21, 2022

The Minoans have long been considered Europe's first advanced civilisation. However, a group of sceptics are now throwing that assumption into question.



Transcript

This channel is part of the history hit Network.

[Narrator]They are among the masterpieces of our past. But what is genuine, and what is fake?

[Dr. Jerome Eisenberg, Art dealer] I found to my shock that so many pieces that, in my opinion, were ancient, were not ancient.

[Narrator] These works of art were found by ambitious archaeologists. Arthur Evans excavates the Palace of Knossos. He makes sensational discoveries, and raises money for new excavations. And, he's knighted by King George V.

In contrast, Luigi Pernier excavates at Phaistos, and he doesn't find anything really spectacular. Funding threatens to dry out, until he is able to present the Phaistos Disc, the oldest written artifact in Europe.

[Dr. Alessandro Greco, Archaeologist] It was an incredible achievement of Pernier. He managed to excavate the entire palace in just a few years.

[Dr. Jerome Eisenberg, Art dealer] It was for glory and for cash.

[Narrator] Evans and Pernier have brilliant restorers at their side: Gillieron, father and son. Did this quartet reinvent our past?

THE SECRET OF THE PHAISTOS CODE

A Film by Michael Gregor


[Narrator] In 1900, Arthur Evans starts work on Excavating the Palace of Knossos. The British archaeologist has purchased a piece of land near Heraklion for this purpose. Evans is clearly interested in more than just archeology. Prestige back home is also important to him. He quickly produces some spectacular finds. Evidence of an ancient high culture which had previously only been described in myths and legends. According to the ancient tales, the labyrinth of Knossos was home to the Minotaur, half-man and half bull, who lurked there waiting for human sacrifices. Evans is thrilled by the discovery. And for him, there is no doubt that the ruins of a magnificent culture will now re-emerge on the island of Crete. The Empire of King Minos in ancient times, symbolizing luxury and abundance. Meanwhile, in the south of Crete, Italian archaeologists have rediscovered the Palace of Phaistos. For them, in this period of nationalism, the reputation of Italian archeology is at stake.

[workers speaking in foreign language]

Just as Arthur Evans did in Knossos, the chief excavator, Luigi Pernier, is determined to find something unique. And Pernier achieves his aim. Today, in the Cretan capital Heraklion, his disc forms the main attraction for visitors to the National Museum, an icon of Minoan culture comparable to the bust of Nefertiti in Berlin. However, dissent can be heard to this very day. Some people claim the Phaistos Disc is a hoax. But if that is true, who could have been involved? The British archaeologist had the experienced restorer Emile Gillieron, at his side. And the popular image we have today of Minoan life is due to Gillieron's work under Evan's supervision. But was it really like that? Today, experts are critical of Gillieron's methods.

Emile Gillieron's staggering career begins in 1877, when the Swiss man arrives in Athens. The city is undergoing an astonishing revival during this decade. Now that Greece is independent from the Ottoman Empire, wealthy citizens are investing in education and the arts. In the shadow of the Acropolis, a millionaire, who is later to achieve great fame, has a magnificent villa constructed. Heinrich Schliemann made a fortune trading in golden arms. Now he plans to make a dream from his youth come true by rediscovering Troy and Mycenae, the cities of Homer's heroes. The young Emile Gillieron hopes to find employment with Schliemann. Schliemann tests his abilities. At least, this is the story that has come down to us. The archaeologist presents Gillieron with three fragments from a fresco, and demands nothing less than a reconstruction of the entire picture. At first Gillieron is bewildered, but then Emile produces a sophisticated reconstruction from his own imagination. He draws a charioteer with a spear. Schliemann is delighted. "That's what it must have looked like!" But then Gillieron suddenly sketches a temple guard. What's more, this isn't the last draft. He carries on producing various alternatives, until the irritated Schliemann finally hires him.

After Schliemann's death, Arthur Evans has Gillieron brought to Crete. Evans has experienced a stroke of good fortune. Not long after starting the excavations, he made some significant finds. Now the fragments need to be reconstructed. Emile Gillieron can carry on in Knossos in the same way that he worked for Schliemann.

His son accompanies him to Crete. The young man is also called Emile. The island is a paradise for archaeologists. Emile Jr. trains his eye on classical structures which have just been excavated, and on the expressive faces of the locals. It becomes apparent that young Emile has inherited from his father not only a talent for drawing, but also entrepreneurial skills. And a certain unscrupulous attitude when dealing with the truth, as later critics will claim. Gillieron is quite prepared to make his employer a hero, if that's what he wants. Emile Jr. draws incessantly, neatly, and with an obsession for detail. Years later, he will take his father's place in the team that is tirelessly excavating Knossos. For four decades, father and son Gillieron, dominate the image of ancient Crete that has become known worldwide, and is still popular today, despite its discrepancies that "of a paradise island, in the midst of the wine dark sea, a fair land, and a rich beget with water," as the poet Homer proclaimed.

The French Archaeological Institute in Athens is a meeting point for artists and scientists. Its director is Alexandre Farnoux. Only a few days ago, the archaeologists gained access to the former private archives of the Gillieron family, so he can provide an expert evaluation.

[Alexandre Farnoux, Director, The French Archaeological Institute in Athens] This is the order book of Gillieron Senior. It's the original form of the catalog used by the Gillierons to offer copies of the archaeological finds. This book contains all the important objects discovered during the excavations, complete with photographs of the restored pieces, and explanations. Here, for example, it says "vase from Pylos" documented by the former German archaeologist Muller. Then it states the size of the vase, and price.

[Narrator] For a long time, archaeologists were only able to provide reasonably accurate depictions of the original archaeological finds with the help of illustrators, who sketched them and used watercolors. So, Gillieron Sr. is in the right place at the right time, and with the right people to develop his talents to the full. He has to capture the shades of color, and the intensity, precisely at the moment of discovery. The skillful illustrator quickly finds an artistic mode of expression for the style of Bronze Age Crete. At least the way his boss Evans pictures the Empire of King Minos.

[Prof. Alexandre Farnoux, Archaeologist] This is a drawing by hand made directly from the original of the Fresco. With the outlines of the excavated fragments, and the additions that Gillieron has suggested in order to recreate the picture. The Minoan tradition of bull-leaping, involved acrobats racing straight towards the animal and jumping over it. This dangerous practice was part of the religious cult rituals, and could end in death.

Europe and the USA quickly became gripped by Cretan fever. The newly-discovered works of art inspire artists and fashion designers, although others dismiss it all as merely a kind of archaeological fantasy-land.

[Prof. Alexandre Farnoux, Archaeologist] The Gillierons produced drawings as if on a conveyer belt, which they then embellished with watercolors. Here's the famous detail from the "Procession Fresco." It was a kind of exercise in graphics, which was then reproduced and sold everywhere in Europe.

[Narrator] The Lily Prince is a revealing example of Gillieron's working method. Gillieron simply reinvented the figure.

[Prof. Alexandre Farnoux, Archaeologist] In the case of the "Lily Prince Fresco", we now know precisely that it has in fact been composed from completely different frescoes. Gillieron did it because that's what Evans wanted in order to illustrate the Minoan Empire. And we experts are still impressed by it, even though the background is much better known today.

[Narrator] Arthur Evans continues to excavate. Utterly convinced that he has a mission to perform, Evans hardly appears bothered by scruples. Non-Minoan architecture is simply disposed of. He names ruins at the palace but his sole discretion. When an alabaster throne is found, Evans immediately declares it to be the Throne of King Minos, although there is no evidence of the throne's function, or even of the existence of King Minos.

He doesn't have to wait long to achieve recognition back home. King George V Knights him.

Luigi Pernier has far greater difficulties to deal with. In the south of the island where he is excavating, the coastline is bleak and uninviting. The early archaeologists here have to be good climbers, because many of the sites are in remote valleys, or on high mountains, where access is extremely difficult. Beyond the mountains lies the Libyan sea. This ocean connected the Minoans with the developed cultures of the near East and Egypt, but it also provided protection against foreign invaders.

Professor Diamantis Panagiotopoulos has been studying the history of Crete in this area for decades. His arduous expeditions along dusty tracks have proved worthwhile, because away from the major palace complexes, there are many cult sites that have still hardly been subject to expert investigation. The mountains along the coast were always a bulwark. In the past, they held back invaders intent on attacking Crete. While today, they make it difficult for curious travelers to make any progress. The inhabitants of Crete have always formed a closed community towards strangers. At the same time, anyone who wants to excavate here could hardly make any progress without local assistance. The Greek Professor from Heidelberg has many friends on the island. The knowledge they share with him has been passed down from generation to generation. Countless caves lie hidden in the mountains. In many cases, the entrances are only known to shepherds. The Cretans have always regarded caves as sacred places. Gods were born in them, including the father of all the gods, Zeus. Archaeologists still come across surprising finds in these sacrificial sites. Double-sided cult axes made from bronze or gold. And bare-breasted priestesses in clay. Or are these representations of goddesses? They provide fuel for the myth that Crete was a matriarchy, a society governed by women. Professor Panagiotopoulos's excavation site is at the edge of the mountains above the Messara Plain. Today, many of the locals are leaving the area. A large number of villages have been abandoned. However, during the Minoan period there was a flourishing settlement here on the hilltop. The remains have been excavated and studied.

[Prof. Diamantis Panagiotopoulos] What interests us is the question, "Why a certain region was of great importance at some periods in history, while in other periods it was abandoned?"

[Narrator] It is not due to the climate. This has hardly changed on Crete over the last 4,000 years. And yet, after the decline of the Minoan culture, Crete never again achieved the importance it had enjoyed during its golden age.

[Prof. Diamantis Panagiotopoulos] Crete is still a puzzle for us archaeologists, even 100 years after the first major discoveries at the beginning of the 20th century. It's pretty amazing that a developed culture arose here, which could justifiably be compared with the great cultures of the orient.

[Narrator] For thousands of years, the fertile soil of the Messara Plain has been a source of prosperity. This was the basis of both the cultural development and political power. Crete is on the crossroads of ancient trading routes. Since the Cretans had a large fleet of ships, trade with people all around the Mediterranean flourished. This was how the first major culture of Europe arose, with its population established early on in centers such as Knossos and Phaistos. And Phaistos is where the greatest puzzle of the Minoan empire was found. Luigi Pernier's disc.

[Dr. Alessandro Greco, Archaeologist] Italian archeology on Crete began in a very special historical situation. Greece had achieved independence from Turkey in the middle of the previous century. Then Crete was divided into several protectorates: Italian, French, and British. It was due to this environment that archaeologists from Italy were able to work without any obstacles. These early archaeologists, like Luigi Pernier, had to explore Crete on the back of donkeys. They had to struggle against malaria, and other unimaginable difficulties.

[Narrator] In the year 1900, when Luigi Pernier lands on Crete, the island is still officially ruled by the Ottoman Turks. At that time, the idea that the first High culture of Europe had once blossomed here, appears unbelievable. And yet, Pernier discovers evidence of this past everywhere. During the Roman period, the Messara Plain was ruled from Gauteng. Here is the Great Code [Gortyn Code], the oldest legal text in Europe. This was rediscovered by Federico Halbherr, a leading Italian archaeologist. Originally Pernier worked for him. This find was to make Halbherr famous. In Phaistos, Luigi Pernier is at first only the deputy on excavations led by Halbherr. Pernier is regarded as extremely ambitious. He is descended from a family of Roman Aristocrats with French roots. His opportunity arises when Halherr becomes involved in a political intrigue. The affair leaves Pernier the new boss in Phaistos. He prepared for his mission at the famous Sapienza University in Rome, studying literature and archeology. Today, the linguist and archaeologist Alessandro Greco teaches here.

[Dr. Alessandro Greco, Archaeologist] During the period from 1800 to 1700 BC, Crete was a cultural focal point. This was known as the New Palace period, when the major structures were built whose ruins can still be seen today.

[Narrator] It was in these palaces that archaeologists found clay tablets with what became known as Linear A script. And despite decades of research, to this day it has not been possible to decipher this written language. Alessandro Greco is therefore obliged to try a different route. He is analyzing all visual information that has been found so far, in order to gain knowledge about the religion, social structure, and everyday life of the Minoans. His main problem here is that virtually all authentic images are only available in miniature format.

[Dr. Alessandro Greco, Archaeologist] We don't know who's depicted here. Is it a king, or queen, a prince, or a God? And we don't know how their minds worked.

[Narrator] Even the visual language of the rings is still puzzling. The function is known. They were used by rulers to place their seals on documents and letters.

At Heidelberg University, Professor Diamantis Panagiotopoulos is evaluating his series of excavations. He occupies the famous Chair of Classical Archeology here. The Practical work of an archaeologist includes analyzing and archiving the finds. In Heidelberg, a scientific mega project is being performed involving 130 experts from 13 countries. This is the famous Corpus of Minoan and Mycenaean Seals, a gigantic collection of data, including hundreds of thousands of photographic negatives and 9,000 prints from clay seals.

[Prof. Diamantis Panagiotopoulos] It's a collection of the most varied materials, forms, and above all patterns in the images on clay seals, which provides us with a wealth of extremely important information about the social structures, ideologies, and mentalities of these societies. Of course, there are a number of signet rings which cannot be guaranteed in terms of authenticity. We compare these problematic examples with seals from systematic archaeological excavations, objects which have been proven to be authentic.

[Narrator] The work of these experts often resembles the proverbial search for a needle in a haystack. The collection also contains a ring with an inscription that has not been deciphered. The spiral shape in script form resembles that of the Phaistos Disc. Does this ring indicate that Pernier's mysterious clay disc is genuine? One of the problematic examples is the Ring of Minos, which has been suspected for many years of being a forgery. Arthur Evans bought the gold ring from a priest, although many experts warned him against doing so. Today, the Ring of Minos is in Heraklion Museum. If it really is a modern forgery, who might the forger have been? In this case too, the name of Gillieron is on the list of main suspects. Were the Gillierons engaged in forgery for decades? Final proof is contained in the Heraklion Museum, but it cannot be accessed. The British archaeologist and linguist Gareth Owens has made Crete his second home. The focus of his research is on early scripts from the Minoan period, like the disc. The Phaistos Palace complex exerts an almost magic attraction over him.

[Dr. Gareth Alun Owens, Linguist] The Minoan civilization of the second millennium BC is based around the palatial economy. And the palaces like we are here in Phaistos is the center of bureaucracy and religion.

[Narrator] Gareth Owens knows every inch of the ruined palace. For decades he has studied each detail here, such as the so-called Queen's Throne Room. Pithoi like this were used to store the commercial wealth of the Cretans. To this day, traditional urns are produced from clay as they have been for thousands of years. The craftsman in the ancient palace workshops became masters of this art, and their reputation even reached as far as the court of the Egyptian pharaohs, who ordered clay vases and silver bowls from Crete.

[Dr. Gareth Alun Owens, Linguist] The Minoan palaces and the economy of Crete is based very much on agricultural products. Very excellent olive oil and wine, still very good today indeed. They were keeping it here in the storerooms. They were exporting throughout the Mediterranean very widely indeed, traveling throughout the Mediterranean Sea. Very, very international. The first palace was very rich, destroyed about 1700 BC, which is probably the date of the Phaistos disc, and it's no surprise that writing is developed in this southern part of Crete.

[Narrator] This first palace at Phaistos was constructed in 1900 BC. 200 years later, a huge earthquake caused it to collapse. The doors and ceilings were made of wood, and they were set on fire by the flames from the oil lamps. It must have been an inferno.
Although the building has been constructed in a special way, it could not withstand the massive earthquake. The fire spread at incredible speed. The inhabitants fled in panic, but nevertheless many did not survive. The entire palace complex was ruined.

[Dr. Gareth Alun Owens, Linguist] The Phaistos Disc is part of that destruction horizon, importantly, deliberately baked. Not accidentally baked, like the destruction level that saved the other linear tablets. It was actually found with a linear tablet, and with really nice Kamares-style pottery. And this part of the palace seems to be for storing valuable objects.

[Narrator] It was found lying together with numerous other artifacts, indicating to Pernier that the disc had fallen from one of the upper stories. But attempting to reconstruct the catastrophe scenario raises new problems. How could a fragile clay disc survive a fall of several meters, and crash down onto a hard stone floor without any apparent damage? A crucial question that neither Luigi Pernier nor his successor in Phaistos, were ever able to answer satisfactorily.

In New York, Jerome Eisenberg deals in ancient artifacts. This internationally renowned specialist has spent decades studying items to establish whether they are genuine, or forgeries.

[Dr. Jerome Eisenberg, Art dealer] It's been fired very thoroughly, very evenly. And the only time ancient tablets were fired was during a fire, and they'd be unevenly fired. And the edges are very, very sharp. And you wouldn't have any ancient tablet, anything made out of clay with sharp edges, that could easily be damaged. It had too many things wrong with it. If you have two or three things that don't make sense, I can accept it. But when you have eight or nine different things that are wrong with the piece, then I certainly would condemn it as a forgery.

[Narrator] If Eisenberg's suspicions are correct, it would mean that Luigi Pernier falsified the exploration record. However, it is also conceivable that he himself was tricked. To this day it has not been established exactly who was present at the excavation when the object was found.

Alessandro Greco thinks it inconceivable that Pernier himself faked the object.

[Dr. Alessandro Greco, Archaeologist] It was an incredible achievement of Luigi Pernier's, to excavate and even evaluate the entire palace within the space of just a few years.

[Narrator] In addition to his excavation activities, Luigi Pernier was also employed in Florence as an antiques inspector. His jurisdiction included the city's archaeological museum. Finds from the Etruscan period have pride of place in the collection here. The Etruscans were among the most powerful people around the Mediterranean. Paola Rendini is a specialist in a Etruscan script. In the magazine, Dr. Rendini and the museum director study one of the most valuable items, the Magliano Disc. It represents one of the most important examples of Etruscan script. Today, the 70 words can be read, while in the days of Luigi Pernier this was not possible. At eight centimeters in diameter, it is half the size of the Phaistos Disc. The words and sentence sections are separated by dots, while on the Phaistos Disc, vertical lines are used.

[Dr. Paola Rendini, Archaeologist] It was found at the end of the 19th century in 1882. The Archaeological Museum in Florence bought it in 1888. It's an extraordinary object because the disc is made of lead. It measures 8x7 centimeters. This isn't very large, but it contains one of the oldest examples of Etruscan writing known to us. Near the location where this was found, an Etruscan cemetery was discovered with even older graves, from the late 7th and early 6th Century BC.

[Narrator] This cult object originated a thousand years after the palace fire in Phaistos. Cultural exchange between Etruscans and Minoans would appear extremely unlikely. Consequently, the great similarity between the two discs is inexplicable. However, while he was working in Florence, Luigi Pernier could have studied the Magliano Disc extensively before he discovered the Phaistos Disc in Crete. As far as Jerome Eisenberg is concerned, this is a crucial clue.

[Dr. Jerome Eisenberg, Art dealer] It has many unique characteristics it. It has nothing to do with any other work of ancient art. Physically, it's the only large disc that's found in the Near East or in the Mediterranean area. Nobody can decide what it is, and where it came from.

Evidence for suspect authenticity:

1) peculiarity of the object
2) punctuations at beginning/end of lines and at various heights
3) abbreviations not elsewhere attested
4) dimensions not corresponding to ancient units of measurement
5) seriality

The genuineness of the object is, in my view, challenged by at least four elements -- or rather five -- which I was able to detect after an accurate inspection. First, its peculiarity. In fact, this tablet does not belong to any of the well-known categories of the so-called instrumentum inscription. It is not a Tabla Lusoria -- a game board. It is not a Tessera hospitalis -- a hospitality token, nor a Tessera Nummularia -- a bronze tag for money changers. It is not a Signaculum, a stamp, because it is not written in reverse order, and it has no handle. Likewise, it is not a label to be attached to an object, because it is written on both sides. And it was not tied to an object, since it has no hole. And so it is quite impossible to define the typology of this artifact, which for the sake of simplicity, we shall simply call a "tablet." The Second point: its punctuation. Punctuation marks are located at the beginning and at the end of the lines at various heights, and this is not how the Romans usually punctuate their texts. Third, the sequence of single letters on the back cannot identify with any of the abbreviations commonly used for Latin epigraphy in the early Imperial times. And Fourth, the dimensions and the weight of the object do not correspond to ancient Roman units. And this is quite a strong argument, in my view, in favor of the falseness of these objects.

Indeed, to these four considerations one might add one final point, that of seriality. Seriality and repetitiveness can often be identified as markers of forgery. Forgers often fabricated more than one sample of their counterfeit products, which may now be inadvertently considered to be genuine artifacts in different parts of the world. For instance, in archaeological museums. So, of course, there are inscriptions which were produced in more than one copy in ancient times, but generally speaking, one should always be cautious when identical, or even slightly different texts, can be found on different physical objects  

-- Epigraphic Criticism and the Study of Forgeries: A Historical Perspective, by Lorenzo Calvelli


[Narrator] One of Pernier's successors at the Italian excavation site in Phaistos, also finds the disc extremely puzzling.

[Dr. Alessandro Greco, Archaeologist] The disc is a unique object, with a unique inscription, for Crete and the entire Eastern Mediterranean. It's a script that features open syllables, like ka-ke-ki-ko-ku, or ta-te-ti-to-tu. It probably originated In Crete, because all other Cretan scripts, such as linear A and B, are also the open syllable type.

[Narrator] In the Heraklion Museum, the disc is the main attraction. It is 3,600 years old, according to the museum. The inscription is said to be a prayer, a record of battles, or an archive register. What is known for certain is that the disc has a diameter of 16 centimeters, and is stamped with 45 different symbols arranged in a spiral from the outer rim to the center, forming a total of 242 stamped impressions.

[Dr. Gareth Alun Owens, Linguist] Too many signs for an alphabet. Too few signs for a system like Chinese or Egyptian. So what we decided to do was to try to progress with systematic epigraphic work. So if a sign is the same in different scripts, it has the same sound value. And those 45 signs, the sound values can be found amongst the 90 sound values of Linear B, which is a script of roughly the same time, from the same place, which has been deciphered.

[Narrator] While the linguistics expert believes there may soon be a breakthrough, Jerome Eisenberg sees examples of suspicious errors.

[Dr. Jerome Eisenberg, Art dealer] This inscription basically goes from right to left, as in Egyptian hieroglyphs. On the other hand, Minoan script a Linear A and Linear B are read from left to right. These are all too highly realistic to be in an ancient script. This is an interesting symbol. This is a gloved hand, or a caestus in Latin, which only occurs in the Roman period, which is about 1500 years later. They just don't make sense together.

[Narrator] If Jerome Eisenberg is right, how could the forger have achieved this? It must have been somebody familiar with classical script types. Obtaining the raw material for the clay disc wouldn't have been a problem. There are potters close to Phaistos. If the price were high enough, they would have remained silent. Luigi Pernier had access to the excavation records, and might have desired the fame for himself, and for Italy. Whether he had the necessary handicraft skills to produce the forgery himself is doubtful. While the spiral pattern almost looks as though it was produced by a child, the symbols were printed with seals molded in a sophisticated process. Jerome Eisenberg believes Pernier commissioned the work at most.

[Dr. Jerome Eisenberg, Art dealer] It was said that Gillieron was present at the time the disc was discovered, and that Pernier was not, that he was probably taking a nap.

[Narrator] The exact circumstances when the Phaistos Disc was found can't be established definitively. No archaeologist was a direct witness. It may be significant that the Gillierons are once again directly implied in archaeological forgery. Did their greed overpower their moral scruples?

Evidence of the Gillierons' salesmanship can be found in the Humboldt University in Berlin. The archaeologist Nadine Becker, is researching the purchase of artifacts by the university during the pre-war period. The Wincklemann Institute is proud of its lavishly-made copies from the Gillieron workshops. They are objects of study for experts and students, all in original sizes, like the throne of King Minos. These exclusive replicas came at a price. Catalogues, purchase orders, and correspondence with the Gillierons have been preserved to this day in the archives. Original invoices and customs documentation indicate the astonishing sums the Gillierons demanded, which were paid by the buyers. Using a process which was technically revolutionary at the time, the metal copies were produced by a galvanoplastic method in the Wurttemberg Metalware Factory, WMF. The Gillierons sold the exclusive items to their international customers for outrageous prices. But the Gillierons did not only place replicas on the market.

Experts at the renowned museums of Boston and Toronto, have also found indications of criminal activities.

[Speaker 1] The museum purchased her in 1931.

[Speaker 2] She's a beautiful piece of work, isn't she?

[Speaker 1] Sir Arthur Evans called her "Our Lady of Sports."

[Speaker 2] You know, another interesting thing here is the fact that she's wearing this gold codpiece. Now that codpiece, in fact, is a penis sheath.

[Speaker 1] Oh! Not quite appropriate.

[Speaker 2] Not entirely appropriate. And it's also interesting that the majority of the ivories that turned up, you know, early in the 20th Century AD, are female figures. And this is because Sir Arthur Evans was very much looking for representations of a prominent female deity, this mother goddess. And that's probably why he called her "Our Lady of Sports," because it's a direct reference to the Virgin Mary.

[Narrator] The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Here too, an ivory figure from the Minoan period was part of the collection -- until recently. It has now been banished to the archives. Quite a comedown for the "Snake Goddess."

[Speaker 2] So what made you suspicious?

[Speaker 1] Especially strange is the damage to her face. The proper left side, you can see, has kind of sheared away. And ivory flakes. This is what ivory does. But the features that survived there are centered on what survives. But if that damage took place after the carving, rather than before the carving, what survives should be asymmetrical, or damaged. The scientific analyses are quite interesting. And I was really surprised when they came back. If the statuette is ancient, the ivory should date to about 1450 BC. When the results came back, they were really surprising, because they did come back at 1450, but AD, not BC. So the ivory that was tested, if not a corrupt sample, is far too recent to be ancient Minoan ivory.

[Speaker 2] So who do you think made her?

[Speaker 1] Well, it would have to be someone who is very familiar with the archaeological material. I believe that the father-son team, the Gillierons, who worked for Evans, and had a very profitable business in making replicas, were well-positioned to create forgeries like this.

[Narrator] Jerome Eisenberg feels this investigation confirms his views.

[Dr. Jerome Eisenberg, Art dealer] I attended an exhibition of ancient art in Boston, in Cambridge, and I was shocked at how many pieces, in my opinion, were forgeries. Between 1958 and 1965, I bought some 40,000 pieces, and of those some 22,000 came out of Egypt, and I became rather expert on detecting the forgeries.

[Narrator] Are visitors to the museum in Heraklion admiring a sophisticated forgery, as Jerome Eisenberg claims? However, recent archaeological discoveries could indicate that the disc is genuine. A bronze axe is also kept in Heraklion. On the head of the double ax there are three lines with overlapping signs engraved upon them. Linguistic experts like Gareth Owens see a parallel here with the stamped symbols on the disk.

Gareth Owens and his colleagues have withdrawn to within sight of ancient Phaistos in order to resolve the last mystery of the oldest script in Europe. Now he believes he has finally achieved the breakthrough. He considers that the texts on the disc can be deciphered and read.

[Researcher speaking in foreign language]

[Dr. Gareth Alun Owens, Linguist] What we have here is definitely a Minoan prayer, because we found these words elsewhere on Minoan Crete, as well. We have a Minoan prayer for a goddess. My suspicion is that it could be the Minoan Astarte. And IQEKURJA, which is the key word on the Phaistos Disc, could well mean pregnant goddess. IQE is known from Linear B to be the word for goddess. And KURJA, kuria, could be the word for pregnant. This wouldn't be surprising when we think that the words on the Phaistos disc were also found on the top of mountains where Minoan people were making dedications, tamata, to the goddess on the top of the mountains. Another attribute of Astarte: she is the Queen of the Mountain.
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Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

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Part 2 of 2

[Narrator] Mount Juktas Towers over Knossos. The mountain is a magical place. It is said that the father of the Gods, Zeus, is buried here. For thousands of years, people have been attracted to the mountain peak, which, from a distance, resembles a sleeping man. Gareth Owens also returns to this place repeatedly. On one side of the mountain, an orthodox chapel with three naves was constructed. Archaeologists then discovered that a sacred edifice with three naves stood on the same site during the Minoan period, almost 4,000 years ago.

[Dr. Gareth Alun Owens, Linguist] It's fascinating to look at the offerings and think that what the Greek Orthodox people are doing today is similar to what the Minoans were doing 36 centuries ago. People don't change. They worry about the same thing. There is continuity. People are worried about their health, and they're asking a higher power for help. And some of the words that have been found on the Minoan inscription, on the same holy mountain, on a very small libation offering that they were doing there, and they were dedicating with parts of the body, but at that time made from clay, not just from silver, have also been found on the B side of the Phaistos disc.

[Narrator] Not long ago, an apparently insignificant sacrificial bowl was discovered. Linguistic symbols that had not been encountered previously are engraved on it. They are almost identical to those on the disc. A forger 100 years ago could not possibly have known these signs. Does this mean the disc is now accepted as genuine?

[Dr. Alessandro Greco, Archaeologist] The Phaistos Disc is a problem.

[Dr. Jerome Eisenberg, Art dealer] The clay is not the same clay as found on Crete. We don't know where the clay came from, because we don't have an analysis of it. And the museum will not allow us to take any test on the disc, or even to handle it.

[Narrator] Berlin, the Egyptian Museum. Rumors have begun to circulate that the bust of the beautiful Nefertiti is a forgery. A scientific investigation will provide a definitive answer, despite the high risk of moving the precious object. With great care, and with extensive security measures in place, the highlight of the museum is taken to the Charite Hospital in Berlin. Here, the bust of the woman reputed to be the most beautiful of all, is subjected to computer tomography. The proof that is so important for the Museum Island of Berlin is now forthcoming. The world-famous bust is not a fake from modern times. The risk and the expense have been worthwhile.

The museum Halle is also posed with a problem. The Museum houses what it believes is a sensational object: the Nebra sky disk, a bronze disc adorned with representations of the heavenly bodies in gold. This incredible find was brought to light by grave robbers, and now there are claims that the disc could be a forgery. An analysis using scientific techniques will resolve the matter. The extensive technical study is performed in the BESSY particle accelerator in Berlin. By employing high-intensity x-rays, the composition of the gold plating can be determined without damaging it. In this way, conclusive proof is obtained: the sky disc is the oldest known calendar of mankind.

What about the disc which is the main attraction in Heraklion?

[Dr. Jerome Eisenberg, Art dealer] On the 100th anniversary of the discovery of the disc, 1908 to 2008, I wrote again to the director of the museum, and he said that that since it's a national treasure, it can't be touched or moved. And if it turned out to be a forgery, it would be a disaster for tourism even.

[Narrator] Year after year, millions of tourists come to the island of Crete. Tourism is the most important commercial activity, securing half the entire income of the island. Knossos, Phaistos, and the museum in Heraklion, are huge public attractions, important features of this mega-business. Critical questions? They're not welcome. Thus it is that an air of suspicion continues to hang over the collection in the national museum. Is the beautiful world of the Minoans depicted here a mere invention thought up by Arthur Evans and Luigi Pernier, put into practice by the Gillierons?

[Geraldine Norman] In Auvers, Vincent stayed in a little auberge [inn] run by the Ravoux family. He lived there for just over two months and is credited with having painted eighty-three pictures -- which means more than a picture a day. Some of them must be fakes, and were probably painted by the Gachet circle. Dr. Gachet was a painter, and so was his son Paul known as Coco. After he had shot himself, Vincent struggled back to the auberge mortally wounded.

[Dominique Janssens, Institut Van Gogh, Auvers-Sur-Oise] Adeline, the daughter of the innkeeper, had seen that he was [inaudible]. That's why she came up to his room to check what happened. And then they called the local doctor. And the local doctor didn't want to take care of Vincent, because everybody in the village knew it was Dr. Gachet who takes care for the painters. So Dr. Gachet came over, and then when he had seen there was nothing to do, he asked the neighbor, [Perchick?], to go to Paris to pick up Theo. So Theo arrived at about 12 o'clock, and at one o'clock in the morning he died here in his room. Now Dr. Gachet came over with his son, and he said to his son, "roll, Coco." Because the more he was rolling the paintings, the more he could bring them back home. And that's how he got a collection of paintings on Van Gogh, which are today in the museum at Orsay.

[Geraldine Norman] Dr. Gachet and his son seemed to have taken as many paintings as they could. Gachet specialized in mental illness and homeopathy, but had been a keen amateur painter since his student day. His home attracted many artists, including Renoir, Pissarro and Cezanne, who came to him for medical advice, and loved experimenting with his etching press. Dr. Gachet died in 1909, but his son lived on in the house, becoming more and more eccentric and reclusive. He never had a job, and seems to have lived off selling the pictures and antiques that his father had crammed into the house. One villager, who has devoted her life to the study of local history, is Madame Claude [Migon?].

[Madame Claude (Migon?)] [Speaking French] He wouldn't tolerate people coming to the house. Not even local tradesmen, or people interested in the works.

[Geraldine Norman] [Speaking French] How could he live like that? He had to eat!

[Madame Claude (Migon?)] [Speaking French] It's a mystery. Like many things in this man's life. He was truly his father's son.

[Geraldine Norman] He kept very quiet very quiet about the Van Goghs, until he made a series of donations to French national collections in the 1950s. His gifts, now in the Musee d'Orsay, include works by Van Gogh, Renoir, Pissarro, and Cezanne. He also gave the nation paintings by his father and himself. He signed his pictures, including copies of works by other artists, with the pseudonym Louis Van Ryssel. His father called himself Paul van Ryssel. The museum has reacted to the controversy by having the Gachet Van Goghs scientifically investigated, and announcing that they will mount an exhibition of all Gachet's donations to public institutions in the autumn of 44:30 1998. This is sure to spark another explosive argument.

[Dominique Janssens, Institut Van Gogh, Auvers-Sur-Oise] You have seen when you walk up to the cemetery, the countryside is exactly how it was a hundred years ago. Japanese, they don't come only to visit, but also to bring offers for Vincent. And certain days we just clean the cemetery. And you have lots of little pots of sake, brushes, and also a lot of Japanese who died in in Japan, their dream is to be buried with Vincent. So a lot of Japanese bring over the ashes here, and then they put it on the graves of Vincent and Theo.

[Geraldine Norman] The number of Japanese tourists who come to worship at the van Gogh shrine in Auvers, got a big boost when Yasuda bought the sunflowers in 1987. It will be a terrible disappointment to the nation if they discover their famous sunflower picture is not really by Van Gogh.

[To Tom Hoving, Ex-Director Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC] What do you think Yasuda is going to say if they actually have to face the fact that they are landed with a fake?

[Tom Hoving, Ex-Director Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC] Oh, I don't think they'll face it. I think they hope it'll go away. I do not think that the people in charge of the insurance company are going to let regiments of experts in to take it off the exhibition, and look at it, and maybe even do some analysis, and so on. I just don't think they're gonna do that. I think it would be a very great loss of face. I think the picture was purchased because the only other Vincent van Gogh in Japan prior to the United States firebombing of Tokyo, was a sunflowers, which was destroyed.

[Geraldine Norman] It is said that the painting was relined after its arrival in Japan, which may mean that important evidence has been lost.

We asked Yasuda if we could talk to them about this, and our views on the sunflowers problem. Yasuo Goto, the chairman of the company, replied, "We have no intention of participating in any discussion of sunflowers' authenticity, as we hold no doubts whatsoever that it is genuine. We also have no intention of answering the questions mentioned in your letter." I personally find it impossible to believe that the Yasuda sunflowers is by Van Gogh. There's too much evidence against it. It's not mentioned in the letters, or other early documents. It first appears in the hands of Emile Schuffenecker, whose name has long been linked with faking. And it is generally agreed that it is visually inferior to the other two. It does disturb me, however, that so many experts still think it genuine. They aren't talking to each other, and don't know each other's arguments. Which is why the muddle persists. If the experts, the Van Gogh Foundation, and Mr. Goto from Yasuda, could be persuaded to divulge what they know, the truth about the Yasuda picture could be found. Using secrecy to protect their reputations and huge investments just won't do. Christie's has both money and reputation at stake, and has opted for silence. They refused to be interviewed, and issued a statement saying, "We see no reason, on the evidence so far produced, to alter our original opinion that the sunflowers is an authentic work by Van Gogh."

[Tom Hoving, Ex-Director Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC] You don't ever get a concert of opinion in art. Very seldomly you get it. And so this, I think, will just kind of go on forever. And since it's not going to ever be for resale, does it matter?

[Dr. Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov, Prof. History of Art, University of Toronto] Most of us who know Van Gogh -- and I think a lot of us do, or profess to know a lot about Van Gogh -- know that this very simple man, filled with great humility and compassion for mankind, saw these works as different legacies than financial ones. I think he would be horrified, and distraught beyond anything you can imagine, to see himself somersaulted to such tremendous value, and such crass commercialism. I think it would have been something that he couldn't have ever tolerated.

-- Is Van Gogh's 'Sunflowers' A Fake?: The Fake Van Gogh's, narrated by Geraldine Norman, World History Documentaries


At one point, the Gillierons created the "Saffron Gatherer" fresco from a few fragments. Further finds prove, however, that the figure depicted here was, in fact, a monkey.

Jerome Eisenberg has no doubt at all about it. The Phaistos Disc is a fake, and Luigi Pernier is a con man.

[Dr. Jerome Eisenberg, Art dealer] He was in need of funds for excavation. Also, he wanted the glory of having discovered a famous piece. So it was for glory and for cash. Arthur Evans also complained that he always needed funds, and that his discoveries on Knossos aided him to have rich people contribute money.

Hitherto in his search for Kapilavastu Anton Fuhrer had only had the clues contained in the Buddha Kanakamuni inscription on the Asokan pillar at Nigliva Sagar and the contradictory accounts of the location of Kapilavastu in relation to the Kanakamuni relic stupa provided by the Chinese pilgrims. Dr. Waddell had, of course, very obligingly published his belief that Kapilavastu was to be found seven miles to the north-west of Nigliva but Dr. Fuhrer had no wish to be seen to have acted on his rival's lead. Now, however, with the unambiguous identification of Lumbini Garden he now had two further sets of directions from the Chinese pilgrims to go on. Indeed, he would afterwards claim that 'the discovery of the Asoka Edict pillar in the Lumbini Grove enabled me to fix also, with absolute certainty, the site of Kapilavastu and of the sanctuaries in its neighbourhood. Thanks to the exact notes left by the two Chinese travellers I discovered its extensive ruins about eighteen miles north-west of the Lumbini pillar, and about six miles northwest of the Nigali [Nigliva] Sagar.'

But, of course, the Chinese did not leave exact notes, only conflicting ones. The reader will recall (see p. 92) that to get from Kapilavastu to Lumbini, Faxian had walked east: 'Fifty le east from the city was a garden, named Lumbini'. By Cunningham's method that would place Kapilavastu about eight miles west of Lumbini. Xuanzang (see p. 102) had reached Lumbini indirectly by way of the sacred spring south-east of Kapilavastu known as the Arrow Well, first walking south-east for 30 li and then north-east for 'about 80 or 90 li.' These directions placed Kapilavastu approximately fourteen miles west-south-west of Lumbini. Dr. Fuhrer's subsequent actions show that when faced by four sets of contradictory directions from the Chinese travellers he plumped for Dr. Waddell's advice, which was to look for Kapilavastu 'about seven miles to the north-west of the Nepalese village of Nigliva.'

Before being summoned to Padariya by General Khadga, Dr Fuhrer had planned to excavate at and around the site of the Buddha Kanakamuni pillars using the General's Nepali sappers. Indeed, he afterwards reported that he had done so, excavating down to the base of the pillar carrying the Asokan Kanakamuni inscription, which 'was found to measure 10 feet 6 inches in depth and its base 8 feet 2 inches in circumference; and 'still fixed in situ, resting on a square masonry foundation 7 feet by 7 feet by 1 foot.' But Fuhrer had come to Nigliva Sagar expecting to add real bricks to his so far imagined Kapilavastu and the equally imaginary Kanakamuni stupa -- instead of which he had been summoned to Padariya to witness General Khadga's momentous discovery of the Lumbini inscription. All might have been well if Anton Fuhrer had been allowed to return to Nigliva Sagar to do his excavating. But then the General dropped what amounted to a bombshell by announcing that he 'did not think any other operations feasible on account of the severe famine.'

There had indeed been very severe famine throughout the tarai country that summer and autumn, when the initial failure of the summer monsoon had been followed by the failure of the lesser October rains known as the hatiya. General Khadga was directing relief operations in the Western Tarai, for which he needed all the manpower he could get. It meant that he was removing the sappers that Dr. Fuhrer needed to make his case.

This was an awful blow to Dr. Fuhrer -- and not just because of his extravagant claims about Kapilavastu and the Kanakamuni stupa. The fact was that the very existence of the Archaeological Department of the Government of the NWP&O -- and, with it, his own post as Archaeological Surveyor -- was under threat, with rumours of severe cuts in the funding of the PWD circulating. Furthermore, after ten years of loyal service he was still on the same salary at which he had started: 400 rupees a month or about £400 per annum. A striking example of the value of his department and of his own worth was required -- which he duly provided.

On or about 20 December Fuhrer emerged from the Nepal Tarai to despatch a telegram to the Pioneer newspaper in Allahabad announcing a double discovery: he, Dr. Anton Alois Fuhrer, had found Lumbini, the birthplace of the Buddha, and he had found Kapilavastu, too, the city where Prince Siddhartha had been raised. The Pioneer ran its exclusive on 23 December 1896 and other newspapers quickly picked up the story, which was reported in the London Times on 28 December.

Five weeks later Professor Buhler gave his public support to Fuhrer's claims in a letter entitled 'The Discovery of Buddha's Birthplace' published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society: 'Dr. Fuhrer's discoveries are the most important which have been made for many years,' he declared. 'They will be hailed with enthusiasm by the Buddhists of India, Ceylon and the Far East. ... The [Lumbini] edict leaves no doubt that Dr. Fuhrer has accomplished all the telegram [first published in the Pioneer] claimed for him. He has found the Lumbini garden, the spot where the founder of Buddhism was born.'

-- The Buddha and Dr. Fuhrer: An Archaeological Scandal, by Charles Allen


[Narrator] Arthur Evans was able to make his dream come true. For four decades, his very personal vision of the palace of King Minos, grew on Crete. He was working also for the fame of the British Empire. And by the end of his life, he was able to call himself Sir Arthur Evans. Even if critics dismiss Knossos as Disneyland, each year millions of visitors stroll around the structures made of plaster and concrete.

Today, however, some archaeologists advocate to dismantle Evans' Knossos.

[Alexandre Farnoux, Director, The French Archaeological Institute in Athens] Today, the Palace of Knossos is the way it is. And that's the way people imagine the Minoan world in the year 1900. The reputation of the Gillierons deserves to be restored, because our way of judging the history of art from a modern perspective, as if in a courtroom, and condemning it, is unfair. When it comes to any sort of scientific work, you always have to take into account the time of its creation.

German philosopher Karl Jaspers described science as methodical insight that is mandatorily certain and universal. It is the ethos of modern science to want to reliably know on the basis of unbiased research and critique....

Misconduct and fraud in science do not only offend against its inherent norms and rules summed up in the ‘scientific ethos’ but also make a mockery of its goals—namely gaining knowledge as profound as possible, which again motivates further research and can be practically applied. Scientists depend on cooperation with each other as well as on productive, constructive and trusting relationships with possible investors, users of scientific results—especially patients—and the general public. Trust and honesty is vital for any kind of successful research. Violations of good scientific practice do not only affect those directly concerned but also science and society in general, and, if permitted, we run the risk of undermining the public’s trust in scientific practice as a whole.

Despite numerous cases of research misconduct being made public, this issue is still a taboo topic among the scientific community....

It would be too narrow-minded to question only the individual integrity of the scientist. Very often, if we look into these seemingly isolated cases of research misconduct further, structures can be identified in scientific practice, which benefit such misconduct if not promote it....

A study recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) proves that retractions of already published articles have become more frequent in the past 30 years. Between 1977 and 2011, 2047 articles were retracted in the fields of biomedicine and life sciences, with research misconduct being the most frequent reason for retraction. Twenty-one percent of the cases claimed unintentional errors as a reason for retraction, whereas 43% of the articles were retracted owing to ‘fraud’ or ‘suspected fraud’, which has increased 10-fold since 1975....

The average period between publication and retraction of articles was 33 months in all cases; it was highest in cases of ‘fraud’, reaching 47 months....Before retraction, many articles are frequently cited. Concerning articles published in highly prestigious journals (such as the Lancet, Nature Medicine, Cell, Nature, New England Journal of Medicine) and later retracted, between 234 and 758 quotations were counted for the period between 2002 and 2010. Thus, it can be assumed that the misconduct of the respective researchers has caused considerable harm to the scientific community....

Possible mistakes have to be differentiated from misconduct with intent and fraud. Characteristics of fraud range from plagiarism to the violation or assumption of the intellectual property of other authors and data forgery. What is considered as fraud is data misuse, the manipulation of results and their presentation, the independent invention of data, the concealment of undesired results, the disposal of original data, submission of false data, disturbance of the research of other scientists and deception. Fraud also encompasses active participation in misconduct of other researchers, joint knowledge of the forgeries of other authors, coauthorship of forged publications and the gross neglect of responsibility.

In 1998 the DFG published a memorandum on safeguarding good scientific practice. Good scientific practice implies to work ‘lege artis’, to always entertain doubt and self-criticism, to mutually check and examine results, to be accurate when securing quality, to be honest and to document and store primary data to ensure reproducibility. In research institutes and research groups, transparency of the organisational structure, unambiguous responsibilities, information, on-going training and supervision of staff and colleagues are part and prerequisite of good scientific practice. This also includes regulations for storing data, for the allocation of authorship, accountability and responsibility for observing the guidelines and regulations of dealing with possible misconduct....

Good scientific practice is first of all subject to the self-control of scientists within their community. Self-control seems to be reasonable, especially because, respectively, qualified scientists can themselves judge best, which results are plausible and which appear rather suspicious. However, the principle of self-control presumes that a scientific community is able and willing to control itself sufficiently. Especially in highly interconnected research—nationally and internationally—concerning complex questions and problems, trust is a crucial but fragile principle. In general, between cooperating scientists, research misconduct is considered impossible, and mistrust, a poor partner. Yet, the recently disclosed cases of research misconduct make it very obvious that self-control, if taken seriously, is a high demand placed on authors, which is very often limited by personal factors or by pressures linked to their university, institution and/or funding body....

The possible consequences of a violation against good scientific practice comprise labour law-related sanctions (e.g. warning, dismissal), academic sanctions (e.g. the revocation of an academic degree), sanctions according to civil law (e.g. compensation) and criminal sanctions (e.g. due to forgery). A revocation must be made and the subject matter must be set right. Violations against good scientific practice must be communicated to all cooperating partners, research communities, professional associations and to the public....

Considering the principles of science and the many cases of fraud recognised over recent years, the question of reasons for research misconduct is becoming increasingly topical. Misconduct does not simply result from poor character or the misjudgement of individual scientists. Although personal factors are certainly not irrelevant, the manner in which research institutions are organised must also be taken into consideration. No scientist can be a priori certain that he or she does not commit errors one way or another—even though unintentionally—or that he or she is not affected by the misconduct of others; however, prevention of research misconduct is becoming ever critical. The following arguments are addressed to explain possible reasons for research misconduct....

When wishing to make a personal career as a scientist and to increase the ‘success’ of one’s institution, one has to publish regularly, quickly and in high-ranking journals. Hence, scientific research is subject to high pressure, which is increased by financial incentives. If there is little success (i.e. only few publications or numerous publications but in lesser-ranked journals), it is unlikely that the career of the scientist will continue long term. One’s own research has to be successful in the sense of ‘publish or perish’ to guarantee a job and income in the future....

High competition for limited funds is generating more pressure on scientists to be the ‘best’, judged by the number of publications and the journals in which they are published....

Research not only fulfils one’s own ambitions as a scientist but also exterior demands for solving important questions for the future of our society. It also establishes and stabilises the so-called ‘research sites’.

The insights of science do not only have value within the field but also in a further reaching way for society and the economy. This is generally held true for countries like Germany, which is rather poor in natural resources but whose know-how is their most important resource in the globalised world....

The impetus for researching may go beyond interest in scientific knowledge; research also serves as a means of self-fulfilment, self-representation and not least the vanity of the agents. For the scientist, this development involves the danger of failing oneself and one’s own aspirations, since despite any highly specialised knowledge: Scientists are no better people.

Presently, we feel that communication between scientists is ‘disturbed’; self-control does not really work. High research activity and great dependency on external funding influence the culture of communication. This has had an effect on scientific journals over recent years, with an exponential increase in the number of publications, and also in the creation of new peer-reviewed journals.

Publication of articles is subject to the self-control of scientists. An article submitted for publication is usually assessed in the form of an anonymous review, normally by two independent scientists....The number of experts who are qualified for reviewing is limited, their time is limited, and in addition, regarding the present national and international research networks, their independence can no longer be guaranteed.

Despite there being a number of strategies and programmes for detecting plagiarism, their usage often exceeds the effort reasonable for those reviewing in an honorary capacity, which may result in a degree of unintentional incompleteness when reviewing....

A loss of a critical discussion culture harms the quality of research. Adverse factors conditioning misconduct can be observed at conferences and congresses....One can do nothing else but congratulate. Hardly ever are negative results or one’s own mistakes addressed. Our ‘togetherness’ finds itself in a rather care-free and positive atmosphere; arguments on a matter can seldom be found. What is thus not promoted is dealing critically with research results....

The appreciation of authors whose effective part in the respective article is limited or minor becomes a disadvantage if they become unaware accomplices, even in individual cases of research misconduct. Being accepted in the context of many experts promotes one’s reputation and career; however, this way of thinking might be damageable for the integrity of science. Networks can also obstruct the clarification of research misconduct: If one ‘falls’, many others will ‘fall’ too. Who would really want that?...

The very successful scientists of today (sometimes called ‘heroes of science’ or ‘giants in medicine’) generally have such a high number of publications that outsiders may feel ‘dizzy’.... Publishing more and more and better each time increases the danger of losing control over the content and of not fulfilling a researcher’s responsibility....

Taking part in many activities eventually makes us reach the limits of our possibilities. The genuine interests of a scientist must not be dominated by ‘always wanting’ and ‘always participating’.

Thus, it is not honest to ‘devote oneself’ to a research project, unless the project is an exact fit with one’s own interests and qualifications, just to get the money. A researcher’s capacity and productivity is limited and cannot be stretched infinitely by external funds. If the expectations are not fulfilled and the necessary honesty is missing, money can become a disadvantage for research....

[T]hose who already have a lot are persuasive and are therefore more likely to receive future funding and perhaps higher volumes. The result of this is thematically and methodically concentrated, and nowadays highly upgraded centres, or ‘research factories’, which show high productivity and growth rates and secure futures. These centres suppress smaller work groups that struggle to compete. The concentration of research in the name of ‘success’ creates power structures and endangers the breadth and quality of research.... high profit (i.e. high scientific output) means everything.

Consequently, a publication in a prestigious journal demands a further publication in an also prestigious journal and so on: Scientific growth is seemingly continued to infinity....

Failure is not provided for: Those who receive high funds are doomed to be successful (i.e. there has to be a result); however, this is obviously a case of positivism misunderstood. Research funding is beneficial, but at the present height, it also means a risk to research, because ‘more’ money does not automatically mean ‘more’ knowledge. This (at least felt, if not always admitted) discrepancy may affect scientists behaviour in a negative way....'

Discussing problems, our mistakes and causes in an open and self-critical way should serve to raise awareness and warn researchers of the potential dangers and consequences of misconduct. In cases of fraud or plagiarism, the agents are not just ‘black sheep’. Individual responsibility shall not be denied and must not be downplayed. However, we have to be aware that generally all researchers bear the risk of research misconduct, violations of good scientific practice are possible for each of us and each scientist is liable to the pressures that fuel such behaviour or, indeed, help disguise it.

Academic work requires transparency. Researchers should be subject to internal and external assessment that verifies their research and relates it to respective control mechanisms. It has to be discussed—not only within the research system, but in a wider context. On the one hand, freedom of research must be ensured, but on the other hand, research responsibility must be realised. Without doing away with self-control, it however becomes apparent that self-control alone is not sufficient and that concepts of external control must be developed and evaluated....

Scientific work also demands modesty; overestimating oneself and one’s own thematic coverage will backfire....

Even though external control may be effective, scientists should still be obliged to self-control. Acting as a researcher does not only serve the purpose of furthering knowledge and progressing personally, but relationships with others must also be considered. Rules of good scientific practice have to be accepted by all of us and embedded into attitudes and personalities....

The pressure to succeed imposed by highly financed research institutions and groups has to be reduced. The fundamental values of science must self-evidently and always have priority; they are honesty, decency, objectivity, credibility, doubt, responsibility and openness.

What increases the risk of research misconduct is working only for profit (i.e. the number of publications and the height of the IFs) and growth (i.e. more and more publications). Thus, research that is libertarian and at the same time only oriented towards the market contradicts the idea of science. Research institutes should overcome the temptation of only seeing themselves as players of the market.

The volume of research fraud that has become known begins to demand a quality offensive to be produced. It could imply proactive controls and random samples, the vocation of quality assurance commissioners, the central filing of data and documents, the obligation to take part in regular self-trainings or even workshops on ‘error learning culture’.

Researchers of today are voluntarily or involuntarily part of a media-marketed academic life. It is not only about the secrets of nature, discoveries and problems that have to be solved effectively; science ‘charms’. Results affect researchers (who gain an impetus for their work out of this) and academic journals (which ‘sell’ well if the stories are ‘good’), and also the ‘world’ (which wants to be helped and entertained by scientific knowledge). The scientist should know the inherent risk of this ‘charm’; the limitations of science itself and, of course, also the personal limits of the scientist are always present.

-- Fraud in science: a plea for a new culture in research, by M J Müller, B Landsberg & J Ried


[Narrator] The fact that the finds of Heinrich Schliemann and Arthur Evans met with such resonance, is partly due to the work of the Gillierons. They too have had a crucial influence on our image of Europe's first high culture. The idea that King Minos's Crete was a paradise on Earth, and his subjects were peaceful art lovers.

xx



[Narrator] Like his father, Emile Gillieron Jr., was never accused of any art forgery. He started a business in Athens. This family company produced successful copies of antique objects right up to modern times.

In Phaistos, Gareth Owens has almost achieved his goal, after decades of working on the mysterious disc. As far as he is concerned, the disc is one of the most important examples of ancient scripts.

[Dr. Gareth Alun Owens, Linguist] We like to think that we are offering a reading that is more secure than has been offered in the past. And we hope people will take advantage of that to move on to the next stage, which is trying to understand.

[Narrator] Jerome Eisenberg refuses to be distracted by Gareth Owen's success.

[Dr. Jerome Eisenberg, Art dealer] I still believe that it is 100% a forgery. No question in my mind.

[Narrator] The suspicions attached over the decades about the authenticity of his disc, didn't appear to damage Pernier's career as an archaeologist. For 30 years, he performed research in Phaistos, ignoring all the doubts and all the doubters.
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Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

Postby admin » Mon Nov 21, 2022 1:35 am

The Truth About The World's Most Elaborate Archaeological Fraud
Absolute History
May 29, 2022

During the late 1800s, a multitude of strange artifacts were unearthed in Michigan. Written in ancient scripts from around the world, they told of a Near Eastern culture living in North America before the arrival of Columbus. The Michigan Relics are considered to be one of the most elaborate and extensive pseudoarchaeological hoaxes ever perpetrated in American history.



Transcript

0:35
in a public museum in the center of the united states there exists a collection of
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archaeological relics so unexpected that they challenge the imagination
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[Music] these artifacts tell of an ancient people that existed in north america
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before columbus the language symbols on the artifacts come from the mediterranean
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egyptian hieroglyphics greek letters and cuneiform writing
1:02
the artifacts were all discovered in the state of michigan at the center of the great lakes region
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thousands of artifacts discovered in 17 counties over a span of more than 25
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years artifacts that have survived under a cloud of uncertainty
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are they the artifacts of a hoax or are they the artifacts of history either way they've come to be known as
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the michigan relics when they were first discovered interest
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in the michigan relics was intense but they would fall into obscurity becoming all but forgotten to be
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rediscovered re-examined and put on display a hundred years after their first appearance
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they have been labeled as frauds by scientists and investigators several times since their discovery
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yet these artifacts continue to inspire independent researchers who are certain
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that the artifacts contain important historical facts facts that have profound religious and
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cultural implications [Music] the artifacts are kept here in the
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michigan historical museum when they arrived at the museum in 2003
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john halsey was the michigan state archaeologist the task fell to dr halsey to protect
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and preserve these artifacts that are part of the largest archaeological controversy in american history
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the michigan relics were a series of objects that were found in various parts
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of north central and southeastern michigan starting in 1890 and running up to about
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1920 the first ones that we're aware of were discovered by a man named james scotford
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who discovered a clay cup while digging fence posts up near wyman and montcalm county scotford went about the community
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showing these things off and getting the people really excited about these artifacts that were that he had
3:00
discovered out there so a number of people in the local community went out with scotford dug into small
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mound-like rises probably not really true burial mounds but they started finding things finding
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copper things finding slate objects and so this led some of the city fathers to
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say hey there may be some money to be made in this and under the tutelage of scotford they
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went out and did a whole lot more digging and found a whole lot more stuff their goal in doing this was to sell
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these things to the smithsonian institution but before they did this somebody said
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maybe we ought to have somebody who knows something about artifacts look at these and they got a professor from lake
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forest college in illinois to come up and look at them and he looked at them but not for very long
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before said these are these are fakes and they're not just fakes they're bad fakes
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guys you got really nothing here and they dissolved the archaeological trust and and it probably should have died
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right right then it was not the end of the story however as scotford would continue to show up
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with artifacts for the next 30 years he eventually moved to detroit
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and suddenly he started finding artifacts in the detroit area but now the artifacts
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that we're finding had begun to turn more to slate and copper by 1906
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scotford was listed in the detroit city directory as a painter of signs in that same directory was the listing
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for a daniel e soper who listed his profession as investments soper would become a dominant player in
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the story of the michigan relics soper was a flamboyant personality with a dubious past
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sopra was a former michigan secretary of state who had been forced out of office
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because of some questionable activities he had taken up the cause of the relics and eventually soper became the
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promotional guy for it sort of a low-grade pt barnum he was he was really
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promoting these things on many of the michigan artifacts were images of what looked like biblical
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scenes indicating a judeo-christian people had at one time inhabited michigan and then
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disappeared soper showed the artifacts to the highly regarded pastor of holy trinity church
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in detroit the reverend james savage father savage he really believed these
5:30
things were legitimate antiquities and his stated position was i'd rather
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collect these things and have them seen eventually as a fraud
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than lose something that was really legitimate father savage wondered if the artifacts
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were connected to the lost tribes of israel seeing the biblical images and the mysterious writings father savage became
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committed to preserving the artifacts that promised an astounding historical tale he would purchase all the artifacts
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that came to him james scottford and daniel soper were the source of those artifacts
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these artifacts depicting biblical scenes also drew the attention of members of the church of latter-day
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saints well mormons have this belief that in addition to the bible that there are
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other scriptures and the other scriptures known as the book of mormon basically talks about a
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group of people that left jerusalem and ended up in the new world somewhere and so
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whenever some archaeological find comes along that talks about large civilizations with roads and buildings
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and cities in the new world they get excited about it the michigan relics have three main
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groupings some are made of clay some are made of slate carved slate and
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some are made from copper for the mormons to find copper plates with
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inscriptions was reminiscent of the original text of the book of mormon
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which was not on copper plates but on gold plates so when mormons heard about plates with
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inscriptions oh they were quite excited because here's verification of what they had been
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thinking about and talking about ever since the 1830s while the discovery of the relics would
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generate excitement they also produced frustration the artifacts promised the great potential of filling in some biblical
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mysteries and yet no one could read the artifacts what made the michigan relics
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distinctive was first of all almost all of them had a very distinctive mark a
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series of actually scratches which eventually became known as the mystic symbol
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we don't know what it was supposed to be if you look at it quickly it has something like the ihs the christian ihs
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what distinguishes them moreover is the size of some of the objects and
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particularly the slate objects they're large they're heavy and they in many
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cases also have what has been called writing lots of symbols but it is not in any of
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the known indo-european languages interpreting the languages on the tablets would prove to be the most
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enigmatic aspect of the michigan relics one interested mormon of the day was the
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bishop rudolf etzenhauser he was a member of a break off group from the
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mormon church and he was a bishop etzenhauser was very enthusiastic about
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the discovery of the relics in michigan he even joined soper on a dig
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etzenhouser commissioned a pamphlet of photographs of artifacts hoping the writing on the relics would come to the
8:45
attention of someone who could interpret them the pamphlet contained good quality photos and some information about the
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dates and site locations for the discovery of the artifacts there is also a portrait of a studious
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daniel soper examining an artifact edson hauser's credit to soper would prove ironic to daniel e soper belongs the
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credit of having been for several years the moving spirit in the investigation of these prehistoric relics of michigan
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how did they go about finding these things well they would sometimes come into a new town and they
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would contact the local sheriff chief of police maybe a local minister postmaster and would say
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we've got these very interesting prehistoric relics and we think we're going to find some more in your area
9:39
based on our our long experience with finding these would you be interested in going out
9:44
with us you seem like an educated man [Music] like to see what you think
9:50
so they get together a team of respectable people and they would go to the appointed spot uh they'd say okay
9:56
well let's dig and scotford would say okay well gentlemen you you go rest in the shade for a minute and i'll i'll
10:03
start digging and so he would dig and then he'd go thump thumb oh come here i think i found something
10:09
he would say to them here you excavate and then they would uncover
10:16
these artifacts and of course he believed that this thing was real uh he he'd found it he had he'd lift it out of
10:22
the ground with his own hands there was no way that it could have could be a fake and then uh
10:29
soper and scotford would say well you know we're really having a lot of trouble with the archaeologists they say
10:35
these things are fake uh would you mind signing an affidavit to the effect that
10:40
you found this thing and that in your opinion it's it's not a fake and he said sure be glad to so in that way the
10:47
legitimate authority of the postmaster the minister whoever it was would be
10:52
transferred to the bogus artifact and this was their standard mo for most of the time they were involved with the
10:58
creation of these things while gaining local and national notoriety soper and scotford also drew
11:05
the attention of a newspaper reporter in detroit william a benscoder ben skoder suspected that soper and
11:12
scottford were not what they claimed to be and he took it upon himself to investigate what they were up to
11:18
ben scott's reporting revealed that scotford had enlisted the help of his sons percy and charles scottford as well
11:25
as his son-in-law william scobee and the production of the artifacts the sons bragged about their father and
11:31
their work to marry granny robson who lived in the same boarding house as the brothers
11:37
granny robeson told ben scott that she occupied a room next to the brothers and that hammering went on day and night and
11:44
what the scottford brothers told her was detroit's ancient relic factory
11:49
ben skoder got himself very much involved in researching this and and talked to all of these people would
11:56
confront them on the street in their homes at night one particularly memorable instance was when ben skoder
12:03
confronted scobee at home one night and scoby threatened him uh when when ben
12:10
skoter was asking too many pointed questions is if we if we weren't in the city i'd punch
12:15
you in the in the nose and then and this is not a direct quote
12:21
and what are you doing interfering with private enterprise anyway
12:26
that's as close as we ever come to one of the principal uh
12:31
participants in this admitting that this thing is is actually an industrial
12:38
exercise later on scotford's daughter in a formal
12:43
deposition states that she saw her father make these things
12:48
and that there were other people involved with it but that she wanted it kept secret until after her mother had
12:55
died so her mother lived on for many years the availability or the existence
13:02
of this deposition wasn't known until well into the 20th century
13:09
at the turn of the 20th century the science of archaeology was still in its infancy but there were several
13:15
professors of science that were angered by what they saw as a blatant perpetration of fraud being foisted upon
13:22
the american public together these distinguished academics formed a committee to expose the
13:27
michigan relics in 1911 they published their findings in a scholarly journal of the day the
13:33
american antiquarian thoroughly denouncing the validity of the relics in addition on july 28 1911 in a
13:42
front-page detroit news article professor frederick starr dean of the department of anthropology and american
13:48
archaeology at the university of chicago very publicly declared their prehistoric
13:53
relics were fakes soper was undeterred by the academics
13:59
and with the help of scotford he continued to discover relics until 1920. in all it is claimed that from 1890 to
14:07
1920 as many as 3 000 to 9 000 relics were found in 17 counties in michigan
14:15
soper retired to chattanooga tennessee where he began referring to himself as colonel soper and continued his
14:21
celebrity with appearances at social events where he regaled prominent individuals with reports on the ancient
14:28
artifacts he had discovered in michigan soper died in 1922 leaving a large
14:34
collection of artifacts father savage died in 1927 also leaving a large
14:40
collection of the michigan relics father savage's collection ended up in storage at notre dame university in
14:46
south bend indiana where they would sit for 30 years mostly forgotten
14:55
[Music] it was in the late 1950s when the artifacts and storage at notre dame came
15:02
to the attention of a mormon church leader in salt lake city milton hunter
15:07
hunter asked to examine some of the artifacts and the university obliged his request eventually sending him the
15:13
entire collection hunter also purchased what remained of soper's collection
15:18
combined the artifacts came to be known as the soper savage collection hunter studied the artifacts until his
15:25
death in 1975 and willed the entire collection to brigham young university
15:30
where it was stored but unexamined for another 20 years
15:35
[Music] at the heart of the controversy about the michigan relics is the question how
15:41
did these artifacts get here and who made them at the turn of the 20th century it was
15:47
commonly held by archaeologists that the oceans had acted as barriers to isolate the americas from the rest of the world
15:53
and that the only cultures in north america before columbus were native american and yet these artifacts are
15:59
clearly not native american the idea of the oceans as barriers is known as the isolationist theory
16:07
counter to the isolationist theory is the idea that humans have traveled and spread their cultural influences in
16:13
every direction especially where there were waterways this is known as the diffusionist theory
16:20
diffusionists think the massive deposit of pure copper in the upper peninsula of michigan was a destination point for
16:26
ancient people from the mediterranean diffusionists to maintain that 2000
16:32
years ago access to northern michigan by ancient mariners would have been possible because water levels were
16:38
higher and there were several different water routes to the great lakes region
16:43
artifacts discovered in north america that are not of native american origin are held up as strong evidence for the
16:49
diffusionist point of view discovery of artifacts that could not be explained by the isolationist view have
16:56
often been labeled as frauds by professional archaeologists or just left ignored and unexplained
17:04
during the 1950s while the soper and savage collections were in storage henriette mertz a researcher who
17:11
subscribed to the diffusionist theory began working with a different collection of michigan relics
17:16
mertz would research the michigan artifacts for over 25 years her conclusions
17:22
the relics were artifacts of an early christian sect probably cops that they used greek as their main
17:28
language and were in michigan around the 3rd and 4th century common era
17:33
mertz authored what would become for some the definitive book on the subject her book the mystic symbol would renew
17:40
interest in the michigan relics ancient american magazine is a forum for
17:46
diffusionist ideas wayne may is the publisher of the magazine and he points to his own
17:51
collection of north american artifacts as evidence that supports the diffusionist model
17:57
wayne thinks that among the frauds of the soper savage collection there are some authentic artifacts artifacts that
18:03
shed light on north america's pre-columbian history the material that comes to us ancient
18:08
american i mean we're very very open not just scientific information but
18:14
you know we listen to the oral history of the native americans that's very key and we also look at the artifacts that
18:20
are found and even though they're outside the paradigm we just have to say oh my gosh you know here it is and for
18:26
example native americans do not use oil lamps
18:32
but yet this comes out of west virginia i bought this out of a private collection and an auction
18:37
and the fellow that had this auction i mean that had this artifact he's well known all his artifacts are all authenticated
18:45
yet within that pile of typically native american recognized and accepted
18:50
material you'll find this an oil lamp made out of clay
18:55
now i could take this this little lamp here and go to a museum in the mediterranean
19:01
you know rome greece uh egypt and put this in the museum and
19:07
no big deal wouldn't mean a thing because they've got thousands of them but yet here we have one from north
19:13
america so it's like well how to get here the indians will tell you we again you know we didn't use
19:19
stuff like this we didn't make it but yet here it is and this is just one example there's a lot of things like
19:24
this that pop up you know i i'm not an archaeologist i'm not a geologist i'm not an epigrapher i'm a publisher
19:31
and i'm just showing the american people what's really out here in the history of north america and we've got a lot of
19:37
unanswered questions and stuff like this shows up all the time since their discovery experts have
19:44
quickly dismissed the artifacts because the symbols appeared to be a mishmash of ancient languages that were randomly
19:50
placed on the tablets and yet some researchers continue to ask what language is on the artifacts and
19:57
what is the message there's a guy by mcglade bergen who did his uh
20:03
did his thesis of all things on the uh language is the michigan tablet
20:09
this is the michigan tablet these are the actual characters now we keep hearing how they're they're goofy
20:14
characters they make no sense uh you know they're this and they're that but yet we find the very same characters
20:21
right here in central and south america we find them on the kinderhook plate in illinois so the hulksters that did this
20:29
they came over to southern illinois and and did this one too and this is egyptian characters again
20:35
another match here's a semitic there's biblos and then here's a crete
20:41
and uh mediterranean cyprus for the guy who would hoax this material he would have had to have knowledge of all these
20:46
ancient languages to hoax the material so that's my point it is so big it is so grand
20:52
that something out there has to be genuine and i think we need to look really
20:59
carefully because this could be the largest biggest archeological tragedy in
21:04
north america because of the quantity of material that has come out of michigan
21:09
glade bergen's doctoral thesis from 1972 is interesting because it demonstrates a
21:15
high statistical correlation between the symbols used on several different artifact sources
21:21
his was an effort to unlock the languages on the artifacts but no one to date has been able to use
21:26
his work as a rosetta stone for the michigan relics
21:33
what's neat about henriette she uh during world war ii she worked for um i would just say it
21:39
cryptography she was a well she understood languages she looked for fake things and real things and tried to
21:46
decipher and and break codes and all that kind of stuff she was a smart lady very well educated a friend of hers a
21:52
judge in chicago approached her before she began this project and introduced her
21:58
to all of this mystic symbol business and asked her if she would uh look into
22:03
it because he had several artifacts and he just wanted to know if it was real or if she thought it was bogus
22:11
and when she started out she was very skeptical when you read this book you'll
22:16
understand there's no doubt in henry it's mine that these things are absolutely authentic
22:22
i got permission to pursue the book which i did and i have republished it we
22:27
have not changed any of henriette's work at all but we've added an addendum in the back
22:33
of the uh not all but several of the articles that we have published in the ancient american magazine which helps
22:38
kind of bring things up to speed for our day one of the authors for the additional
22:44
material was an educational researcher david alan diehl diehl's work is probably the most
22:50
rigorous look at the language and symbolism on the michigan relics to date david diehl is an accomplished graphic
22:56
artist he is also a self-taught scholar of paleo hebrew his efforts to learn and master the
23:02
reading of early hebrew scriptures led him to many interesting research projects and resulted in the writing and
23:08
publishing of several books his writings put him deep in the diffusionist camp
23:14
working with the artifacts researched by henriette mertz david has produced three significant insights about the relics he
23:21
has deciphered a language identified the theology and established a date for their creation anybody can
23:28
clearly see that they're religious they're they're biblical in context and they are what some people have said yeah
23:34
they're scenes from the bible okay given that it'd be easy for anybody to
23:40
see the flood and see the rebus with four rows of ten squares that stands for forty and then you see the symbol for a
23:46
day oh circle oh forty days oh it rained 40 days so some of it is very easily
23:52
read and understood david diehl's work revealed a startling new interpretation of the mystic symbol
23:59
instead of being the ihs of christian significance it reads in hebrew as yhw
24:06
which is the hebrew spelling for the name of god yahweh this alphabet
24:12
right here was completely deciphered by me after after realizing that wherever i
24:18
encountered it they were using a hebrew phrase or word and they put it in paleo-hebrew but paleo-hebrew
24:24
disguised by the fact that it was done with a cuneiform nail any language can be written in uniform even chinese
24:31
when i saw the the designs of the letters to me it was very instantly clear that they were paleo-hebrew
24:37
inscribed with the cuneiform nail and made to look something like uniform
24:43
it's a total invention but it's yet based on the shapes of the letters that were already recognized as ancient
24:48
hebrew ancient hebrews over here there's the aleph the beth the gimel the dallas these are all
24:54
standard paleo-hebrew this comparison chart is very interesting because it allows someone who has no real expertise
25:01
in these alphabets to be able to look at them and compare and then look at the tablets and
25:07
work out the sound of the letter anyway you can do that even if you don't have a vocabulary and you get a hebrew
25:12
dictionary and look it up and see what the word means david diehl demonstrated the use of hebrew on a clay tablet that was used
25:19
for much of his research and here's where i got letter number one two three that's a y h w and here i've
25:26
got letter number four five and six now how do i do that well
25:31
the first letter i recognized was this one that looks kind of like a w it's got three strokes going up
25:37
that letter is a classic babylonian shin which is an s
25:42
sh this letter that's the kef
25:49
the other h the heart h and my designer's eye tells me that that's an m
25:55
done with cuneiform you know how you take an m up down up and down but yeah the m the s the sheen
26:02
and the keth which is broken but if you look at it very closely you'll see the relationship of these two strokes
26:07
this one is brought up just like this one right here there's a cath right there with a
26:12
left hand stroke pulled up and then in that case the word is msh
26:18
messiah
26:27
the theology of the cops was a central deity named yahoo
26:32
a good son of the right hand named yahoo saboth the good son
26:38
and an evil son of the left hand brother to the other one called sama el
26:45
salma el is a is the to them was the devil here's the theology basic theology
26:52
creator deity with two brother sons one good one bad
26:58
in 1895 a french translation of the pistus sofia
27:05
which is this coptic egyptian theological document
27:11
came into br came into print and not wide printing wide distribution but but
27:17
some distribution in france and in europe three years after scofford was accused
27:23
of creating the first uh of these artifacts so you have to you have to make your mind up yourself was scotford able to
27:30
convey this theology at a time when it was unknown in the world and it was not a standard christian theology how could
27:35
he have put that in there the answer to the question is clearly he could not i see a consistent theology
27:43
and letter forms that never existed before in anyone's world invented by these people and why would
27:48
they invent these new alphabets very clear reason why there was a thing
27:55
in the beginning of the fourth century called the aryan dispute and the aryan dispute was basically
28:01
bishop arius of of alexandria disagreed with emperor constantine's
28:07
approach on the trinity and the emperor wanted there to be a trinity
28:12
which he succeeded in achieving and bishop arius
28:18
was was the subject of the nicean council in turkey in 325
28:25
a.d when it was determined that the nature of the messiah was
28:32
the same as the father they were the same nature whereas bishop areas held that they were of different natures
28:37
different substance the son was a created being created by the father as an angel first totally
28:43
different than constantine's idea of a of a trinity ever-present co-equal
28:50
trinity godhead which is what he conceived so bishop arius and his followers were
28:56
in a lot of trouble in the eastern mediterranean southern mediterranean
29:02
around the beginning of the fourth century
29:08
to the middle uh the quarter first quarter of the fourth century but they were in sconstance in in egypt
29:15
and they were ripped out at the time of the aryan dispute another intriguing observation made by
29:21
david diehl came from the book of photographs published by rudolf etzenhauser containing this image of a
29:27
slate tablet found near roland township in michigan's isabella county when i saw the photograph in
29:34
etsonhauser's book i saw this eclipse i analyzed it i said it's a calendar i can see the date that the event occurred
29:41
because there was an uh event horizon there was a picture of a face with his nose pointing at the edge of the
29:46
circular calendar where it occurred it was at the end of the fifth month the fifth month is not may by the way
29:52
the fifth month is july if you use spring reckoning for the new year which is what the hebrews did
29:58
so this means it's the end of july so somewhere near the end of july this event occurred and you could see the
30:04
partially developed eclipse you could see the crescent moon shape there is a meteorite flying in front of it and then
30:10
there's another total eclipse next to it and there's three little figures looking at it so i went to my friend who had the
30:17
voyager program for max i asked him if he'd run the conjunctions for the period of 325 a.d
30:24
to 425 a.d i estimated 100 years period and i based it on the nicean council
30:29
when the events occurred that transpired that actually caused the cops to be forced to leave the mediterranean
30:37
or die etzenhouser happily put it was in roland township isabella county i was able to
30:43
give him the exact grid coordinates where the artifact was found within an eighth of a mile maybe or something uh
30:48
the reason it's important is in a solo a total solar eclipse it's not the whole world that turns dark
30:55
it's only about 20 mile strip 20 mile circle of
31:00
primary umbra shadow uh the penumbra goes out a long ways in
31:07
some cases hundreds and hundreds of miles but in this case the solid full blacked out eclipse only covers about 20
31:14
to 30 miles depending upon the position of the moon and so my friend popped up about 10 dates for solar eclipses during
31:21
that period of time only one of them went through michigan and one of them went directly over these coordinates of
31:26
roland township he called me back he says how does july 27th 352 a.d i said
31:33
bingo it's right on the mark and then there was the question of the meteor a meteor during a total eclipse would be
31:40
visible but it's a rare thing wouldn't have been very visible at this point but it would definitely been
31:45
visible at this point so i i don't think that that's a real problem i think what they're saying is while the
31:51
eclipse occurred meteors were going by particularly one apparently large one meteorite went back and found that on
31:57
the 27th of july precisely the date of the eclipse it's one of the two days of the maximum
32:03
intensity of the delta aquarid meteor shower which occurs every year on the 27th and 28th of july
32:11
that to me confirmed that my my estimation of the
32:18
meaning of this artifact was correct i'd predicted that it was going to be a solar eclipse
32:24
found roughly where the artifact was found somewhere near it and uh it turns out it
32:30
was precisely under the path of the center of the eclipse so i think that's a confirming piece of information that
32:37
some forger wouldn't have really bothered to go through the effort and trouble even if he knew it
32:44
to create all of this data this this beautiful detail i think that that just confirms to me that this
32:52
is real and these people were really there at that time and it puts him right there at the time
32:57
of that of the copts exile from the mediterranean so the detractors are going to have to deal
33:04
with this stuff somehow some way uh they can't just say nay
33:14
with the increased attention inspired by merch's book byu began getting requests to examine
33:19
the relics it also brought forth accusations of concealment of the relics by the church and the academic community
33:27
to address the controversy and to assess the collection the editor from the university's publication the byu studies
33:34
contacted dr richard stamps a michigan archaeologist i had heard references to the soper
33:41
savage collection didn't know much about it maybe had seen
33:47
a photograph of some of the tablets and when the editor of the byu studies came and said hey we're looking for an
33:53
archaeologist from michigan to analyze this collection we got this big collection hey young sure i'm
34:00
excited about this and i was excited because i was able to take in 20 years of experience of looking at michigan
34:06
artifacts to go and see how do these match up where do they fit how does it fit into the big picture i go in with
34:13
certain questions what are these artifacts what is their function where are they from where do they fit in
34:19
michigan's prehistory we have a pretty good record of artifacts lifestyles here
34:24
in the state of michigan there are the paleo-indians been here since the glaciers retreated then we have a shift
34:30
when the climate change the vegetation the animal life change the archaic period comes in there are
34:37
intensive hunters and gatherers so i was excited to take this new
34:42
collection of artifacts and kind of pass them through the filter dr stamps reviewed the entire collection
34:49
and published a report of his findings in the byu studies the title on my article is called tools
34:55
leave marks because i was looking at these pieces and i was starting to find
35:01
marks from tools that didn't quite exist
35:08
finding pieces of clay with an imprint on the back of the clay where the clay
35:13
had been put on a wooden table and the table was made of wood that had been cut with a saw and you could see the imprint
35:19
of the saw marks from the wooden table on the clay
35:25
or to find copper artifacts that had been filed with a file and you could see
35:30
the file markings or you could see the chisel marks where artifacts had been cut with a cold
35:36
chisel tools leave marks and so i was looking at the artifacts finding these kinds of
35:44
marks finding tools that were basically non-functional
35:50
you make a knife but if it doesn't have a sharp edge you know what is the purpose of it
35:55
or if you make a clay vessel but it won't hold water what's the function of it how did they
36:01
fit into the larger context of michigan prehistory
36:06
they did not fit there were no paralleling fines that had been
36:13
excavated in the last hundred years so they didn't match up and that's when i started to look a
36:19
little more critically and and try and find some of these things that didn't make sense well
36:24
things like the slate now these slate pieces are made of beautiful slate
36:30
they're cut and they're polished smooth they have right angles some of them have holes and drilled through them so i'm
36:37
saying well how did you polish the slate this smooth
36:43
this big how did you do that and we looked around i ended up going to
36:49
the slate museum on the vermont new york border taking samples
36:54
from the michigan relic collection and saying how do you make something this smooth
37:00
and the guy walks me over to the piece of machinery and says he put it through this machine he said
37:05
when you cut them you use this kind of a saw and he walks me over and shows me the saw and shows me the cut marks on the modern
37:12
pieces which match the cut marks on the michigan relics
37:17
and then i take some of the samples and i say to them where do you think this slate came from
37:23
and the one fellow says oh that came from the such and such mind he recognized the consistency the color
37:30
of the slate itself so then i say myself well now how is this stuff
37:36
getting from you know new york vermont to michigan uh i did some research and slate was a
37:44
very popular uh material raw material for making things like window sills
37:52
some door seals but also making things like sinks and one of the pieces that i'd seen in
37:59
the michigan relics had just boggled my mind i couldn't figure this thing out because flat across the top comes down
38:05
as a right angle and goes up at an angle and down at an angle it's a strange piece and it had certain holes drilled
38:12
in it and the holes became part of the decoration they were either starbursts or border
38:18
lines or something so here's this piece of slate and i'm looking at this saying you know what's
38:24
going on here and then i'm walking around the museum and what do i find but a sample of a sink in the old days they
38:32
used to make sinks out of slate and these were the two end boards were
38:37
the same shape as this michigan relic that had had this carving put on it
38:44
where did they get the slate from somebody was coming along construction site where they were putting in window
38:50
sills door sills sinks found the old stuff took it off to their
38:55
workshop and then changed it from a 19th century
39:01
construction material reject put a decoration on it and turned it
39:07
into a michigan relic i also looked at some things on copper artifacts and i went to a metallurgist
39:13
and i said look at this metal and tell me what you think about it and they did a couple of things like
39:20
measured it with their calipers and they came up with the average
39:25
thickness and something like 3 16 of an inch okay this was a standard you want to buy some raw copper you go down to
39:33
the store and it comes in this size this size in this size and there's one of the sizes that's
39:39
available when you're buying copper also we looked at some of the fine lines the
39:46
metal are just when he was looking at this he said boy whoever created this had a sharp tool
39:52
i said what do you mean he was able to measure the very very thin line
39:58
that was scribed on the copper tablet and he says you have to have a sharp
40:03
steel tool to do that and also at a molecular level we got the
40:09
meddler just to look at it they could see the conformity and they they said this has been smelted
40:17
so some people would say well come on stamps you know maybe the native americans were smelting copper and it's
40:24
a great thought it's a great idea show me some evidence
40:31
of a of a copper smelter of all the archaeological
40:38
sites in the state of michigan and nobody's found a smelter that dates to the time period you know this
40:45
prehistoric period so um the copper didn't line up the clay didn't line up the slate didn't line up
40:55
so i came to the conclusion that these were made by someone other than
41:02
early pre-contact folks i think
41:08
scofford was making them soper was helping bury them and getting
41:13
customers to come and dig them and father savage was the unfortunate fellow who was kind of duped into
41:20
believing that they were real and he amassed this large collection so what was what was the purpose i think
41:27
scotford was making money at it if the artifacts could speak for themselves what would they tell us would
41:34
they reveal an engineered lie or a hidden truth did scottford and soper discover genuine
41:40
historical artifacts preserving them until the writing could be read and their authenticity proven
41:46
or is anyone that looks for meaning in the artifacts just another victim of scotford and soper's hoax
41:52
how will we get to the truth does a technology exist today that did not exist at the turn of the 20th
41:59
century that could prove the authenticity of the michigan relics
42:04
thermoluminescence is basically a dating technique that can be used on some
42:09
ceramics it's a technique and it's one that we need to pursue in the future
42:14
the university of southern california long beach has a well-regarded archaeology program
42:20
and a thermal luminescence testing facility under the guidance of dr carl lippo the
42:26
clay tablet that david deal had deciphered was recorded with a 3d laser and a fragment of the tablet was
42:32
submitted for thermal luminescence testing the test report from dr lippo was thorough within a 10-year window of
42:39
possible error the report indicated that the tablet was manufactured in the late
42:44
1890s it would seem that with a luminescence test and with dr stamp's examination of
42:52
the artifacts that the story of the michigan relics would be closed but there are some lingering doubts that
42:58
keep the controversy alive the clay tablet examined by david diehl and henry at mertz was not a part of the
43:04
soper or savage collection and might be an individual example of fraud
43:09
pieces from the mertz deal collection were claimed to have come from an earlier discovery some say as early as
43:14
1870 or even 1850 well before scottford and yet there is no evidence for that
43:20
claim [Music] the merch steel collection can be traced back to a collection from a curiosity
43:27
museum in springport indiana run by professor edwin worth worth moved his museum from detroit to
43:34
springport in 1906. newspaper reports from 1900 indicate
43:39
that worth had recently put his curiosities on public display in downtown detroit at the wonderland
43:45
pavilion where did worth get his relics did he buy them from scotford they were both in
43:51
detroit at the same time again no records have been discovered to answer these questions
43:57
in the etson hauser pamphlet there are two intriguing documents this is the book by the way let me just hold this up
44:03
that was published by rudolph ettenhauser 1910 or 1911 concerning uh his take on the michigan
44:10
artifacts and it has many many pictures that we've already seen before but what it what it has that
44:16
nobody else has is this one of the claims that's been made is that scottford from 1890s and sober and
44:23
savage which they were all involved on the discovery of the michigan tablets however
44:28
prior to that we've got many players on the michigan scene pulling up artifacts as early as
44:34
1856. here we have two signed affidavits with the people's names they can all be
44:41
verified and all these people who signed here we have no mr soper no father
44:46
savage and no scottford brothers here at all so here we have two affidavits absolutely clean have nothing to do with
44:53
soper savage or the scotfords and these are different people and pictures of the artifacts that they found we do not know
45:00
today where these artifacts are and then just one more comment the monhegan stone
45:05
we talked about earlier at the mouth of the st lawrence river this doesn't show the whole stone it just shows what's inscribed on the stone
45:12
and this is what you would see if you go there today to see it and of course here we have the mystic symbol and other
45:18
cuneiform writings and markings down here is the mystic symbol with two messages going different messages going
45:25
across to the travelers coming in that way that's the monhegan stone this is what's carved on the monhegan stone at the
45:32
mouth of st lawrence and i believe these people these michigan folks this is
45:37
exactly the highway they came in on the rivers and the waterways in north america were their highways
45:42
in addition wayne may had this interesting story and if i may it's it's only three paragraphs can i read that to
45:48
you okay i want you this this is what it says yodeja article dear mr may
45:54
in the article christ in america volume 4 issue 26 wayne may wrote of a claim that the
46:00
ojibwe name for henriette merch's mystic symbol is yodhiva
46:05
mr may adds that the yod haiva is remarkably similar to the biblical
46:10
jehovah it's not only similar he goes on to say it's identical to 75 of the biblical
46:17
name the name that we angelicize as jehovah is actually the hebrew tetragrammaton
46:24
which can be stated in our alphabet as y h v h
46:30
but whose hebrew letters are called yodhaeva so mr may's informant in fact gave him
46:37
the hebrew names of the first three letters in the name of god presumably the additional syllable
46:43
spoken once a year is a final hey to complete the tetragrammaton
46:50
the yod haiva is a hebrew tetragrammaton those are cuneiform writing and
46:55
what's it doing in north america and then there is david diehl's work with a language
47:01
it appears that deal broke the code to reading the cuneiform writing does it reveal a real language or does
47:08
it reveal the genius behind the forgeries where could scotford or soper have gotten the language did they invent it
47:15
or did they copy it from a real artifact if you think that scotford had a style
47:20
sheet to make these objects i would say yes and no i say that by virtue of the fact that
47:26
when you look at these artifacts you see the care that was taken to create them as opposed to scotford's banging and
47:33
bashing with his chisel and his clippers on on standard
47:38
commercial grade copper plates eighth of an inch thick you know it's pretty clear that they're fraudulent
47:44
but not the ones that much care had been taken with scottsford polluted this massive artifacts but i think that there
47:50
was enough of the artifacts around in scott first time to hit for him to draw off the known ones at the time as a
47:56
style sheet did he make all of these artifacts overspread all over michigan over a many many year period
48:03
no and why are there no artifacts being found now well a lot
48:08
of people i know of that have collections are afraid to come forward with collections because they uh they think they'll be treated as fools
48:16
so many of them will probably never surface for that reason
48:25
i think the michigan tablets to me also are extremely important because of
48:30
the quantity now if you had maybe 50 maybe even a hundred i could say well
48:36
yeah that can be faked but uh 10 000 3 000
48:42
i have a hard time with that especially when we know and the professionals even admit that we have evidence they come
48:48
out of at least 17 counties i've got evidence for 27 counties throughout the state of michigan one or two may be fake
48:55
but are they all fake you say a thousand i mean how long does it take you to make a thousand come on
49:02
he was doing this for what twenty five years to make three thousand is the number
49:08
that i sticks in my mind but hey you can crank those out now hurry the clay pieces don't take that
49:14
long to make now to scribe the ones on copper that's going to take a little more time
49:20
again put it in a 25 year time frame and how many a month do you have to make it's not that many nobody ever fessed up
49:27
without having any of the perpetrators admit it there is this lingering doubt a lot of
49:32
people take that as evidence that it really wasn't a fraud so people expect that there's some kind of resolution and
49:38
and the lack of of a resolution leaves a doubt in their mind
49:44
some have said well yes there are fakes but there may be a
49:49
few that are real i i touched and held and looked at
49:58
every single piece that was in the salt lake museum
50:04
that came here and if there was a real one i sure
50:10
couldn't find it and then maybe there are some in this another little museum someplace
50:15
maybe henrietta mertz had something that i didn't see okay but all i can say is
50:21
every single piece that i looked at i couldn't find one that
50:27
was right that looked right it just it just wasn't there so
50:32
maybe it's there hey that's science the door is always open [Music]
50:38
the fact is that the sober savage and mert steele collections contain manufactured artifacts
50:45
enough artifacts to make the michigan relics possibly the largest archaeological fraud in north american
50:51
history and yet questions remain was there ever anything of ancient
50:56
historical value to be discovered in the michigan relics is there a possibility that an ancient
51:02
coptic group was actually in michigan but a group so small that they left only
51:08
a tiny trace of their presence and that the trace has been lost in the piles of fakes created by scotford and
51:15
soper or is the whole story best summed up by francis kelsey the michigan
51:20
archaeologist who wrote in nineteen eleven it may be presumed that men will be ready to believe what they wish to
51:26
believe and that no hoax will be too preposterous to be without a following
51:33
whatever aspect of the story you focus on it must be agreed that the tale of the michigan relics is filled with the works
51:39
of some very creative and industrious individuals perhaps what is most remarkable about
51:45
the story is the persistence of the desire for the artifacts to be real
51:50
the fact that the michigan relics still stir the imagination 100 years after being labeled as frauds
51:56
speaks to the power of the story they present the sheer numbers of items created and
52:01
the compelling story they invoke is by itself a testament to the genius and the
52:06
creativity behind their creation the story on the artifacts and the story about them
52:12
may be most valuable for an unintended reason they may remain as a timeless example of
52:18
the need for careful discernment when it comes to telling the difference between what could be the truth
52:24
and what is the truth [Music]
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Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

Postby admin » Mon Nov 21, 2022 2:05 am

Forgery Experts Explain 5 Ways To Spot A Fake
WIRED
Nov 20, 2018

Forensic scientist Thiago Piwowarczyk and art historian Jeffrey Taylor PhD examine a purported Jackson Pollock painting and use their expertise to determine if the painting is legitimate or a forgery.



Transcript

Search in video
0:00
this is thiago pivavarcik and jeff
0:02
taylor
0:03
of new york art forensics and this is a
0:06
jackson pollock
0:08
or at least it looks like one but it's
0:10
actually a fake
0:12
here's how they figured it out today we
0:15
will perform all the steps necessary
0:17
to determine its authorship
0:21
[Music]
0:27
jackson pollock was an american painter
0:29
that
0:30
painted from the early 20s to the 1950s
0:34
he's best known by the drift or court
0:36
paintings
0:37
that he did from 1947
0:40
to the time of his death in 1956.
0:45
pollock's grip paintings are considered
0:47
his best period
0:48
so uh good sized well-preserved
0:52
jackson pollock he can go for over 100
0:55
million dollars
0:58
there's a lot of claims of jackson
1:00
pollock drip paintings
1:02
and our laboratory was able to identify
1:05
over a hundred fakes so we can say that
1:08
we found more fakes and there are
1:11
authentic jackson pollocks over there
1:13
[Music]
1:16
we received this painting by a client
1:19
that
1:20
chose to remain anonymous we're going to
1:23
call him sydney
1:26
first step when we receive a painting
1:28
we're trying to establish something
1:30
called the provenance
1:36
provenance is a chain of ownership and
1:40
custody of an artwork
1:41
from the contemporary ownership
1:44
all the way back to its manufacturing
1:47
where this painting came from what is
1:50
the story behind it
1:51
is there anything that shows the history
1:54
of this artwork
1:59
so this is one of the most fascinating
2:01
documents that i've ever seen
2:03
this is a document to explain why sydney
2:06
should have a jackson pollock
2:08
most bargeries there are not as much
2:10
forgeries
2:11
of confidence with forgeries or
2:13
documentation
2:15
this is problematic in all these
2:16
different ways the facts has no number
2:19
dr armand hirschkovitz cannot be
2:22
referenced
2:22
there's no record of a tear gallery in
2:25
dover new jersey
2:26
then he says he acquired this painting
2:29
in 1955
2:30
after pollock died but he didn't die
2:33
until 1956.
2:34
so for all these reasons this is an
2:36
incredibly unreliable
2:38
and deceitful document
2:44
the next step will be we try to find a
2:47
match
2:48
for the artwork jackson polo paintings
2:51
are specifically hard to look for
2:53
matches because
2:54
the nature of the image most of the
2:56
sources are
2:58
imprinted material and the catalog
3:01
resonate which is
3:02
the comprehensive catalogue of works
3:06
for a given artist this painting has no
3:10
match
3:13
the next step is a close-up visual
3:16
analysis
3:18
[Music]
3:20
so we're looking close to the painting
3:23
to try to find anachronistic materials
3:25
and techniques
3:26
something that would be uncharacteristic
3:28
from a given outer
3:30
or a given time it's a very very thin
3:33
layer
3:35
yeah look at how many how many colors i
3:37
count that aren't in the drip layers
3:39
it's very hard to prove there's
3:42
something
3:43
is but it's easier to find
3:46
things that are out of place things that
3:48
should not be there
3:49
look at these underlying colors we got a
3:51
yellow a green
3:54
and neither of them appear in the drip
3:55
patterns that's done with a brush
3:57
[Music]
3:59
yeah it's rather strange because when
4:01
pollock starts doing the port painting
4:02
he really doesn't
4:03
brush much anymore yep so there's no
4:06
signature here
4:08
a lot of the works going into the market
4:11
in very controversial ways
4:13
are not signed and we suspect that
4:16
someone is trying to
4:18
mitigate whatever legal repercussions
4:21
trying to
4:22
imply that unsigned work is not
4:26
forgery per se as i say it's a next
4:29
level to take the step to sign
4:32
artwork
4:33
[Music]
4:35
now you see here tiago i got two holes
4:40
right here they're just that distance
4:44
and they're repetitive you have a series
4:46
of
4:47
smaller holes and that indicates that
4:50
this canvas was a certain point staple
4:54
and staple canvases will not be a thing
4:57
on 1956. there's something
5:01
did you see the dirt here yeah that's
5:03
not nasty
5:05
it's being aged through a series of
5:07
processes
5:08
to look older it's like they spilled
5:10
something on this
5:11
through carelessness or not through
5:14
carelessness
5:15
you can see by the marks on the back how
5:18
it was
5:18
dabbed with a tea bag and if you
5:21
actually
5:22
come really close and smell it you can
5:24
smell
5:25
tea still the surface is being
5:29
sprayed with nicotine to emulate
5:32
ages of exposure to smoking but
5:36
the canvas is actually really good state
5:39
of conservation
5:40
it hasn't really shredded the way a
5:43
canvas starts to unravel at its edges
5:46
over time there's like some punctual
5:47
damage that is here
5:49
yeah you should be like all over like
5:51
this
5:53
[Music]
5:57
then the next step will be photography
6:04
so we want to see if there's any under
6:07
drawings or sketches under the paint
6:10
you never know sometimes the canvas was
6:12
reused
6:14
[Music]
6:17
do you see that that squared green there
6:19
oh yes
6:21
in this case instead of finding under
6:23
drawing actually we found
6:25
that this canvas was reused from
6:28
a prior picture that had
6:31
very regular geometric shape which is
6:34
very young characteristic from pollock
6:36
as well now we get out the uv
6:40
light if you're going to analyze the
6:42
material
6:43
aspects of the artwork we want to be
6:46
sure
6:46
that we're looking at relevant parts of
6:49
it
6:49
so we examine it with ultraviolet light
6:53
to try to look at the original parts of
6:56
the painting
6:57
normally all the restorations would show
6:59
up but
7:00
none of the restorations show up any
7:03
just different as if
7:04
the thing was done all at the same time
7:07
see look
7:08
here this cut there is a big patch
7:12
on the back and this ripping is
7:16
held together by a patch and it's gluing
7:20
it together
7:21
you see there's two little canvas
7:23
threads
7:24
are actually loose and the restoration
7:29
was made in a completely
7:34
substandard way and it doesn't seem to
7:37
be
7:38
fulfilling the purpose of a proper
7:42
conservation
7:44
the x-ray fluorescence spectrometer
7:47
that's the next step
7:52
this handy device that looks kind of
7:53
like a star trek phaser is
7:55
a really outstanding tool in the field
7:58
of art forensics i'm actually emitting
8:02
a small amount of x-rays onto the
8:04
surface of the painting
8:06
it's exciting the electrons in the
8:09
pigments there and that allows this to
8:12
identify
8:13
what elements are present it shows that
8:16
we have
8:17
titanium on it which is natural from
8:19
titanium dioxide
8:21
white pigment it's a very common
8:23
material from the 1930s for a lot of our
8:27
cases
8:28
titanium is the determining factor and
8:30
it has tripped up more forgers than any
8:32
other element
8:33
so if this were purporting to be a
8:34
painting by degas
8:36
and we found the titanium immediately we
8:39
would know no way
8:41
in this case however by the time pollock
8:43
is working titanium is a widely
8:45
available white
8:46
so to find it in pollock's work is not
8:48
surprising in fact it's well documented
8:49
that his works do contain titanium
8:51
titanium white was already available in
8:54
the 1950s
8:58
from that we move on to microscopy
9:04
so thiago is going to be taking tiny
9:07
non-destructive fragmentary samples
9:09
of different bits of paint
9:13
this process is mostly used for
9:16
organic materials with those we would
9:19
then be able to test both
9:21
the pigment and the binder we're looking
9:24
for
9:25
what is the kind of paint used
9:29
we try to take a few samples from each
9:33
color and then we use
9:36
the rama spectrometer we put in a
9:39
microscope slide
9:41
and we shine a laser over it and then
9:44
this laser bounces back
9:47
inside the machine in a slightly
9:50
different color from the original hollow
9:52
glazing
9:53
that can tell us an idea of what we're
9:56
looking at
9:57
and we found mostly acrylics
10:01
although the binder known as acrylics
10:04
did
10:04
exist at the time pollock was alive in
10:07
this one
10:08
the specific variant of acrylic did not
10:10
exist it only started being manufactured
10:12
in the 1960s
10:18
for more than 100 years scientists have
10:20
just been looking at tiny fragments
10:23
of paintings under microscopes and this
10:25
allows us to really make a visual
10:28
identification based in metals and
10:31
tiny fragments of mineralogy
10:35
so there are studies regarding jackson
10:38
pollock paintings that describe
10:40
the type of debris found in his
10:44
paintings
10:45
look at that either somebody dropped us
10:47
in a mud puddle or they
10:48
directly applied this stuff and there is
10:51
a specific type of
10:53
sedimentary rock and dust that he would
10:56
spread on his
10:58
work i think it's a piece of insulation
11:01
that's what i'm saying i don't you can't
11:02
even tell what that is but
11:04
on this case we analyzed the debris and
11:07
dust
11:07
embedded on the painting and it seems to
11:10
be
11:11
the breeze from drywall which is
11:14
inconsistent with
11:15
other pollux works
11:20
conclusion a jackson polygon that
11:23
technique
11:24
per se that is not much of a mystery so
11:27
it is our opinion
11:29
that this would not qualify as a jackson
11:33
pollock painting
11:38
as i say if the deal is too good
11:42
there's something wrong
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Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

Postby admin » Sat Nov 26, 2022 1:07 am

The Forgery
Music & Moving Image Production
May 18, 2021

A 50 minutes documentary on false art and greed in the art world.

Art is big business as one can see in the documentary The Forgery. This film on international art fraud is constructed as a detective story.

German detective Scholler is in pursuit of Dutch art forger Jansen. Scholler retains 1502 false art works while catching Jansen in France. A third party in The Forgery is art collector Hans. He bought the painting ‘Three Tulips’ in an auction house. Apparently by Cobra painter Corneille. There is doubt on the ‘Three Tulips’. Hans starts a search for the truth. At the end he finds Corneille in Paris. The famous painter makes him understand that this work is a forgery. :’I hope you haven’t spend too much money on this…’

Script & Director: Arjanne Laan
Produced: NFI and NPS TV
Producer: Roel Simons

Camera: Mauricio Rubinstein

Sound: Fokke van Saane

Editing: Jan Dop

Music: Patricio Wang

Broadcasted:

NPS-Dutch Television;

Finish TV YLE;

Pay TV -Italy

Distribution:

Nos SalesMip Com

Docsonline
IDFA

Release: 2001

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Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

Postby admin » Fri Dec 09, 2022 10:56 pm

Part 1 of 3

The Assyrians
Fall of Civilizations
by Paul M. M. Cooper
patreon.com/fallofcivilizations_podcast



Transcript

Search in video
0:15
In the year 401 BC, at the height of the period known as the
0:21
Greek Golden Age, a Persian prince named Cyrus the Younger
0:26
was fighting a bitter civil war against his brother, and was trying to seize the
0:31
throne of Persia. To help him in this fight, he hired a
0:37
mercenary army of mostly Greek soldiers; 10,000 men who travelled the long
0:43
road to Persia to fight on his behalf. Among them was the Greek writer and
0:50
adventurer named Xenophon, and he later wrote about this expedition
0:55
in his work entitled Anabasis. Xenophon and his companions met the
1:02
enemy Persian army at the battle of Cunaxa, on the banks of the Euphrates River, and they gave the Persian prince Cyrus
1:12
value for his money. The Greek heavy troops beat the Persians
1:17
back, and delivered a victory for the man who had hired them. But when the dust of battle had cleared,
1:24
they heard the bad news. Cyrus the Younger had been killed,
1:30
apparently knocked from his horse by a young common soldier.
1:35
His claim to the throne of Persia had died with him, and the war was over.
1:42
For the Greeks, this must have been heartbreaking. Their long journey, the victorious battle, and all their sacrifices had been for
1:52
nothing. Their general had also been killed and
1:57
all of their senior commanders captured, leaving them without a leader and stranded in the middle of a foreign land. Now Xenophon and what remained of his
2:08
10,000 men had to find their way home to Greece.
2:13
They knew that their only route was to reach the Black Sea, which lay across the
2:18
wide deserts of what is today Iraq. They were terrified. They had few
2:25
supplies and the enemy army was already pursuing them close behind.
2:31
They hastily elected some leaders from among them, and Xenophon was one of them.
2:36
He told his men to throw away everything they carried, shedding weight in order to outrun their enemies.
2:44
So, they pelted across the deserts and the fertile river lands dotted with
2:50
date palms, following the course of the river Tigris north.
2:55
It's while they fled in this manner that they stumbled upon something that must have made them stop in their tracks. It was the enormous crumbling ruin of a
3:07
city, completely deserted, and full of the vast ruins of ancient buildings.
3:15
This city was larger than anything Xenophon had seen back home in Greece,
3:21
and later he wrote about this discovery in his work Anabasis.
3:37
The Greeks continued their march unmolested through the remainder of the day and arrived at the Tigris River. It was a large, deserted city. This wall
3:47
was 25 feet in breadth, 100 in height, and the whole circuit of the wall was 11
3:54
kilometers. It was built of clay bricks rested upon a stone foundation six meters high. Nearby this city was a pyramid of stone,
4:06
a plethrum in breadth and two plethora in height. Upon this pyramid were many barbarians who'd fled away from the neighboring
4:14
villages.
4:26
But Xenophon didn't have time to linger. The pursuing Persians were right behind
4:32
them, and he couldn't spare any time to explore the ruins.
4:37
They dashed onwards, following the river north. But then, only a day or two later, the Greeks came across another ruin, this one
4:47
even larger and more impressive, surrounded by an enormous series of
4:53
crumbling walls.
5:04
The Greeks marched 34 kilometers to a great stronghold, deserted and lying in ruins. The foundation of its wall was made of
5:14
polished stone, full of shells. It was 15 meters in breadth and 15 in height.
5:21
Upon this foundation was built a wall of brick 15 meters in breadth and 30 meters in height,
5:27
and the circuit of the wall was 30 kilometers.
5:38
Once again, they had no time to stop, but it's clear that the sight of these
5:44
lonely crumbling ruins affected Xenophon. For days afterwards, he asked any local
5:51
people he encountered who had built such enormous constructions all alone out
5:57
there in the desert. No one he spoke to could tell him anything, and it seemed no one even knew the names of these great cities.
6:07
Some people thought they might have been built by the Medes, a people who now
6:12
occupied the area. Others told fantastical stories about
6:18
the gods bringing down fire and thunder to destroy these ancient walls,
6:24
killing everyone who had once lived within them. Today, we do know the names of these cities, and it's thought that Xenophon, at
6:33
the end of the 5th century BC, was the earliest person to stumble upon
6:39
them and write an account. These were the cities of Nimrud and
6:45
Nineveh. At the time when Xenophon stumbled across these ruins nearly two and a half millennia ago, the first stones of the
6:54
Parthenon in Athens had been laid only 50 years earlier. The Colosseum in Rome
7:01
would not be built for another 500 years. But the city of Nineveh had already been
7:08
an ancient ruin for more than two centuries. This mighty city had flourished, boomed into a towering capital home to hundreds
7:19
of thousands of people. It had given birth to some of the ancient world's most beautiful art and architecture,
7:27
and then all at once fallen into dust. Xenophon and his men did eventually
7:35
return to Greece, and when he wrote his memoirs, he gives special attention to
7:40
those moments when he looked out over the sand-blasted desert, the grasses sprouting between the crumbling bricks as the wind battered
7:50
his hair and tugged at his clothes. In those moments, Xenophon must have
7:56
asked himself, who were these people? Who built such vast cities out here in the desert? How could such a great metropolis vanish
8:06
so completely beneath the sands? If so many people had once lived there, what in all the world could have
8:14
happened to them?
8:48
My name's Paul Cooper and you're listening to The Fall of Civilizations podcast. Each episode, I look at a civilization
8:56
of the past that rose to glory and then collapsed into the ashes of history. I want to ask what did they have in
9:04
common? What led to their fall? What did it feel like to be a person
9:09
alive at the time who witnessed the end of their world?
9:14
In this episode, I want to look at one of the most remarkable ancient civilizations; the society known today as the Assyrian Empire.
9:25
I want to explore how the Assyrians built their empire out of the ashes of the Bronze Age and built an empire of iron that lasted for centuries.
9:36
I want to show how they expanded and developed to become perhaps the world's
9:42
first military superpower, as well as fostering an extraordinary flourishing
9:48
of art and learning. Finally, I want to tell the story of what happened to cause their final, devastating collapse.
10:06
In this episode, we return for the first time to a setting that we've seen before,
10:13
in Episode 8 on the Sumerians. These are the arid desert lands of
10:20
Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia is a vast floodplain. For millions of years, its lands have
10:30
been watered by two great rivers; the river Tigris and the river Euphrates.
10:37
These great watercourses flow south from the mountains of Turkey, and bring
10:43
enormous quantities of silt down with them. If we were to soar high above the earth's surface, we would see these two
10:52
rivers as vivid lines of green snaking through the dusty land.
11:00
The rivers Tigris and Euphrates form one arm of a geographical feature that has come
11:06
to be known as the Fertile Crescent. This is an area of land roughly in the
11:12
shape of a half moon that runs from the marshlands of southern Iraq north up the silt-rich rivers, then west
11:22
to the humid coast of Syria. The Fertile Crescent continues south
11:27
through the mountainous lands of Lebanon, down the Mediterranean coast of modern
11:32
Israel and into Egypt, watered by the river Nile and its rich delta.
11:39
Surrounded by high, treacherous mountains to the north and east, bounded by the
11:45
Mediterranean Sea in the west, and the impassable deserts of Arabia to the
11:51
south, this sweeping corridor created the environment where some of the world's first great
11:59
societies rose up.
12:06
To us, the Assyrian Empire feels like a relic of the impossibly distant past,
12:12
but it's worth reminding ourselves that for them, their world was already ancient.
12:19
The earliest settlements in this region, like the ones found at Gobekli Tepe
12:24
and Catalhoyuk are truly ancient, each between 12,000 and 9,000 years old.
12:32
They are some of the first evidence we have of humans living in large societies
12:38
after the end of the Ice Age. But the Assyrians also had an incredibly
12:45
rich awareness of their own ancient history and the cultural roots of their
12:51
society. Since the invention of writing by the Sumerians around the year 3200 BC,
13:00
humans had been passing their knowledge down from generation to generation, and
13:06
it's hard to overstate just how powerful this was. The Assyrians held onto the memory of several of the great kings of the
13:16
Sumerian age, revering them as semi-mythical heroes.
13:21
Among these was the legendary hero Gilgamesh, who slayed monsters and went
13:27
on a quest to find the secret of eternal life. They still told stories about the Akkadian king Sargon the Great, who, for
13:37
the later Assyrians, had lived nearly two millennia in the past.
13:43
For them, Sargon was about as distant in the past as Julius Caesar is for us.
13:50
But his name was still on their lips; they still told stories about him, wrote
13:55
about him, and drew inspiration from him, as this middle Assyrian text called
14:02
Sargon the King of Battle demonstrates. While Sargon dwelt in the land, his
14:10
heroes with him, twelve he chose. He brought his army across the fir-tree
14:15
land. He conquered the cedar mountain. He took for his weapon the lightning bolt of his god.
14:24
Like the Sumerians before them, the Assyrians saw the ruins of ancient
14:29
cities scattering their landscape, and developed stories to explain how they
14:35
got there. They believed that a great flood had once washed over the world, and that these ruined heaps of stone and
14:45
brick were a remnant of this destructive, ancient event.
14:50
So, I think it's worth reminding ourselves right at the outset that the Assyrians did not think of themselves as we might think of them, as an early
14:59
culture at the dawn of human history, but as a people on the cutting edge of human
15:06
progress, the product of a long and ancient line, and the culmination of all that humanity was capable of.
15:23
Since the fall of the Sumerian Empire, the language of Akkadian had become the
15:28
region's most common tongue, replacing the old Sumerian language, and
15:34
the cities that had once formed part of the Sumerian empires had broken away.
15:40
They were now a loose constellation of independent city-states dotted up and
15:46
down the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. Each city had their own king, their own
15:53
army, and their own god. As we saw in Episode 8, for much of the
16:00
region's early history, the Akkadians had been something of a junior partner to
16:06
their Sumerian cousins. But now, with the collapse of Sumer, the
16:11
Akkadian cities of the north were finally free, and they set out on their
16:16
own journeys. One of these cities was the city of Ashur.
16:30
Ashur was occupied from at least the year 2500 BC. It was founded at the height of Sumerian
16:39
rule on a bank of the river Tigris in northern Iraq, about halfway between the modern cities of Tikrit and
16:48
Mosul. Ashur was probably an early trading city. It would have been a town
16:55
of tents and houses built from river clay, thatched with reeds. The smells of cattle and wood smoke
17:04
would have drifted through its muddy streets, the sounds of people and the fluttering of the leaves of date palms, perhaps
17:13
already the first canals being dug to water its fields.
17:18
In its early days it would have been a very humble place, and it would be hard to imagine the glorious legacy that its people would
17:27
one day construct. Throughout the Sumerian period, the town
17:33
of Ashur did well, and some of this was down to its natural advantages.
17:39
It was nestled on a bend of the river Tigris that sheltered it on its north and east side, and its builders improved its natural defenses with a system of
17:50
strong buttressed walls that made it a strong fortress.
17:56
The rivers of Mesopotamia were the land's lifeblood. They brought water for drinking and to irrigate the fields, but in the rough
18:05
landscape, they also acted as the highways along which trade could move on
18:10
barges and ships. Carvings of the time show long boats powered with oars forging over the brown waters of the
18:20
rivers, carrying wheat and barley, copper and tin, as well as fine woods and stone
18:27
from the north. As a crucial stop along one of these rivers, Ashur soon grew to be a wealthy place.
18:36
Excavations of its houses show that by the second millennium, many of them were
18:42
spacious mansions. It became common for wealthy families to
18:47
keep vaults beneath their floors to hide their many valuables; jewelry made of
18:52
gold and polished brass inlaid with semi-precious stones like carnelian,
18:59
agate, and the brilliant blue lapis lazuli. Excavations have even uncovered dozens of libraries and archives in the city,
19:09
where texts written in cuneiform on clay tablets were stored, a clear indicator of
19:17
a city overflowing with wealth.
19:25
The wealthy families of Ashur were also able to donate handsomely to religious
19:31
organizations, and the city would become home to no fewer than 34 temples to the various gods worshiped by all the
19:40
people of Mesopotamia, gods like the sun god Shamash and the
19:46
moon god Sin, the storm god Adad, Ishtar, the goddess of love and war, and of
19:53
course, the king of the gods, Enlil. We can imagine walking through the city
20:00
streets at this time and hearing the incantations washing out of the temple
20:06
doors and overlapping in the hot air, the priests of the different gods competing
20:12
for attention in the crowded city, the ringing of bells and the banging of drums, the singing of hymns. Funeral processions may have floated
20:23
past, chanting poetry such as this surviving devotional hymn to the
20:28
Babylonian god Marduk. The man who is departing in glory,
20:36
may his soul shine radiant as brass. To that man may the son give life, and
20:43
Marduk, eldest son of heaven, grant him an abode of happiness.
20:51
The temples also performed services for the sick. If you visited the temple of Ishtar with an ailment, it's likely you would have
21:00
heard something like this prayer being said over you by one of its priests.
21:07
Bind the sick man to heaven, for from the earth he is being torn away.
21:13
Of the brave man who was so strong, his strength has departed.
21:18
In his bodily frame, he lies dangerously ill, but Ishtar, who in her dwelling is grieved for him,
21:26
descends from her mountain, unvisited of men. To the door of the sick man she comes. Soon, like most cities of this time,
21:38
the city of Ashur developed a god of its own. In fact, the city virtually became a god.
21:49
In the religious systems of Mesopotamia, gods and cities had an intimate and
21:56
interwoven relationship. The gods of this time performed many of
22:01
the duties that they do for us today. They could be called for in times of need or given sacrifices to ward off evil.
22:11
But at this time, each city also had a god in the same way that every sports
22:16
team has a mascot. The god was believed to quite literally
22:21
live in the highest chamber of the city's temple, often in a statue dedicated to them. If you visited another city on business,
22:30
it was considered sensible to give an offering to the city's god while you were there, and if two cities went to war, it was thought that their gods were
22:40
battling it out in the heavens just as their armies were fighting down on earth.
22:46
The more a city succeeded, the more power its god was presumed to have.
22:54
As the city of Ashur grew in importance, its people named the city's god after
23:00
the city itself, and so, the god Ashur was born.
23:05
Grand temples were thrown up to this new deity, and as the city went from strength
23:12
to strength, worship of Ashur rose to become the highest form of religion for
23:18
its people. This god rapidly took on new symbols and
23:24
iconography. He became thought of as a robed man wearing a crown and holding a bow, often appearing in carvings at the
23:34
center of a winged disc, looking down on the world and the golden city over which
23:41
he presided. As the confidence of the cult of Ashur grew, eventually the position of Enlil as the king of the gods, a position he had
23:52
held for a thousand years, was in jeopardy. Over the next centuries, the god Ashur even took over Enlil's wife, the goddess
24:03
Ninlil, and his sons Ninurta and Zababa. Ashur and not Enlil was now the supreme
24:12
god for this city's people. The people of the city of Ashur would soon become known as Ashurayeh,
24:22
but today we call them Assyrians.
24:28
Like many of the powerful cities of this region, for the next millennium or so, the
24:34
Assyrians of the city of Ashur would make several attempts to found their own
24:40
kingdom, and a number of times, they succeeded. One great king named Shamshi-Adad ruled at the end of the 19th century BC,
24:52
and he conquered large areas outside of Ashur, bringing back great wealth to
24:58
the city. Under his reign, the people of Ashur built a grand, royal palace, and the temple to the god Ashur was furnished
25:09
with a ziggurat, an enormous stepped tower that in the Bronze Age was a
25:14
statement of a city's membership to an elite and powerful club.
25:20
But this early flourishing of Assyrian power was stamped out by the rival power
25:26
of Babylon, a powerful city in the south, that established its own empire under
25:33
the famous King Hammurabi.
25:39
This was the fate of the people of Ashur for much of the second millennium BC.
25:47
They were able to rise a little bit before being swallowed up by a bigger fish. They were folded into the empires of
25:55
Babylon, the Mitanni, and the Hittites, and would usually spend a century or so as a
26:01
possession before throwing off their rulers and once more going it alone.
26:08
But throughout this time, there was also a flourishing of Assyrian culture.
26:15
One epic poem known today as the Tukulti- Ninurta epic, has survived from this time.
26:22
It glorifies Assyrian military conquests in the south, and sets out a model for
26:29
how the ideal Assyrian king should behave, and it also contains a vision of the fierce war-like spirit of the Assyrian
26:40
people. They charged forward furiously to the fray without any armor.
26:47
They had stripped off their breastplates, discarded their clothing. They tied up
26:53
their hair and polished their weapons. The fierce, heroic men danced with
26:58
sharpened weapons. They blasted at one another like struggling lions, with eyes flashing.
27:05
Particles drawn in a whirlwind swirled around in combat.
27:10
Death, as if on a day of thirsting, slakes itself at the sight of the warrior.
27:19
But as the second millennium BC drew to a close around the years 1200 to 1150
27:28
BC, the Assyrians would face a challenge of astonishing magnitude.
27:47
The period that followed has gone down in history with the name the Bronze Age
27:53
collapse. As we saw in our second episode, for
27:58
reasons we still don't entirely understand, a wave of destruction would soon wash over this region. Hordes of a mysterious force known as
28:09
the Sea Peoples would land on its shores. Famine would spread from city to city.
28:16
This destruction would sweep whole civilizations off the map,
28:21
and leave virtually no inhabited cities left in the eastern Mediterranean region.
28:29
Only two great societies emerged on the other side of this destruction;
28:35
one was Egypt. As we saw in our second episode, the
28:40
Egyptians managed to stop the Sea Peoples in a daring ambush on the waters
28:46
of the Nile Delta, and just about held their society together.
28:52
The other was Assyria. It survived by withdrawing from its
28:58
recent conquests and holding on to only those territories that were essential to keeping its trade routes open.
29:07
It withdrew back to its heartland and survived in a diminished form.
29:14
But as the wave of destruction ended, the challenges that Assyria faced were
29:20
enormous, as the historian Georges Rue recounts.
29:28
Towards the end of the 10th century BC, Assyria was at her lowest ebb. Economic
29:34
collapse was impending. She had lost all her possessions west of the Tigris, and
29:40
her vital arteries, the great trade routes that ran through the mountain passes, were in foreign lands. Hostile highlanders occupied not only
29:51
the heights of the Zagros, but the foothills down to the edge of the Tigris
29:56
Valley, while Aramaean tribes pitched their tents almost at the gates of Ashur.
30:06
At this time, a serious territory consisted of little more than a strip of
30:11
land along the river Tigris, surrounded on all sides by determined enemies.
30:18
But there were also things to be thankful for. For one thing, Assyria's enemies seemed incapable of uniting.
30:29
For much of this history, they hated each other as much as they hated the Assyrians, and this would prove crucial for
30:37
Assyrian survival. In the flat plains of Iraq, Assyria had
30:43
no natural boundaries or defenses. For its survival, it relied on the fact that
30:49
its enemies could be dealt with one by one. The powerful Assyrian army could march one way, then the other, smashing each
30:58
enemy in turn, and subsequent kings would do everything they could to ensure that
31:04
this continued to be the case. The main cities of Assyria were also
31:11
virtually untouched by the disaster of the Bronze Age collapse, and they continued their economic output throughout the crisis.
31:20
Assyria still had chariots and horses and weapons. It had access to iron, the new metal that had been used for ceremonial and
31:30
decorative objects for centuries, but was only just beginning to be used to forge
31:36
weapons and armor. The introduction of iron meant that Assyria was no longer dependent on the fragile supply of copper that came to
31:46
them from across the mountains in the far away mines of Afghanistan.
31:51
Iron occurs ten times more commonly in the earth's crust than copper, and could
31:57
be found just about anywhere. The warriors of Assyria had been trained
32:03
by years of constant fighting, and were now among the best in the world.
32:09
Perhaps most importantly, the line of royal succession had supposedly not been
32:16
broken for more than 200 years, meaning that the kings of Assyria
32:21
claimed to draw on an ancient and unchallenged legitimacy among their
32:27
people. In this region at the time, no other state could say the same. To at least one Assyrian king, it
32:36
must have seemed clear that if Assyria could only seize its opportunity, it
32:41
could become a power unlike any that had been seen before.
32:47
That man's name was Tiglath-Pileser I. Tiglath-Pileser
33:04
ascended to the throne in the year 1114 BC.
33:10
He was the son of a harsh ruler named Ashur-resha-ishi I.
33:17
His father had been remorseless in his campaigns, giving himself the title “the
33:23
avenger of Assyria” and “merciless hero of battle”.
33:29
One surviving edict by his father declares that the penalty for fraternizing with palace women was to be thrown into an oven, and it's clear that
33:39
Tiglath-Pileser inherited at least some of his father's harsh reputation.
33:45
A series of laws was written during his reign called the Middle Assyrian Law
33:51
Code, and they included incredibly harsh punishments against women.
33:57
In one, a married woman who has an affair is decreed to be killed.
34:03
But he was an energetic ruler and a skillful campaigner.
34:09
One of his royal inscriptions describes him in the following manner.
34:17
Unrivaled king of the universe, king of the four kingdoms, king of all princes, lord of lords whose weapons the god
34:26
Ashur has sharpened, and whose name he has pronounced eternally for control of
34:31
the four quarters, splendid flame which covers the hostile land like a rainstorm.
34:40
This kind of overflowing self-praise is quite typical of how all Assyrian kings
34:47
described themselves, but in the case of Tiglath-Pileser, it's clear that the challenges he faced were indeed formidable.
34:56
He had inherited an Assyria that was threatened on multiple fronts.
35:02
In the north, climate shifts have been driving nomadic horsemen into the northern plains. The Mushku people of Syria had occupied
35:11
certain Assyrian districts in the upper Euphrates Valley. The Hittite people had also snatched some of its territory,
35:20
and the powerful rival of Babylon still lay to the south.
35:26
But Tiglath-Pileser didn't waste any time. He attacked the Mushku first and
35:32
conquered them, and then drove out the Hittites and Arameans, and everywhere he went, he placed a record of his victories.
35:42
In one of the strong fortresses he built along his border, he engraved the
35:48
following message on a series of copper plates in the base of the walls.
35:55
Altogether, I conquered 42 lands and their rulers, from the other side of the Lower Zab in distant mountainous regions to the other
36:04
side of the Euphrates, people of Hatti, and the Upper Sea in the west.
36:16
The king at Tiglath-Pileser also loved to hunt, and he delighted in bringing back
36:22
live specimens of animals from the far away lands that he campaigned in.
36:28
I killed ten strong bull elephants in the land Harran, and the region of the
36:35
river Habur, and four live elephants I captured. I brought the hides and tusks of the dead elephants along with the live
36:43
elephants back to my city of Ashur. It's hard to know how the average
36:49
Assyrian citizen of the time would have felt about all of this, since their accounts were not recorded. We can imagine that at the very least, a
36:59
great deal of wealth would now be flowing into the city of Ashur.
37:05
Teams of construction workers would have been working day and night to build new
37:10
palaces and gardens in the city. Exotic, never-before-seen animals might
37:17
now be seen on the streets, while access to new trade routes may have meant that
37:23
new spices and fabrics would have begun to appear in the city markets.
37:33
Tiglath-Pileser swept his Assyrian armies west, and when he conquered the
37:39
Hittite town of Pitru, he gained control of the highway to the Mediterranean Sea,
37:45
a distant body of water that, for the Assyrians, constituted one edge of the
37:52
entire world. Assyria at this time was the only great
37:57
power in this region with no access to a coastline, and we can see something of
38:03
the wonder in the king Tiglath-Pileser’s words when he boasts about going on
38:09
board a ship for the first time. The Assyrian chronicles even record that
38:15
he hunted and killed some kind of sea creature known as a nahiru.
38:21
I killed a nahiru, which is called horse of the sea in the great sea of the land of Amurru.
38:32
We don't know what this animal was. Many believe it may have been a dolphin or a
38:37
whale, while others say it was likely a hippopotamus. But it shows what a novelty
38:43
it was for the king of the landlocked kingdom of Assyria to finally reach the
38:48
water. Tiglath-Pileser died in the year 1076 BC, and on his deathbed, he must have looked
38:59
back on a life of staggering success. During his violent rule, Assyria
39:06
recovered much of the territory that it had lost over the period of the Bronze Age collapse. He had grown his kingdom into an empire
39:15
that was all but unmatched in the region, and he must have looked ahead to the
39:21
dawning of a golden age for Assyria. But the fortunes of Assyria would soon
39:28
change for good with the reign of a king named Adad-Nirari II.
39:42
Adad-Nirari was crowned in the year 910 BC, nearly 3,000 years ago, and it's worth
39:50
mentioning that his reign is perhaps the first event in the entirety of Near
39:55
Eastern history that can be dated to an exact year with a hundred percent
40:01
confidence. The Assyrians, like the peoples before them, didn't keep track of years with numbers like we do.
40:09
Instead, they gave each year a name, sometimes named after a particular
40:15
person as a kind of honor, or named after a significant event that had taken place,
40:21
like a great battle or an eclipse of the sun. Assyrian scribes kept long, meticulous lists of these year names, along with
40:32
brief notes about important events that had taken place, as the following example shows, corresponding to three years at the end
40:42
of the eighth century BC. The year of chamberlain Tab-shar-Assur,
40:49
the city of Dur Sharruken was founded. The year of Shamash-upahhir, governor of
40:56
Habruri; Kummuhi was conquered, and a governor was appointed. The year of Sha-Assur-dubbu, governor of Tushan; the king returned from Babylon,
41:06
the vizier and nobles, the loot of Dur- -Jakin was destroyed, on the 22nd of
41:11
Teshrit, the gods of Dur-Sharruken entered the temples.
41:16
This system worked well enough for people of the time, but it means that if a modern historian wants to work out the date of a particular event, they need to
41:26
have an unbroken list of year names, and for that list to include a known
41:33
historical event or an astronomical event that can be clearly dated, like a solar eclipse. Luckily for us, the Assyrians were
41:43
obsessed with eclipses, believing them to be important omens from the gods,
41:49
and they kept incredibly careful note of any that occurred. The reign of Adad-Nirari is the beginning of the earliest one of these
41:59
lists. He was an ambitious king, and he soon began to expand in all directions into what is today Turkey, Iran, and the
42:09
Mediterranean coast, drawing on the strength of the formidable Assyrian army.
42:19
The life of an Assyrian soldier was a tough one.
42:24
Adad-Nirari's armies were made up primarily of men drawn from the fields.
42:30
They would spend much of their year working on farmsteads with their families, digging canals and turning the dusty earth with plows and hand tools,
42:41
growing beans and pulses, wheat and barley, raising livestock like sheep, pigs,
42:48
and cattle. Then when the spring came, the rains stopped and the winter mud
42:54
hardened across the land, they would be gathered up, given a spear
42:59
and a shield made of woven reeds, and marched up into the rocky hills or out
43:05
into the barren desert to fight for the empire. Sometimes they would fight other settled societies who lived in walled towns.
43:15
Other times, their opponents would be nomadic tribesmen or even other
43:20
Assyrians who had rebelled. It must have been a confusing and
43:25
frightening experience for these men, and no doubt many despised being forced
43:31
into this service. But perhaps there were also those who enjoyed it. Without these annual excursions, many of
43:40
them may never have seen a mountain or an ocean, or anything of the world
43:46
outside their town or village. Since the Assyrian army tended to
43:52
win more than it lost, there must have been a certain sense of pride in their
43:58
shared accomplishments. This rhythm of a season of harvest in the autumn and a season of war in the
44:07
spring formed the heartbeat of the Assyrian Empire. It was a drumbeat of expansion and
44:15
conquest that was continued by the king who came to the throne in the year 883
44:22
BC, and who would carry the Assyrian Empire to new and unprecedented heights. His name was Ashurnasirpal II.
44:37
Ashurnasirpal was a remorseless and ruthless warrior,
44:42
and many of the things we associate today with the kings of Assyria, their
44:48
cruelty and harsh treatment of enemies, reached a climax under his rule.
44:55
Much like many rulers of this time around the world, it's clear that he used terror tactics and tortuous methods of execution to drive fear into the hearts
45:07
of his enemies. But his inscriptions, out of all those of
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the kings of Assyria, do stand out for the delight they seem to take in the
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details of these terror tactics. After crushing one rebellion to his rule,
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Ashurnasirpal commissioned this inscription describing what happened
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next. I burnt many captives from them.
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I captured many troops alive. From some, I cut off their arms and hands.
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From others, I cut off their noses, ears, and extremities. I gouged out the eyes of many troops. I made one pile of the living and one of
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heads. I hung their heads on trees around the city. I burnt their adolescent boys and girls.
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I razed, destroyed, burnt, and consumed the city.
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Whether because of these tactics or despite them, in the short term,
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Ashurnasirpal was an effective conqueror. New conquests were turned into client
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states and ordered to pay tribute to the Assyrian Empire.
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Enormous wealth began to flow once again into the imperial center, and
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Ashurnasirpal celebrated his victories with the construction of even more grand
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palaces. I founded a palace of cedar, cypress, juniper, boxwood, terebinth, and tamarisk
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as my royal residence, and for my lordly leisure for eternity,
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I made sculptures of beasts of the mountains and the seas in white limestone and alabaster, and placed them at its doors.
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I decorated it in a splendid fashion; I hung doors of cedar and cypress in its
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doorways, and put therein silver, gold, tin, bronze, and iron,
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treasure from the lands I conquered. I took people which I had conquered from the lands over which I had gained domination and settled them there.
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This policy of resettling conquered people in Assyria wasn't new, but
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Ashurnasirpal seems to have employed it far more frequently than his predecessors.
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The Assyrians understood a very simple calculation in the ancient world,
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that population size meant power, and they quite happily filled their
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cities with people from all corners of their empire. They created what must have been some of the most cosmopolitan urban environments
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before the modern age, and we can only imagine what it must have been like for these conquered peoples to be uprooted from their villages and deposited
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unceremoniously in the vast metropolitan cities of the Assyrian heartland,
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larger than any town they had ever seen, and where hundreds of languages would
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have been heard on the streets. But the Assyrians also used deportations and relocations in a much more punitive
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way, and this policy also reached its height under Ashurnasirpal. Deportation may sound like something of
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a light punishment when compared to the fates of some of those who stood in the way of the kings of Assyria, but it was a brutally effective tactic
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for crushing resistance to the empire. Human beings during this time and
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throughout history are so connected to our landscape that this kind of uprooting had a devastating psychological impact on the peoples it
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was done to. This technique of mass deportations was
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so effective that it has been employed by modern dictators. Joseph
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Stalin famously deported at least six million people in the 20th century from
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more than 20 ethnic minority groups considered to be troublemakers,
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and in the early days of the American colonies when indigenous people were taken as slaves, they were always transported to another region to break
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their relationship with the land and reduce their chance of escaping.
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Whether despite this cruelty or because of it, King Ashurnasirpal did manage to
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keep the empire together and dramatically expanded it, but he was followed by his son, a man named Shalmaneser III,
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who would not be so capable. Shalmaneser enthusiastically continued his father's policies of aggressive expansion and
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mass deportation, but in the final years of his reign, the people of Assyria had had enough. An enormous rebellion led by his son
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broke out across the entire empire. 27 cities, including the city of Ashur,
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rose up in rebellion, and this long and bitter civil war allowed virtually all of the people that Ashurnasirpal had conquered to shake off
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Assyrian rule. Assyria’s heavy-handed military domination
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of the region had made them hated, and it was clear that if they hoped to ever
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build a lasting empire, something would have to change.
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One king named Tiglath-Pileser III thought he knew what that thing was,
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and it was not a softer and more diplomatic approach.
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He decided in characteristic Assyrian fashion that what the empire needed was
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a much more powerful army.
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Up until the middle of the 8th century BC, the Assyrian army was much the same as any other force in the region,
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only a good deal larger, and the numbers really are staggering
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for the time. Shalmaneser III, the son of Ashurnasirpal,
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once boasted a force of 120,000 men at a time when the world population has been
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estimated at only 50 million. If his inscriptions are to be believed,
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then at that time, around 0.25 percent, or one in every 400 of the
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world's entire population, was at that time serving in the Assyrian army.
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But it was still a force made up of virtually untrained peasants. The only professional soldiers were bodyguards that protected the king
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and other nobles, but these were mostly deployed in the cities and palaces, and rarely saw battle. The vast bulk of the Assyrian army was
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made up of farmers, who as we've seen, were plucked from their lands whenever the need arose, following the heartbeat of the seasons.
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Although the empire could summon a vast horde of soldiers, it was an ineffective
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force. When the autumn came around and the barley grew golden in the fields, these armies of farmers had to march right
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back home and bring in the crops, otherwise the people of the empire would
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go hungry. Gathering this huge army from the fields was an immensely time-consuming and difficult task.
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Rebellions could break out at any time of year, but if one occurred in some far
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corner of the empire, the Assyrians had to wait until summer for their campaign to begin. It would take months to gather all the
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soldiers required, and then another month or two to march across the region to
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face it. By the time they arrived, it would be nearly time for the annual harvest, and the men would have to march all the way
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back home. If they were clever, a rebellious city could simply lock its gates and wait behind their walls for the
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armies of Assyria to go away, and in many cases, this is exactly what they did.
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But in the year 745 BC, the king Tiglath- -Pileser came to the throne.
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He chose his royal name after the king who had brought Assyria to such
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greatness more than three centuries before, who had forged a path to the Mediterranean and killed that sea
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creature known as a nahiru. This new king Tiglath-Pileser engaged
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in a radical program of reforming the Assyrian military into perhaps the first
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truly modern army. He reformed the core of the military
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into a body of elite armored troops, cavalry, and chariots,
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and he demanded that conquered territories on the edges of the empire supplied all of the army's light infantry who were considered expendable
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and often bore the brunt of the casualties. The Assyrian army also pioneered the use of a large engineering component to its
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fighting force. Assyrian soldiers could build bridges and dig tunnels, construct fortifications and siege engines, as well as maintain
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the supply lines needed to keep an army going. This combined fighting force of soldiers and engineers was similar to the formula
55:23
that would make the Roman military so formidable seven centuries in the future.
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Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

Postby admin » Fri Dec 09, 2022 10:56 pm

Part 2 of 3

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Assyrian carvings show remarkably detailed scenes of the army crossing one
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of the land's great rivers, something they must have had to do multiple times a year. We see Assyrian men blowing into tied-up
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sheepskins to inflate them and use as buoyancy aids,
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chariots dismantled and turned into boats, rafts constructed to transport
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supplies and equipment; army engineers could even cut paths through the treacherous mountains, as this inscription written by the late
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Assyrian king Sargon II seems particularly proud of.
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Mount Simirria is a great mountain peak that points upward like the blade of a spear. Its summit touches the sky above, and its roots are made to reach down
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below into the netherworld. It is not fit for the ascent of chariotry or for allowing horses, and its access is very difficult for even the
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passage of foot soldiers. I had my vanguard carry strong copper axes; they cut through the high mountain crags as if they were limestone, and
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thereby improved the path. I took the lead of my army and made the chariotry, cavalry, and battle troops fly over the mountain as if they were brave
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eagles. I had the common soldiers and like infantry follow behind them. The camels and donkeys bearing the baggage leapt up
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its peaks like the ibexes native to the mountains. I had the numerous troops of the god Ashur ascend its difficult slopes in a good order, and then I set up camp
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on top of that mountain. Tiglath-Pileser also increased production of iron in the empire.
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It was a small-scale industrial revolution. Assyrian cities of this time must have become increasingly smoke-filled, the
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furnaces belching charcoal smoke, the sound of billows and clanging hammers
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echoing off the buildings. The use of iron allowed the Assyrians to enter the era of true mass production. Assyrians could now use iron to make
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arrowheads, knives, pins, and chains, while Assyrian soldiers now marched with
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iron swords, iron spear blades, iron helmets, and iron scales sewn into their
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tunics. The effect was immediate. In the year 743 BC, only two years after coming to the
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throne, King Tiglath-Pileser marched north against the kingdom of Urartu, and
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conquered it easily. Two years later, he marched west into Syria against the kingdom of Arpad.
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The people of the city of Arpad had fought the Assyrians before, and they knew what to do. They would simply close their gates and
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hold tight. The Assyrian army may have looked fearsome, but they knew that when the summer came to an end, they would have to
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go home and harvest their fields just as they always had.
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But as autumn came, the people of Arpad must have realized that something was
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wrong. The Assyrians showed no sign of going home. In fact, it looked like they were
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settling in for a long stay. Tiglath-Pileser lay siege to the city of
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Arpad for three years, something that would have been impossible with the old
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seasonal armies. When the city finally fell, the Assyrian
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king ordered Arpad to be destroyed and its inhabitants slaughtered. It was a
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clear message to all those who stood in the empire's way, that a new age was dawning.
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Much like superpowers today, the Assyrian Empire treated the areas outside its
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boundaries as zones of extraction, where life was cheap and all that
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mattered was the empire's continued access to their resources.
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Assyria would grow rich from the vast wealth it extracted from these
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areas. One text written during the reign of that cruel king Ashurnasirpal II lists all the wealth drawn from a single
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campaign of terror against the region of Bit-Zamani.
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I received harnessed chariots, equipment for troops and horses,
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460 harness-trained horses, two talents of silver, two talents of gold,
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100 talents of tin, 100 talents of bronze, 300 talents of iron, 3,000 bronze receptacles, bronze bowls,
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bronze containers, 1,000 linen garments with multi-colored trim, dishes,
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chests, couches of ivory and decorated with gold, the treasure of his palace,
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also 2,000 oxen, 5,000 sheep, his sister with her rich dowry, and the
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daughters of his nobles. On top of this, 15,000 slaves were rounded up and brought back to
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Assyria to labor in manual jobs and provide a workforce for the empire.
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In campaign after campaign, Tiglath- -Pileser conquered lands in Syria, and
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marched all the way down the Mediterranean coast, taking coastal cities all the way to Egypt. He invaded the northern kingdom of
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Israel, destroyed their army, installed a puppet king, and deported
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large numbers of Hebrew tribes back to lands in Assyria.
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Tiglath-Pileser also added one more remarkable new possession to the list of
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Assyrian conquests; that was the mighty and ancient capital
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of the south, the great city of Babylon.
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The city of Babylon had been the political and religious heart of
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southern Mesopotamia for more than a thousand years. It was perhaps the most ancient and revered great city in the region, and at
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this time, it ruled over an area known today as Babylonia.
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This is a landscape of marshes covering much of the south of what is today Iraq
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on the coast of the Persian Gulf. This was once the largest wetland in the
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Middle East, home to countless rare species of bird, and the reeds often grow so high that you can't see over them.
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Mesopotamia had once been divided between the Sumerians in the south and
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the Akkadians in the north, but this had now evolved to become
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Babylonians in the south and Assyrians in the north, and it's a cultural division that still exists today.
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In modern times, the distribution of the Sunni and Shia regions of modern Iraq
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roughly follow this same geographical divide.
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Babylon was the largest city in the world at several points in history, and
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it was perhaps the first city to ever reach a population above 200,000. Today, its awe-inspiring ruins sit about
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85 kilometers south of Baghdad, a sprawling mass of crumbling walls.
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Its famous Ishtar Gate, with its ornate blue glazed tiles, its depictions of oxen,
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lions, and dragons were at this time still several centuries in the future,
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but Babylon would have still been a resplendent city glittering in the sun.
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Tiglath-Pileser's conquest of Babylon shifted the balance of power in Mesopotamia. By the year 736 BC,
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the empire encompassed almost the whole of the region known as the Fertile Crescent. It now formed an unbroken corridor from
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the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, linking up the trade routes of the Indian Ocean with those of North Africa and Europe.
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Its roads would have been thick with caravans of donkeys and camels, its
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rivers full of barges carrying spices and precious stones,
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wheat, barley and fruit, gold and silver, and brass.
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It was this empire and the formidable army it now commanded that the king
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Tiglath-Pileser III would pass down to his younger son, who would found the greatest dynasty of the Assyrian age.
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His name was Sargon II, named after that great ancient Sumerian
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hero. His dynasty would be known as the Sargonid Kings. They would rule for three generations
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that would form the highest point of the empire's achievements in war, art, and
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literature, but they would also be the twilight of its age.
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When these three generations ended, the empire would finally collapse in ash
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and flame.
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At this point, I think it's worth pausing and asking what was life like for the
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average citizen of the Assyrian Empire? Due to their officious record-keeping, we
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actually have a great deal of detail about how the people of ancient Mesopotamia lived. Like the Sumerians ,the Assyrians wrote
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on clay tablets, which is lucky for us since it has made their texts incredibly
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durable. An enormous number of these pieces of writing have been recovered, so many that an estimated 90% have still never
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been looked at by a trained expert, and far less translated.
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The experience of reading these tablets is like hearing the babbling of
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countless voices speaking up to us from the impossibly distant past about a
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remarkable array of everyday matters. Just one out of countless examples is
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this letter from a child away at school complaining to his mother that the other
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children have nicer clothes than he does. Tell the lady Zinu her son Iddin-Sin sends
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the following message; from year to year, the clothes of the young gentleman here become better, but you let my clothes get worse from year
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to year. The son of Adad-Iddinam, whose father is only an assistant of my father, has two new sets of clothes, while you fuss even
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about a single set for me. In spite of the fact that you gave birth to me and his mother only adopted him, his mother loves him while you,
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you do not love me. As a result of this rich collection of texts, we can paint a remarkably clear
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picture of what life was like for these very ancient people.
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Walking the streets of a great Assyrian city during this time would have engaged
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every one of your senses. One such city was Nineveh, which would
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soon become the capital of the empire, the same city that the Greek writer Xenophon would one day pass by while fleeing from the Persian army
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pursuing him. Nineveh was an enormous city for the time. Its city walls were 12 kilometers long,
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built of a stone foundation surmounted by mud bricks and enclosing an area of
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seven and a half square kilometers. The wall was broken by fifteen gates,
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many of them named after gods such as the Adad Gate named after the god of
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storms, or the Shamash Gate after the god of the sun, while others carried more descriptive names like the Desert Gate or the Gate
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of the Water Carriers. The city was surrounded by a moat filled
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with water from the river Tigris. The city would have been a kaleidoscope
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of rooftops, built in a largely unplanned manner, and its alleyways would have been covered with mats and reed awnings to keep off
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the heat, much as they still are in Iraq today. In the courtyards of houses, skins of wine and jars of water hang from the
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rafters to cool. We can imagine a joint of meat boiling in a clay pot on a fireplace, the smells of baking bread wafting from
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a clay charcoal oven nearby. The following recipe for lamb stew
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translated from a clay tablet shows the kinds of smells that would have been wafting through the city streets in the afternoon.
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Stew of lamb; meat is used. You prepare water. You add fat. You add fine grain salt,
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dried barley cakes, onion, shallot, and milk. You crush together and add leek and garlic.
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Like the Sumerians before them, the Assyrians loved to drink beer. They drank
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it in groups, sipping it from large urns through hollow reed straws.
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Beer held a prominent place in Assyrian culture, and this inscription by the late
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king Ashurbanipal shows that even in the highest royal circles, it was considered
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among life's greatest pleasures. In my reign, there is prosperity.
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In my years, there is abundance. My kingship is good as the choicest oil.
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Good beer I have placed in my palace.
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Nineveh sat on the river Tigris, and had a bustling dock and waterfront beside
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the gate known as the dock gate. This would have been a vibrant place
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full of the smells of dried and fresh fish, stagnant water, and mud, the babbling
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of the crowd, people arguing over prices and shouting greetings in dozens of
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languages. Merchants would sail downstream on barges or ships woven from reeds, perhaps traveling south to Ashur or Babylon with
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clay urns full of beer or wine. The following letter contains
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instructions from a wine merchant to a friend.
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Tell Ahuni Belanum sends the following message; may the god Shamash keep you in
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good health. Make ready for me the myrtle and the sweet-smelling reeds I spoke to you about,
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as well as a boat for transporting wine. Buy and bring along with you ten silver
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shekels’ worth of wine and join me here in Babylon sometime tomorrow.
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But the Tigris was a fast-flowing river, much faster than the Euphrates, and
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sailing back upstream was very difficult. So, traders would often make the journey
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back by road, accompanied by caravans of donkeys.
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The road system was now much improved since the time of the Sumerians, and a
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sophisticated highway network now joined all of Assyria's major cities, with
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milestones at regular intervals telling travelers how much further they had to
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go. But the roads were often dangerous, and although soldiers would patrol them,
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banditry was extremely common. One letter from a local governor shows
1:12:46
his frustration with the lack of response to the bandit problem.
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Tell Sin-Iddinam Sillee sends the following message; I have written to you repeatedly to bring here the criminal and all the
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robbers, but you have not brought them, and so, fires started by the robbers are still raging and ravaging the
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countryside. I am holding you responsible for the crimes which are committed in the country.
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In the cities, a great deal of life took place on the roofs of houses.
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During the day, women would gather on these roofs to perform the duties of maintaining their homes. They would pound grains into flour
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and knead the dough to make bread, prepare food, wash linen, and hang it out to dry. We can imagine them talking with their
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neighbors from roof to roof as they worked, and the sounds of their laughter
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drifting overhead. During the hottest hours of the day, with the Iraqi sun often reaching more than 40 degrees Celsius or 104 degrees
1:13:53
Fahrenheit, the heat would drive everyone indoors. The
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finer houses of the city often had a kind of cool room, with a floor made of
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polished alabaster or marble, and the walls painted with plaster.
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During the hottest parts of the day, the floor and walls would be splashed with water to cool the air inside. The city's poor would sleep on reed mats
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while the rich had wooden bed frames with mattresses and coverings. The richest of the citizens had beds made of ivory and fine carved woods.
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It's not just people that were thought to live in this city; the Assyrians believed that the world was populated by countless demons and
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spirits who could not be seen or heard, but whose influence could constantly be
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felt, and who often manifested as bad smells. These demons were responsible for illnesses and disease, and they required
1:14:59
the constant attention of exorcists to expel them. The following letter recounts the procedure for one exorcism for a person
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suffering from epilepsy. As soon as something has afflicted him,
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the exorcist rises and hangs a mouse and a shoot of thornbush on the vault of the
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patient's door. The exorcist dresses in a red garment and puts on a red cloak. He holds a raven on his right arm, a
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falcon on his left, and recites the incantation “Truly, you are evil!” After he has finished, he makes another
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exorcist go around the bed of the patient, followed by incense and a torch, and recites the incantation “Begone evil
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hutupu!” until the demon is driven out. He does this every morning and evening.
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Talismans were often used to ward off these evil spirits, often small statues
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in bronze or clay, sometimes precious stones like jasper.
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They were often frightening images of demons with the wings and heads of goats
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and dogs, and the tails of scorpions. These would be kept in every corner
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of the house to ward off evil. As you walked the city, you would see these small talismans hanging from the rooftops.
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For many Assyrians, one crucial everyday object was what's called a cylinder seal. These were a small cylinder of stone,
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some no larger than a battery, which had complicated designs and symbols carved
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into them. The idea was that someone could prove their identity using this seal, and they could be used to sign contracts just like a signature.
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People would wear them around their necks on a string, and when a contract was written on clay, they would roll the cylinder over it so that their unique
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image was left printed on it. You could even seal a chest, an urn, or a
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door using clay or wax, and then print it with an official seal so that everyone
1:17:20
knew the last person to open it. The following letter of instruction to a
1:17:26
member of the king's household shows the importance that these seals held in all
1:17:32
manners of official business. Tell Manaya that Siqi-ilani will be coming to you carrying the cylinder seals to reseal
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the entrance of the warehouse, and also the cylinder showing a lahmu monster for resealing the chests. Get everyone together,
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open the storehouse, and take as many as you can carry of the garments which are in the chests under my seal. Put your cylinder seal on whatever has been
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returned, and send me back the seal cylinders. But these cylinders were expensive, and they signified that their holder was
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an important person of high class. Regular people had to get by without one,
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and to sign a contract, they would simply press their fingernails into the clay,
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meaning that the marks of these ancient people's hands are still left on some of
1:18:28
these documents.
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The people who lived these countless lives in the streets of the great Assyrian cities were probably largely unaware of what was going on in the vast,
1:18:47
grand palaces that loomed over their cities. They would have likely followed the comings and goings of kings with some
1:18:56
interest the way we might pay attention to celebrity gossip,
1:19:01
but to them, the inner workings of the royal palace would have been as inaccessible and mysterious as the center of the earth.
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But what happened in those inner chambers would have an enormous effect on their lives, and as that final great dynasty of
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Assyria, the Sargonid Kings, took to the throne, the dramas of the royal court would soon have deadly consequences for
1:19:30
all those who called Assyria their home.
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The drama of the Sargonid Kings truly begins with the son of Sargon, a man
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named Sennacherib. He came to the throne in the year 705 BC,
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and he would begin one of the most remarkable family dramas to come down to
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us from the ancient world, and he would be the father and the grandfather of the
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last two great kings of Assyria; Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal.
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This great drama got off to a remarkably rocky start.
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Sennacherib's father, Sargon, had been a respected and feared king,
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but it's clear that something about Sennacherib meant that he didn't quite hold the same level of command. After only two years of his rule, several
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Assyrian vassals in the foothills to the east, in Syria, and along the Mediterranean coast all suddenly stopped paying their tribute to the empire.
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The Egyptians, always happy to throw sand in the eyes of the Assyrians, moved to
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back the rebels’ fight for independence, and the young Sennacherib quickly found
1:21:04
himself plunged into a fight for the empire's survival.
1:21:10
The young king quickly gathered the full force of the imperial army and dealt
1:21:16
with the rebel kings in the usual Assyrian fashion, taking them on one by
1:21:21
one. He first marched east and crushed the peoples of the Iranian lowlands. Then he marched north and around the
1:21:30
Fertile Crescent to the Mediterranean coast, and reconquered the rebellious
1:21:36
kingdoms there, as he recalls in the following inscription.
1:21:42
With the weapons of the god Ashur, my lord, and my fierce battle array, I turned them back and made them retreat. I quickly slaughtered and defeated the
1:21:51
king of the land of Elam, together with his magnates who wore gold jewelry like fattened bulls restrained with chains.
1:21:59
I slit their throats like sheep and cut off their precious lives like thread. Like a flood after a rainstorm, I made their blood flow over the broad earth.
1:22:09
The swift horses, harnessed to my chariot, pulled into floods of their blood. The wheels of my war chariot, which lays criminals and villains low, were bathed
1:22:18
in blood and gore. I filled the plane with the corpses of their warriors like grass. I cut off their lips. I cut off their
1:22:26
hands like the stems of cucumbers in season.
1:22:32
One of these campaigns is remarkable because we have accounts of it written
1:22:37
by both the winners and the losers in a level of detail almost unprecedented
1:22:43
anywhere else in the 8th century BC. This is because its records have
1:22:50
survived not just in the chronicles of Assyria, but also in the Bible.
1:22:56
This was Sennacherib's campaign against the Kingdom of Judah.
1:23:05
The Kingdom of Judah was one of the region's two major Hebrew kingdoms, and
1:23:10
it centered on the powerful city of Jerusalem. It had once been part of a united Kingdom of Israel, but in the face of
1:23:20
Assyrian aggression, the kingdom had been broken up. It was now divided into the
1:23:26
Kingdom of Israel in the north ruled by a puppet king, and Judah in the south. The Judean king at the time was a
1:23:36
man named Hezekiah. He was an energetic ruler and seems to
1:23:42
have been driven by religious fervor. The religion of the ancient Israelites was something of an oddity in this
1:23:52
region at the time, because it disallowed the worship of any god but the Hebrew
1:23:58
god Yahweh. As we've seen, worship in places like
1:24:03
Assyria was a much more eclectic affair. You might make offerings to Marduk while
1:24:10
you were visiting Babylon on business, and make an offering to Ashur when you got home. You might make an offering to Ea if your son was going on a long
1:24:19
voyage by boat, or to Gula if someone you knew was sick.
1:24:24
In the Assyrian worldview, the gods of other cities were often seen as hostile
1:24:30
and were thought to be subordinate to the great god Ashur, but they were still thought to very much exist. In fact, the Assyrians had a habit of
1:24:40
kidnapping the gods of their conquered enemies. Sometimes when they captured a new city, they would take the statues of its gods
1:24:49
back to the Assyrian capital as a way of harnessing their power for themselves.
1:24:55
But the religion of the Hebrews was different; it held that there was only one god. If you worshiped any other deity, it was
1:25:04
believed that you were at best talking to the air, and at worst communing with
1:25:10
evil spirits. King Hezekiah was one of the most
1:25:15
strident religious rulers of ancient Judah. He enacted sweeping religious reforms, including strict instructions to worship
1:25:25
only the Jewish god Yahweh. He removed all other statues and icons
1:25:31
from the temple of Jerusalem, as the Book of Kings, Chapter 2:18 in the Hebrew
1:25:38
Bible recalls.
1:25:47
Now it came to pass in the third year of Hoshea, son of Elah, king of Israel, that
1:25:52
Hezekiah, the son of Ahaz, king of Judah began to reign, and he did that which was
1:25:58
right in the eyes of the lord, according to all that David, his father, had done. He removed the high places and broke the
1:26:06
pillars, and he broke in pieces the brazen serpent that Moses had made, for unto those days, the children of
1:26:14
Israel did offer to it.
1:26:24
Perhaps it was Hezekiah's religious devotion that led him to make the
1:26:29
enormous gamble of defying the Assyrian Empire, or perhaps the recent rebellions in Assyria had emboldened him, and he
1:26:39
believed that it might be on the brink of collapse. Whatever his calculation, it backfired completely.
1:26:49
He soon heard news that the Assyrian king Sennacherib was marching out to
1:26:55
punish the Kingdom of Judah with the full might of the Assyrian army.
1:27:00
The news coming from the north would have been terrifying. Sennacherib first conquered the rebels of Ekron, and then
1:27:10
swung his armies south to march on Jerusalem. On the road, he came across the fortified Judean city of Lachish.
1:27:22
Lachish was the second-most important of the cities of Judah. It was built on a hill about 40 kilometers to the southwest of
1:27:30
Jerusalem, and had a strong wall running all the way around it.
1:27:36
The hill was steeper on the north side and for defensive purposes, this is where
1:27:41
its gate had been built. We can imagine the sight that the citizens of Lachish would have seen one day in the year 701 BC.
1:27:53
From the north, a great cloud of dust would have begun to gather on the horizon, looking like some great natural disaster
1:28:02
on its way. As the dust grew closer and thicker, you would have been able to hear the vibrations through the earth.
1:28:10
If you've ever been inside a large sports stadium at full capacity, try to
1:28:16
imagine what three or four times as many people would sound like
1:28:21
all marching together in their heavy armor, along with their horses and the
1:28:26
clattering of chariot wheels and harnesses. Finally, the enormous force would have come into view like a shadow on the land.
1:28:37
In the center of their formations, the main body of infantry would have massed, organized into tight, compact units, their spear points glittering in the sun.
1:28:49
Even more terrifying would be the trundling wheels of enormous siege engines come to tear down the walls of the city.
1:28:58
The Judean military was insignificant in comparison.
1:29:03
They were made up of militias and mercenaries huddled behind the walls of
1:29:09
Lachish that must have suddenly seemed like a pitiful defense.
1:29:19
What happened next is depicted on a remarkable series of carvings etched in
1:29:25
meticulous detail in gypsum, designed to decorate the walls of Sennacherib's
1:29:31
southwest palace in Nineveh. In their day, these carvings would have
1:29:36
been coloured, their details picked out with dyes of green, blue, red, and yellow.
1:29:43
The Lachish relief is an incredible piece of art, although the events it depicts are horrific. It's a perfect snapshot of a moment in
1:29:53
history that would otherwise be completely lost, capturing the clothes and the faces of the soldiers and the frenzied action of the battle.
1:30:03
The Assyrians first built a camp and began to settle in for a long siege of
1:30:09
the city, and it's here that their expertise at engineering came into play. As the weeks dragged by, they slowly
1:30:19
built a ramp of stone and earth leading up to the city's walls.
1:30:24
It would have been around-the-clock effort. Assyrian workers toiled to form the mud bricks that made up the ramp, baking them
1:30:34
in the sun, while soldiers shielded the workers as they built it, the occasional arrow or slingstone whistling down from the
1:30:44
defenders on the walls. The desperation of the city's defenders can be clearly seen in the archaeological record at the site of
1:30:53
Lachish. At some point, we can see that they ran out of iron, and in desperation began to carve new arrowheads out of bone.
1:31:05
Finally, when the ramp was completed, the vast Assyrian siege engines would have
1:31:10
rumbled into life. These siege engines were something like an iron age tank. They were made up of a large wooden
1:31:19
frame like a mobile fortress on enormous wheels. They had a tower on top from which archers could rain fire on the defenders.
1:31:29
At the front of the engine was a large, heavy instrument, somewhere between a
1:31:34
battering ram, a spear, and a hammer. This was used to break the mud brick walls of
1:31:40
enemy cities, jimmying between the gaps in the bricks and stones, and slowly wearing them down. Defenders would constantly try to set
1:31:49
these engines on fire, and so, they were covered in thick layers of wet animal
1:31:54
hides. A constant stream of Assyrian workers would hurry up to the front lines, carrying jars and skins of water, dousing
1:32:04
the engine and putting out the fires. As well as these engines, the Assyrians
1:32:10
would have laid countless ladders against the walls. The defenders rained down arrows and stones,
1:32:18
but the result was inevitable.
1:32:25
The defense collapsed. People fled the city in all directions,
1:32:31
and the Assyrian army finally marched into Lachish.
1:32:36
From here on, the carvings begin to look like a depiction of hell.
1:32:41
As a punishment for resisting, the city of Lachish was utterly destroyed.
1:32:47
The inhabitants of the city were rounded up and deported to faraway lands on the other side of the river Tigris. The carvings show them leaving the city
1:32:57
in long columns, men and women riding bullock carts piled
1:33:02
high with all their possessions, children sitting on the carts or cradled
1:33:08
in their mother's arms. The carvings even show some prisoners being forced to play musical instruments as they march away from their home,
1:33:18
an episode perhaps also recorded in the ancient lament of Psalm 137.
1:33:34
By the rivers of Babylon, we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.
1:33:39
There on the poplars we hung our hearts, for there, our captors asked us for songs.
1:33:45
Our tormentors demanded songs of joy. They said sing us one of the songs of
1:33:51
Zion. How can we sing the songs of the lord while in a foreign land?
1:34:03
It's in this psalm too that we get one of the first recorded warnings delivered
1:34:10
to the empire of Assyria about the fate that might befall it in
1:34:15
the future, a fate that its various enemies were increasingly beginning to long for.
1:34:27
Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is the one who repays you
1:34:32
according to what you have done to us. Happy is the one who seizes your infants
1:34:39
and dashes them against the rocks. Next, the Assyrian army marched on Jerusalem, and Hezekiah was ready for
1:34:50
them. He'd built a new wall around the great city, and dug an underground tunnel
1:34:58
through solid stone that would bring fresh water directly into the city.
1:35:04
But even so, the situation must have looked bleak. The Judean king decided that he would have to negotiate. "Now in the 14th year of King
1:35:24
Hezekiah did Sennacherib, King of Assyria, come up against all the fortified cities of Judah and took them.
1:35:30
Hezekiah, king of Judah, sent to the king of Assyria to Lachish,
1:35:36
saying “I have offended. Return from me that which thou putted on me will I bear.”
1:35:44
The king of Assyria appointed Hezekiah, king of Judah, 300 talents of
1:35:50
silver and 30 talents of gold."
1:35:59
In order to pay the bounty, he even stripped the gold from the great temple,
1:36:04
something that must have been a heart-rending decision for this devout king. But this seems to have hardly appeased
1:36:13
the Assyrian king Sennacherib, who continued his siege.
1:36:18
At one point, he sent his general, a man named Rab-Shakeh, to approach the walls of
1:36:25
Jerusalem and demand the surrender of its defenders. The Assyrian general Rab-Shakeh
1:36:32
reminded the Jewish holdouts of all the other lands that had fallen to the military might of the Assyrians.
1:36:44
Have any of the gods of the nations ever delivered his land out of the hand of
1:36:50
the king of Assyria? Where are the gods of Hamath and of Arpad? Where are the gods of Sepharvaim? Of Hena?
1:37:00
Have they delivered Samaria out of my hand?
1:37:08
It looked as though all was lost, but it's at this point that luck began
1:37:14
to turn in Hezekiah's favor. The Hebrew Bible recalls him praying to
1:37:21
his god Yahweh to deliver him from the Assyrian siege, and the Hebrew poet historians who wrote the Book of Kings record this reply
1:37:32
coming down to him from the heavens.
1:37:40
Now have I brought it to pass. Yea, it is done, that fortified cities
1:37:46
should be laid waste into ruinous heaps. Their inhabitants were as the grass of
1:37:52
the field and as the green herb, and as the grass on the housetops, and as
1:37:58
corn blasted before it is grown up. Thus saith the lord concerning the king
1:38:03
of Assyria; he shall not come unto this city, nor shoot an arrow there. Neither shall he come before it with shield, nor cast a
1:38:13
mound against it. It came to pass that night that the angel of the lord went forth and smote in the camp of the Assyrians
1:38:22
104 score and 5,000. When men arose early in the morning, behold; they
1:38:36
were all dead corpses. We may never know the truth of what happened to bring an end to the siege of Jerusalem. The most likely explanation is probably
1:38:44
an outbreak of plague among the army of Assyria. Plague was a constant threat to any campaigning army, and it wouldn't have
1:38:53
been the first campaign to end in this way. One Egyptian account repeated by the later historian Herodotus, recounts how
1:39:02
the Assyrian army was turned back after an infestation of field mice swarmed
1:39:08
their camp. The mice are said to have gnawed away at the Assyrian bowstrings and shield handles, making them unable to fight.
1:39:18
This is possibly another slightly fanciful description of a plague
1:39:23
decimating an army. The Assyrian sources are understandably quiet about what must
1:39:30
have been an embarrassing failure. The only source to mention this campaign
1:39:36
focuses on the early victories won by the Assyrians, and on the tribute that
1:39:41
Hezekiah handed over. This campaign gives just one brief
1:39:47
snapshot of what the Assyrian war machine was like, and how it felt to be on the receiving end of its fury.
1:39:56
Still, the campaign had ended in an embarrassment, and it was perhaps this
1:40:01
defeat that led the city of Babylon in the south to desire its freedom.
1:40:13
The question of what to do with Babylon was one of the constant pressing
1:40:18
concerns of the Assyrian kings, and it had been a thorn in their side for
1:40:24
centuries. Babylon was a proud and ancient city
1:40:30
with a distinct culture, and it was so powerful that it was exceptionally
1:40:35
difficult to keep it in the empire. Various Assyrian kings tried different
1:40:42
approaches to this problem. Some simply allowed a native Babylonian
1:40:47
to rule the city and its surrounding territories, which kept the Babylonian people happy, but this often led to the Babylonian
1:40:56
king declaring independence whenever the central power of Assyria was distracted
1:41:02
or deployed elsewhere. Others tried imposing an Assyrian governor on the Babylonians. This naturally enraged them, and these
1:41:12
Assyrian kings of Babylon would often face plots and rebellions, and would
1:41:17
quite often be toppled in favor of some Babylonian noble who would then
1:41:22
immediately declare independence. The third option was to keep the throne
1:41:28
of Babylon in the family. This usually involved the king of Assyria crowning his brother or uncle as the king of Babylon,
1:41:38
but this held another danger. If this brother was a little too ambitious, he might consider using the might of Babylon as a springboard to try
1:41:49
and take the whole empire for himself. By the year 694 BC, this repeated cycle
1:41:58
and seemingly impossible problem had become too much for King Sennacherib, and
1:42:04
for him, the conflict had become personal. Babylonian rebels were partly
1:42:10
responsible for the death of one of his sons, and after crushing his enemies in the north in the Kingdom of Judah and along
1:42:19
the Mediterranean coast, he swung around and set out on campaign to decisively
1:42:25
beat the city of Babylon and solve the Babylonian problem for good.
1:42:38
In the year 689 BC, the Assyrians laid siege to Babylon.
1:42:44
The siege lasted for 15 months, and when the city finally fell, Sennacherib wrote
1:42:50
this description of what happened next. I destroyed the city and its houses from foundation to parapets.
1:43:00
I devastated and burned them. I razed the brick and earthen work of the outer
1:43:05
and inner wall of the city, of the temples, and of the ziggurat,
1:43:10
and I dumped these into the Arahtu canal. I dug canals through the midst of that
1:43:16
city. I overwhelmed it with water. I made its very foundations disappear, and I
1:43:22
destroyed it more completely than a devastating flood so that it might be impossible in future days to recognize the sight of that city and its temples. I
1:43:32
utterly dissolved it with water and made it like an inundated land.
1:43:39
Even by the standards of the time, this action was considered excessive.
1:43:45
Burning a Judean or Elamite city to the ground was one thing,
1:43:50
but to do the same to the cultured, ancient, and holy city of Babylon was too
1:43:56
much. There was a great outcry in Assyria, and Sennacherib responded by kidnapping the Babylonian god Marduk, carrying him back
1:44:06
to Nineveh, and placing him on trial. We can imagine the scenes as a group of
1:44:13
Assyrian legal officials gathered in court to condemn the silent stone statue
1:44:19
of the god. Marduk was eventually found guilty, but the broken text recounting this episode gives no clue about what
1:44:29
punishment was handed down. Sennacherib's goal had been to utterly
1:44:34
destroy Babylon, and he had succeeded. Its northern provinces were folded into the Assyrian Empire, and the city itself
1:44:44
was left in ruins.
1:44:51
The war in Babylon seems to have drained something from King Sennacherib.
1:44:57
After destroying the ancient city, he no longer seems to have had any appetite
1:45:02
for war. Instead of destruction, he dedicated the later years of his reign to building. He settled down in the city of Nineveh
1:45:12
and named it his new capital. Nineveh had been an important city for
1:45:18
millennia, but when Sennacherib moved there, it was in a sorely neglected state.
1:45:25
He renovated its palaces and built new ones, decorating them with carvings of his early victories like the one at the siege of Lachish,
1:45:34
as the following inscription recounts. I had a palace built with elephant ivory, ebony, boxwood, cedar, cypress,
1:45:45
juniper, and terebinth, a palace that I named The Palace Without
1:45:51
A Rival. I roofed its rooms with beams of cedar grown on Mount Amanus. I fastened bands of shining bronze on magnificent doors
1:46:03
of cypress, whose scent is sweet on opening and closing.
1:46:08
I installed eight striding lions standing opposite one another, which were
1:46:13
made from 11,400 talents of shining copper cast by the
1:46:19
god Ninagal, and were filled with radiance.
1:46:26
One inscription on a stone lion in the quarter associated with Sennacherib's
1:46:31
queen, named Tashmetu-sharrat, contains hopes that the royal couple would both
1:46:37
live long and healthy lives within the new palace. Sennacherib constructed beautiful gardens at his new palace, importing various
1:46:47
plants and herbs from across his empire and beyond. Cotton
1:46:53
trees may have been imported from as far away as India, and it's been suggested
1:46:59
that the famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, may actually have been these gardens in Nineveh, which were
1:47:10
designed to represent the empire in miniature form. Sennacherib recounts these efforts in the following inscription.
1:47:20
I planted alongside the palace a botanical garden, a replica of Mount
1:47:25
Amanus which has all kinds of aromatic plants and fruit trees, trees that are
1:47:31
the mainstay of the mountains and Chaldea, collected inside it.
1:47:37
By the end of Sennacherib's reign, Nineveh must have shone, a resplendent
1:47:42
city fit for the world's mightiest empire. I think in this change we see in Sennacherib, we see a possible different
1:47:52
path that history might have taken. The war-like king who had torn down the
1:47:57
walls of Lachish and burned Babylon to the ground now seemed to turn away from battle. He settled down and began building
1:48:07
instead. If this really indicates a change of personality in this Assyrian king, the tragedy is that he would not live to
1:48:17
pass on this spirit to his sons.
1:48:32
Sennacherib had at least seven sons, but when the crown prince, the oldest of them all, died in battle against the Elamites, Sennacherib was left to choose
1:48:43
between the remaining younger sons who would be the next king.
1:48:48
In the end, he had to decide between only two candidates. These two sons were named Udru-Mulissu and Esarhaddon. For Sennacherib,
1:49:03
this seems to have been a difficult decision. At first, the older son Udru-Mulissu was named the crown prince, but after a few
1:49:14
years, he seems to have fallen out of favor with his father.
1:49:20
We can only guess what it was that made the king change his mind, but considering what would go on to happen, we might offer a guess.
1:49:29
It may be that Sennacherib detected something cold and hard in the character
1:49:35
of Udru-Mulissu, a hunger for power that frightened him.
1:49:40
Whatever it was, Sennacherib decided to name the youngest of his sons as crown
1:49:46
prince instead, the man named Esarhaddon.
1:49:52
Esarhaddon's brothers were enraged. In a later inscription, he recalls the
1:49:59
effect this announcement had on them. I am my older brother's youngest brother,
1:50:05
but by the command of the gods, my father elevated me firmly in the assembly of my brothers, saying this is the son who will succeed
1:50:13
me. He questioned the god Samas and Adad by divination, and they answered him with a firm
1:50:20
yes, saying he is your replacement. He heeded their important words and
1:50:27
gathered together the people of Assyria, young and old, and my brothers, and told them.
1:50:35
Afterwards, my brothers went out of their minds and did everything that is displeasing to the gods of mankind, and they plotted evil.
1:50:43
They butted each other like goats for the right to exercise kingship, and then my brothers went mad.
1:50:50
They drew their swords godlessly in the middle of Nineveh.
1:50:56
The other brothers begged their father to reconsider, but King Sennacherib's mind was made up. Udru-Mulissu was forced to swear an oath
1:51:06
of allegiance to his brother. We know the kind of thing this oath would have contained because we have surviving copies of this kind of treaty
1:51:15
that Assyrian kings always sent out to their vassals. These were long legal documents running over many pages containing an oath in
1:51:25
which they swore their loyalty to the new crown prince, complete with terrifying heavenly punishments if they broke their word.
1:51:36
This is the treaty which the king of Assyria has concluded with you
1:51:41
in the presence of the great gods of heaven and earth. If you should remove it, consign it to the fire, throw it into the water, bury it
1:51:52
in the earth or destroy it by any cunning device, annihilate or deface it,
1:51:58
may Anu, king of the gods, let disease, exhaustion,
1:52:03
malaria, sleeplessness, worries, and ill health reign upon all your houses, clothe
1:52:10
you with leprosy, and forbid your entering into the presence of the gods
1:52:15
or king roam the desert like the wild ass and the gazelle.
1:52:21
May Shamash, the light of heaven and earth, remove your eyesight.
1:52:26
Walk about in darkness. May Ishtar, lady of battle and war, smash your bow in the
1:52:33
thick of battle. May Nabu, bearer of the tablet of fates of the gods, erase your
1:52:40
name and destroy your seed from the land. But still, the bitter former crown prince Udru-Mulissu refused to accept it.
1:52:52
Esarhaddon's brothers began plotting to have him killed, forcing him to flee to the western regions far from the increasingly
1:53:01
dangerous atmosphere in Nineveh. Esarhaddon later remembers this exile
1:53:07
with bitterness. They started evil rumors, falsehoods, and
1:53:13
slander about me against the will of the gods, and they were constantly telling insincere lies, hostile things behind my back.
1:53:21
They alienated the well-meaning heart of my father from me against the will of the gods, but deep down he was compassionate, and
1:53:30
his eyes were permanently fixed on me exercising kingship.
1:53:39
Esarhaddon's escape from Nineveh probably saved his life, but his father Sennacherib failed to see the danger that was increasingly growing
1:53:49
against his own person. On the twentieth day of Tebet, the tenth
1:53:55
month of the Assyrian calendar in the year 681 BC, the snubbed oldest prince
1:54:02
Urdu-Mulissu, accompanied by another brother, fell upon the king Sennacherib while he prayed in one of Nineveh's temples,
1:54:10
and killed him. The death of Sennacherib sent shockwaves
1:54:16
across the whole region. In Judah and in all the other places where the Assyrians were despised, people must have celebrated in the streets.
1:54:27
But in Assyria, the murder of the king was an abomination.
1:54:32
The treacherous prince Udru-Mulissu and the other brothers had miscalculated the
1:54:38
strength of the reaction against them. Riding this tide of outrage, the crown
1:54:45
prince Esarhaddon quickly gathered an army and marched out to meet his
1:54:50
treacherous brothers in battle. They also mustered a mighty force,
1:54:57
but on the eve of the first battle, the soldiers of the brothers deserted en
1:55:02
masse, unwilling to fight for the men who had murdered the old king. Esarhaddon now marched on Nineveh,
1:55:12
facing virtually no resistance. One of his later inscriptions recalls
1:55:18
his emotion upon retaking the city where his father had been murdered.
1:55:25
I entered into Nineveh, my royal city, joyful, and took my seat upon the throne of my father in safety.
1:55:35
The south wind blew, the breath of Ea, the wind whose blowing is favorable for exercising kingship.
1:55:42
They awaited me favorable signs in heaven and on earth, a message of the soothsayers, tidings from the gods and goddesses,
1:55:50
giving my heart courage. Esarhaddon's rage against the conspirators was overwhelming. He quickly
1:56:00
moved to execute all of their accomplices and the entire families of his brothers, as one chilling inscription recounts.
1:56:12
I sought out every one of the guilty soldiers who wrongly incited my brothers to exercise kingship over Assyria, and imposed a grievous
1:56:21
punishment on them. I exterminated their offspring.
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Esarhaddon had retaken the throne that his father had left for him,
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but the way he was forced to take it forever scarred the young king.
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The rest of his life he lived in a cloud of paranoia, never knowing who he could
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trust. Messages written on clay tablets show that he frequently sought the advice of oracles and priests,
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asking them whether any of his relatives or officials wished to harm him.
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He spent much of his time in a heavily fortified palace in the city of Kalhu,
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with high walls and only one entrance and exit, designed to be impregnable to
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assassins. Perhaps fearing that the gods were angry with him, Esarhaddon also set out to undo some of the damage that his warlike
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father had done. He especially wanted to repair relations with the southern metropolis of Babylon after the destruction that his father
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Sennacherib had wrought on it. He ordered that various statues of Babylonian gods should be returned to their rightful home,
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and in the year 680 BC, he announced that he would rebuild the ancient city.
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Many letters written between King Esarhaddon and his chief architects have survived, and in them we get a clear sense that he
1:57:57
wanted to rebuild Babylon just as it had been before the destruction.
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Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

Postby admin » Fri Dec 09, 2022 10:57 pm

Part 3 of 3

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I laid its foundation platform over its previous foundations, and in exact accordance with this earlier plan. I did not diminish it by one cubit or
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increase it by half a cubit. I drew its grand plan exactly as it had
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been written. I made its foundation platform as strong as the base of a mighty mountain, and built its structure as it was in
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former days. Esarhaddon's rebuilding was a clear message to Babylon's people,
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and if reports are to be believed, it seems the Babylonians were grateful for the work done on their city. One message written by the governor that
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Esarhaddon installed in Babylon gives a glowing impression.
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I have entered Babylon. The people of Babylon welcomed me, and they blessed the king every day, saying he is the one who returned Babylon's
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captives and booty. Also, the chiefs of Chaldea from Sippar
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to the mouth of the sea blessed the king, saying he is the one who resettled Babylon. But Esarhaddon was also a fierce
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war-maker. He even invaded Egypt, sick and tired of their activities funding and supporting rebels in Assyrian lands.
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His first campaign in 673 BC was an embarrassing failure, but he succeeded
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with another push two years later. One victory monument put up in the south
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of modern Turkey proclaimed the totality of his victory.
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Memphis, his royal city, in half a day with mines,
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tunnels, assaults, I besieged, I captured, I destroyed, I devastated, I burned with fire.
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But around this time, Esarhaddon's health began to deteriorate.
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It's not exactly clear what his illness was, but I think there's a good argument to be made that this Assyrian king was
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suffering from one of the first recorded cases of depression. The king would often spend days in his
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sleeping quarters without food, drink, or human contact, and matters were made much worse when his queen, the great love of his life,
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passed away. Esarhaddon began writing letters to his
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chief exorcist and medicine man, a person named Adad-shumu-usur.
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This man was the one most responsible for Esarhaddon's wellbeing, and he
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often replied with hopelessness to the king's constant requests,
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as this letter written by him to the king shows.
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As to what the king, my lord, wrote to me, I'm feeling very sad. How did we act that I have become so
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depressed for this little one of mine? Had it been curable,
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you would have given away half of your kingdom to have it cured, but what can we do? Oh,
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king, my lord, it is something that cannot be done.
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Letters preserved from Esarhaddon's royal court describe his condition in
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some detail. He suffered violent vomiting, constant fevers, nosebleeds, and dizziness, painful earaches, and melancholy.
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The king often feared that his death was near, and a rash began to cover most of
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his body, including his face. His royal physicians could do nothing to
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help him, and they often wrote despondently back to him.
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The king, my lord, keeps on saying to me why do you not diagnose the nature of
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this illness of mine and bring about its cure? I spoke to the king at the audience and could not clarify his symptoms.
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As Esarhaddon's death neared, the question of his succession became a
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pressing concern. He had seen firsthand what a civil war
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over the throne could do to tear the empire apart, and he wanted to do everything he could to ensure a smooth transition.
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Determined not to repeat his father's mistakes, Esarhaddon decided on an
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inventive course of action. He would name one of his young sons the
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king of Assyria, ruling the whole empire from Nineveh, and another son he would name the king of Babylon, who would rule over that city,
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swearing an oath to the Assyrian Empire. In Babylon, he appointed his eldest
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surviving son Shamash-shum-ukin, and in Nineveh to be the king of the
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whole empire in his place, he appointed a younger son named Ashurbanipal.
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It was a beautiful vision; two brothers ruling over the world's two greatest cities together,
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the two of them uniting these two cities, bringing in an age of peace and
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prosperity. It was a beautiful vision, but a mistaken
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one. In fact, Esarhaddon's miscalculation would backfire enormously, and the war he caused would usher in the final chapter
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of the Assyrian age.
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One day in the year 670 BC, in the city of Harran in northern Mesopotamia,
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a woman fell into an ecstatic fit and began speaking in tongues.
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She ran through the street and shouted out for all to hear a clear and unmistakable prophecy.
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A slave girl of Bel-ahu-usur in the suburb of Harran; since the month of Sivan she is enraptured and speaks these prophecies
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about him. It is the word of Nusku. I will destroy the name and seed of Sennacherib.
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King Esarhaddon's network of spies soon delivered this information to him, and he
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was appalled at the news. He immediately ordered a crackdown
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across the empire, burning the homes of anyone found to be spreading this conspiracy, but the news of the prophecy does seem
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to have shaken him. During the final years of his life, Esarhaddon became obsessed with omens and prophecies, and his court astrologers
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spent a lot of their time reassuring him, as this letter from one of them shows.
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The eclipse of the moon moved from the eastern quadrant and settled over the
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entire western quadrant to the moon. The planets Jupiter and Venus were
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visible during the eclipse until it cleared. This is fortunate for your majesty, and portends evil for your enemies in the
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westland. Because of the dark omens seeming to
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gather around him, Esarhaddon undertook a number of times a bizarre ritual known
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as the substitute king. The substitute king ritual involved the Assyrian monarch going into hiding for a
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hundred days, during which a substitute was found to take his place.
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This was often a commoner, and he would spend those hundred days living in the
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palace, sleeping in the king's bed, wearing his crown and royal clothes, and
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eating his food. During this time, the actual king remained hidden, and even
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took on the title “the farmer” to try to fool the evil spirits out to harm him.
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At the end of the hundred days, having absorbed whatever negative energy was
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out to get the king, the substitute was put to death and the real monarch was
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returned to the throne, the evil supposedly having passed him by.
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Esarhaddon repeated this ritual three times during the final years of his
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reign, showing just how desperate he was to shake the feeling of doom that had begun to gather around him.
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But it was no use. After a rebellion in Egypt, Esarhaddon
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marched out to fight against those who opposed him, and on the way, his health worsened.
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His condition became critical as his army passed through the north of Mesopotamia, and he died in the town of Harran.
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This was the same town where only a few years before, the woman had run through the streets, shouting in ecstasy about the prophecy
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of his doom.
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When Esarhaddon died, his sons Ashurbanipal and Shamash-shum-ukin
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successfully ascended the thrones of Assyria and Babylon, and began the twin
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rule that their father had planned. This began as a remarkable success.
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Shamash-shum-ukin journeyed to Babylon and brought with him the statue of Marduk that his grandfather had put on trial, the last
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artifact that remained to be returned to Babylon. The two princes took up their thrones without any turmoil or unrest,
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and at first it seemed like the old king's plan was about to usher in a new
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age of peace. But for a number of reasons, that peace wasn't to last.
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The reign of Ashurbanipal is without doubt the golden age of the Assyrian
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Empire. At the time of his reign, it was the largest empire that the world had ever seen, and its capital of Nineveh was
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probably the largest city on the planet. The king Ashurbanipal himself springs
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out of the historical sources as a fully formed character, full of his own preoccupations and obsessions.
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One of the most interesting aspects of his character is that he was possibly the first Assyrian king to be able to read.
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Up until this time, reading wasn't considered a particularly kingly activity. Kings had servants and scribes to do
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their reading for them, and rulers were supposed to take part in more manly pursuits like hunting and fighting. But Ashurbanipal hadn't been intended
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for the throne. Before being named the crown prince, he had been preparing for some kind of position in the temples, and this meant
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he was taught to read from a young age. It's something he was clearly quite
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proud of, as this inscription written by him attests.
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I, Ashurbanipal, understood the wisdom of Nabu, the god of learning, all the art of writing of every kind. I
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made myself the master of them all. I read the cunning tablets of Sumer and
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the dark Akkadian language which is difficult to rightly use. I took my pleasure in reading stones inscribed before the flood,
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such works as none of the kings who went before me had ever learnt. I wrote on tablets, checked and collated, and deposited within my palace for
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perusing and reading. Ashurbanipal's collection of clay
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tablets was something quite unprecedented in the world at the time.
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It was the first attempt to create a universal library, a place where all the
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books ever written could be kept. He wrote to cities and centers of
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learning all across the empire, requesting copies of every written work
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ever set in clay. Eventually, he would amass a collection
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of over 30,000 clay tablets. Most were observations of events and
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omens, texts detailing the behavior of certain peoples and animals, texts on the movements of heavenly bodies, the planets,
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and stars. But the library also contained dictionaries for the languages of Sumerian, Akkadian, and others, as well as
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religious texts, rituals, fables, prayers, and incantations, even comical satirical
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pieces of writing, as well as the great ancient mythology and poetry of
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Mesopotamia. Many of the traditional Mesopotamian stories and tales known today, among them the epic of Gilgamesh, have only survived
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into the modern day because they were included in Ashurbanipal's library.
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But Ashurbanipal would soon have to deal with the very real challenges of ruling
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the Assyrian Empire. Egypt, Assyria's newest imperial
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possession, was already in full rebellion, and so in the year 667 BC, Ashurbanipal
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marched the Assyrian army as far south as Thebes and sacked numerous Egyptian
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cities in classic Assyrian fashion. This campaign crushed the insurgency, but
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as usual, it only created more resistance in the long term.
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Rebellions sprang up once again the very next year, forcing him to march back to
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Egypt and stamp it out even harder. But despite his efforts, the Assyrians
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would never successfully integrate Egypt into their empire. At this time, another power on the opposite side of the empire
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began to become an increasingly painful thorn in the side of Assyria.
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These were the Elamite peoples of southern Iran.
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The Elamites were an ancient people. They had been instrumental in the fall
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of Sumerian society more than a millennium before, and since then had
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built a powerful and wealthy kingdom centered on the capital of Suza.
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The people of Elam had clashed with the Assyrians a number of times, and today
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their border is more or less in the same place as the modern border between Iraq
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and Iran. Ashurbanipal's father Esarhaddon had taken pains to exist peacefully with the people of Elam, and even allowed
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outbursts of violence on the border to go unpunished. Now, Elam was growing in confidence. Without much hope of defeating Assyria
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on the battlefield, they had settled for a similar tactic as the Egyptians in
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dealing with their powerful neighbor, supplying and arming rebel groups in Assyria, and causing as much trouble for them as
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they could without provoking an all-out war. But in the year 653 BC, it's thought that the Elamite king,
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a man named Teumann, received a secret message. This message was from the older brother of King Ashurbanipal, then ruling as the
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king of Babylon as their father had decreed, the man named Shamash-
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-shum-ukin. Shamash-shum-ukin had been dissatisfied with his lot in life for a long time now. Since their father's death 13 years
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before, he had ruled as king of Babylon while his brother ruled over the whole
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empire. He must have had a pretty good life, but he didn't feel all that powerful. In theory, he ruled over all of Babylonia,
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but in practice, most of his governors simply ignored him and considered Ashurbanipal to be their true king. Inscriptions show that Ashurbanipal
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would often dictate orders to him and would frequently meddle in the affairs of Babylon. His anger at this situation was clearly
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growing, and if he did send a message to Teumann, the king of Elam, we can imagine
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that it contained a clear proposition. I will help you invade Assyria, topple
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Ashurbanipal, and destroy your ancient rival, and in return I want to rule over Babylon as its only king.
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The Elamites were all too eager to accept.
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When the season of war came back around in the year 664, the Elamites launched a
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surprise attack. They swept down from the mountains and attacked the Assyrian’s southern territories.
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Ashurbanipal was enraged. He gathered his armies and marched down the rivers to
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face them. He successfully repelled their attack and chased their soldiers back into Elam.
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He defeated them in battle beside the river Ulay, close to their capital of Suza, and one of Ashurbanipal's inscriptions boasts
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about this victory, which is also immortalized in a series of carvings
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that were displayed on his palace walls. By the command of the gods Ashur and Marduk, I blocked up the Ulay River with
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their corpses and filled the plane of the city Suza with their bodies like water weeds. In the midst of his troops, I cut off the
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head of Teumann, the king of the land Elam. One remarkable carving even depicts the king Ashurbanipal
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relaxing in his gardens with his queen, surrounded by musicians and servants
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fanning him, bringing him drinks and food, and all the while the head of his
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conquered enemy Teumann hangs in the branches of a nearby tree.
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It's not clear whether Ashurbanipal suspected his brother's hand in the surprise attack. Either way,
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one year later, Shamash-shum-ukin revealed his true intentions.
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He rose his armies in rebellion against his brother, and declared the lands of Babylonia to be independent.
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This clearly shook King Ashurbanipal. We can almost hear the betrayal, the hurt,
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and the anger speaking directly from his official inscriptions. Shamash-shum-ukin,
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my unfaithful brother, for whom I performed many acts of kindness and whom I had installed as king of Babylon, I made and gave him everything that
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kingship calls for. I assembled soldiers, horses, and chariots, and placed them in
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his hands. I gave him more cities, fields, orchards, and people to live inside them than the father who had engendered me had
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commanded. He forgot these acts of kindness that I had done for him, and constantly sought out evil deeds.
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Aloud with his lips he was speaking friendship, but deep down his heart was scheming for murder. He lied to the citizens of Babylon who
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had been devoted to Assyria, servants who belonged to me, and he spoke words of
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deceit with them. But privately, Ashurbanipal was clearly afraid.
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He frequently wrote messages to his oracles and soothsayers, giving them
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questions that he wanted to ask the gods, and in these questions we get a
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remarkable sense for the uncertainties and doubts that plagued him during these
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dark days. Will the Elamite army gather, get organized, march, and fight with the men and army of Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria?
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His fears were soon realized, and the Elamite army, still stinging from their
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defeat the previous year, joined with his brother to fight him.
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Ashurbanipal responded by marching with his full force on the city of Babylon.
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His brother Shamash-shum-ukin was forced to retreat behind its mighty walls, and the Assyrians settled in for a siege.
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The siege of Babylon went on for four years. Conditions within the city of Babylon became horrific during this time.
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People began to starve and resort to cannibalism. When the city finally fell, the Assyrian soldiers poured over its walls and into
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its streets. Shamash-shum-ukin himself appears to have died in a fire, although it's not clear how it was
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started. The citizens of the city who had held out for so long under horrific conditions were cut down by the Assyrian
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soldiers, as Ashurbanipal's inscriptions recall.
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Those of them who fled before the murderous iron dagger, famine, want and
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flaming fire, and found a refuge; the net of the great gods, my lords, which cannot
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be eluded, brought them low. Not one escaped. Not one sinner slipped through my hands. As for those men and their vulgar mouths
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who uttered vulgarity against Ashur, my god, and plotted evil against me,
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I slit their tongues and brought them low. The rest of those living I destroyed, and their carved-up bodies I fed to dogs, to
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pigs, to wolves, to eagles, to birds of the heavens, to fishes of the deep.
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After all his father Esarhaddon's efforts to rebuild Babylon, Ashurbanipal
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had now turned it back into ruin.
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With his vengeance on Babylon complete, Ashurbanipal turned his attention to
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Elam. In the next year, he marched up into the mountains, but this time he would not simply punish
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Elam. This campaign was waged as a war of extermination, designed to utterly remove it as a political entity in its entirety.
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Carried by wounded rage, Ashurbanipal scattered the armies of Elam and rounded
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on its capital city of Suza. One Assyrian carving shows what happened
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next. It shows the city of Suza in the background. Flames are rising from its towers and
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pouring out the mouth of its gate. In the foreground, Assyrian soldiers are
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carrying off all kinds of loot, and on the walls and towers of Suza, more
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soldiers are steadily and meticulously going to work demolishing every building
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in the city brick by brick. Ashurbanipal, in one of his inscriptions, describes the
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destruction he ordered. Suza, the great holy city,
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abode of their gods, seat of their mysteries, I conquered.
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I entered its palaces, I opened their treasuries where silver and gold, goods
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and wealth were amassed. I destroyed the ziggurat of Suza. I smashed its shining copper horns. I reduced the temples of Elam to naught.
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Their gods and goddesses I scattered to the winds. The tombs of their ancient and recent kings I devastated.
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I exposed to the sun and I carried away their bones toward the land of Ashur. I devastated the provinces of Elam, and on their lands I sowed salt.
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The Assyrians had once more emerged victorious, their army undefeated, all challenges overcome,
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and now one of their oldest rivals utterly eradicated.
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The empire was at the height of its confidence, but in little over 30 years, its end would come,
2:24:47
and all that would be left would be a series of enormous smoking ruins
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crumbling into the desert sands.
2:25:01
It's in the final decade of his reign, perhaps around the year 640 BC, that King
2:25:08
Ashurbanipal commissioned the works of art that would stand as perhaps the
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defining and lasting legacy of his entire civilization.
2:25:19
These are the lion hunt reliefs of the northwest palace in Nineveh.
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At this time, a breed of lion known as the Asiatic lion roamed freely right
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across the Middle East. They are slightly smaller than their African counterparts, with a much shorter mane and a distinctive fold of skin
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running down their bellies. Although we think of them today as endangered animals to be protected, lions were a constant menace for the people of
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Assyria. They would often roam down from the hills and take away livestock, and they could be a very real danger to
2:26:03
the people. This letter, written by a panicking servant to his master who's away from the house on business, shows how
2:26:12
prevalent this danger could be. Tell my lord your servant Yakim-Addu sends the following message.
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A short time ago I wrote to my lord as follows; a lion was caught in the loft of
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a house in Akkaka. My lord should write me whether this lion should remain in that same loft until the arrival of my lord or whether I should have it brought to
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my lord, but letters from my lord were slow in coming, and the lion has been in the loft for five days. Although they threw him a dog and a pig, he refused to
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eat them. I was worrying; heaven forbid that this lion pine away. I became scared, but eventually I got the
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lion into a wooden cage and loaded it on a boat to have it brought to my lord.
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The kings of Assyria had hunted lions for centuries, and the killing of these
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creatures had taken on a symbolic meaning. For the kings of Assyria, the lion came to represent all the dangers that
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menaced their people, and by triumphing over a lion, they were shown to be
2:27:18
capable of protecting their people from all other dangers. In the early days, these hunts would take the form of expeditions out into the
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wilderness to find wild lions in the hills, but in the later years of the
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empire, lions were rounded up from the countryside and brought to the capital
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to be bred in captivity, as one inscription by the 9th century
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king Ashurnasirpal recounts. With my outstretched hand and my fierce
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heart, I captured 15 strong lions from the mountains and forests.
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I took away fifty lion cubs. I herded them into Kalhu and the
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palaces of my land into cages. I bred their cubs in great numbers.
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These lions could be hunted in more controlled performances
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in full view of all the city's inhabitants, and it's one of these incredible spectacles that the lion hunt reliefs
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portray. We can see the king in his chariot fighting with spear and bow. We can see the lions in their cages with
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a small person or child in a smaller cage above, tasked with the job of
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opening the cage door. We can see the soldiers penning in the lions with
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shields and spears, with trained dogs straining on their leashes.
2:28:48
We can imagine the thunder of the king's chariot as it rides around the arena, and
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the whistling of his arrows as they find their mark. These reliefs show the craft of the Assyrians at its most realistic, and
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demonstrate an art form that had matured over centuries. The immaculate details in
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the human figures in the embroidered clothes and the details of the chariot,
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even the fingernails and eyelashes of the figures are all realized in perfect
2:29:20
detail. But while the human figures are depicted formally with little or no
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emotion on their faces, it's these lions that carry almost a human expressiveness.
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As the arrows and spears strike them, the faces of the lions seem to cry out with
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human sorrow, and it can be tempting as a modern observer to see in that sorrow a distillation of the mood that must have
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been enveloping the empire in its final years as things began to crumble around
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it. These would be the last great pieces of art to ever be created in the empire of Assyria in the final years of its last
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great king. Within little more than three decades,
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the empire of Assyria would collapse, and all of its great cities would be
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abandoned to the sands.
2:30:37
As is always the case, there were multiple causes of the Assyrian collapse,
2:30:44
and the latest research suggests that one of these was something we've encountered a number of times throughout this series.
2:30:53
That's a rapid and dramatic climate shift.
2:30:58
In the south of Mesopotamia, what was then the lands of Babylon, the land is arid, broken only by the rivers and marshland,
2:31:07
while in the north there is a great deal of rainfall in the winter. This means that in the south, vast networks of irrigation canals have been necessary
2:31:18
since the earliest Sumerian days. But in the north, irrigation was less of
2:31:23
a concern, since the seasonal rains were able to water the crops. The last 200 years had been a time
2:31:33
of unusually high rainfall. But new studies of stalagmites in the
2:31:40
Kuna Ba caves of northern Iraq have suggested that around the year 675 BC, in
2:31:47
the final years of the reign of King Esarhaddon, this situation began to change.
2:31:55
Stalagmites are rock formations that form slowly as mineral deposits drip
2:32:00
down from the roofs of caves. This means that they grow outwards, leaving rings just like the rings of a tree.
2:32:10
Studying the chemical composition of these rings can tell us a lot about how the climate changed over the course of their formation,
2:32:19
and these stalagmites clearly show that there were two distinct phases in the
2:32:24
climate of the Assyrian age. The first was one of the wettest periods
2:32:30
of the whole 4,000-year span that the stalagmites show. During this time, Assyrian fields would have been thick with barley and wheat,
2:32:40
its grazing lands rich and capable of supporting huge herds of animals. But
2:32:46
this phase came to an end around 725 BC, just before King Ashurbanipal came to the
2:32:55
throne. This second period was marked by increasingly dry conditions. In fact, the region was soon gripped by a
2:33:04
mega drought. Even today with all our modern farming techniques,
2:33:12
crop productivity in northern Iraq is highly sensitive to small changes in
2:33:18
rainfall, and it's possible that a protracted period of drought may have acted to weaken the imperial center of Assyria.
2:33:27
There is some evidence that during the decades of drought, the people of the north began to dig irrigation canals of the kind more usually found in the dry
2:33:38
south, suggesting that the rains were becoming increasingly unreliable. But there's little evidence to be found
2:33:46
in historical texts, and no real mention of devastating droughts. After all, drought was one of the
2:33:54
problems that Assyrians had learned to deal with expertly.
2:34:00
Records show that the prices of grain and slaves remained relatively stable
2:34:05
throughout this period, meaning that the picture wasn't one of starvation or people dying in the streets. But it's still worth bearing in mind
2:34:15
that the Assyrian state was now under pressure from its environment and were suddenly put at an economic disadvantage to their southern neighbors.
2:34:25
Whether this was a major factor in their downfall is still subject to lively
2:34:31
debate, but I think another factor is perhaps the most important. Assyria was perhaps the first true
2:34:40
military superpower. Their military was easily the most powerful in the region, a
2:34:45
hammer that crushed all opposition, but their heavy-handed approach to
2:34:50
maintaining their empire made them incredibly unpopular.
2:34:56
This meant their subject peoples were constantly on the verge of rebellion, and
2:35:01
whenever this happened, the Assyrians did the only thing they knew how;
2:35:06
crush the rebellions even harder and make themselves even more hated.
2:35:13
Eventually, they were left with no other option but the kind of thing Ashurbanipal did to the lands of Elam, to crush their enemies so ruthlessly
2:35:25
that they simply ceased to exist. But nature abhors a vacuum, and beyond
2:35:32
the blackened and smoking lands of Elam, another power had been building for
2:35:37
centuries, just waiting for their opportunity to expand, an opportunity that the Assyrians had just dropped right into their laps.
2:35:49
These were the people of Medea, who were called the Medes.
2:36:00
The Medes were an ancient Iranian people who spoke the Medean language and lived
2:36:05
in the region of northern and western Iran. For centuries now, the powerful Elamites had been their rivals and kept their
2:36:15
ambitions in check, but with the Elamites now virtually eradicated, that was no longer the case. In the next decades, the Medeans expanded
2:36:27
rapidly and moved to occupy the lands of Elam, gathering its scattered and angry peoples beneath its banner.
2:36:37
Soon they were a formidable force, and they were all animated with a common
2:36:42
purpose; a burning hatred for the Assyrian Empire and everything it stood
2:36:47
for. All they would need was an opening, and that opening would come in the form of the death of the great king
2:36:57
Ashurbanipal.
2:37:06
For someone whose early life was so meticulously recorded and who professed
2:37:11
his love of literature and writing, the final 12 years of Ashurbanipal's
2:37:17
reign are a surprising mystery. We don't actually know how he died or
2:37:24
really how he spent the last decade of his life. It's possible that the king was struck with a period of illness,
2:37:32
or like his father, he fell to the family tendency for depression and paranoia.
2:37:40
One inscription, possibly the last ever written by Assyria's last great king,
2:37:47
does seem to represent a kind of lament, a wail of pain for the misfortunes that
2:37:53
have befallen him. It stands out among all the boasting and bluster of the Assyrian kings as a true moment of vulnerability and suffering
2:38:04
speaking up to us through the ages.
2:38:11
I did well unto god and man, to dead and living.
2:38:16
Why have sickness and misery befallen me? I cannot do away with the strife in my
2:38:24
country and the dissensions in my family. Disturbing scandals oppress me always.
2:38:31
Illness of mind and flesh bow me down. With cries of woe, I bring my days to an end.
2:38:40
On the day of the city god, the day of the festival, I am wretched. Death is seizing hold upon me and bears
2:38:49
me down. With lamentation and mourning, I wail day
2:38:55
and night. I groan oh, god, grant even to one who is impious
2:39:02
that he may see the light.
2:39:09
Whatever the cause, in the year 639 BC, the chronicles that
2:39:15
had until then kept detailed records of the life of the king suddenly stop.
2:39:21
For this period, virtually the only sources we have to work from are the Bible and the writings of Herodotus, who compiled his histories 200 years later,
2:39:34
and for whom Mesopotamia was a distant and mysterious land.
2:39:40
But one thing is clear; after the death of Ashurbanipal, chaos
2:39:45
began to reign in Assyria. There was fighting in the streets, and
2:39:50
all its provinces rose up in rebellion. Babylon once more declared independence, and civil war split the empire.
2:40:02
In the year 616 BC, a series of Babylonian chronicles begins,
2:40:08
and they tell the story of the final collapse of Assyrian society.
2:40:14
The great instigators of this downfall would be the people who the Assyrians
2:40:19
had so inadvertently helped. These were their enemies waiting and
2:40:25
watching in the hills, the people of Medea.
2:40:30
In a startling surprise attack, the Medean armies marched down through the foothills of the Zagros mountains and invaded the lands of Assyria.
2:40:41
First, they marched to the great ancient capital of Ashur, birthplace of the
2:40:47
Assyrian nation and the home of its god. The Babylonian chronicles record what
2:40:53
happened next. He made an attack on the town and
2:40:58
destroyed the city wall. He inflicted a terrible massacre upon the greater part of the people, plundering it and carrying off prisoners
2:41:08
from it. This victory must have rocked the ancient world.
2:41:15
This was the first time in centuries that a city of the Assyrian heartlands
2:41:20
had been captured and sacked, and it must have sent a clear message to all of its
2:41:26
enemies; the empire of Assyria was weak, and with enough of a push, perhaps it could even be toppled.
2:41:35
One man heard this message loud and clear. He was one of the new kings of the independent Babylon who had big plans
2:41:45
for the ancient city he ruled, and his name was Nabo-polassar.
2:41:56
Nabo-polassar was a curious character. We don't know anything about his origins,
2:42:02
but he refers to himself in his inscriptions using the phrase ‘mar la
2:42:08
mammana’, or the son of a nobody. No other Mesopotamian king had ever
2:42:14
described himself in this way, and it shows that in the social upheaval of
2:42:20
this period of chaos, some of the power of the nobility was being eroded, and men
2:42:26
were rising from the ranks of the common people to rule.
2:42:31
When he heard about the Medean victory at Ashur, Nabo-polassar must have been
2:42:37
overjoyed. He had spent years fortifying his borders, strengthening them for a conflict with
2:42:45
Assyria that he knew must be around the corner. But now, he began to dream of even bigger things. He gathered his armies and
2:42:56
marched to Ashur as fast as he could to join forces with the Medes.
2:43:02
The Babylonian armies arrived too late for the fighting, but in the ruins of the
2:43:08
Assyrian city of Ashur, they formalized their alliance.
2:43:13
The Medean king Cyaraxes married his daughter Amytis to the
2:43:18
Babylonian prince Nabu-kudurri-Usur, and they joined forces for war.
2:43:26
This is the situation that had been the Assyrian nightmare for centuries,
2:43:31
and it had finally come to pass. Its enemies had united against it at its
2:43:38
moment of greatest weakness. For the rest of that year, the joint Medean and Babylonian forces pushed
2:43:47
north up the river Euphrates, but they found that even a wounded lion
2:43:54
can still bite. The Assyrian army, even in its weakened state, was still a formidable force and made them pay for every inch of land.
2:44:06
It wasn't until the year 612 BC, a full two years after the invasion had
2:44:12
begun, that the Medean army reached the walls of Assyria's greatest city,
2:44:18
the capital of Nineveh.
2:44:24
We can only imagine how that army must have felt, looking out over that great city, the capital of the world, with its
2:44:32
towering ziggurat, its glorious palaces, and its double line of defensive walls.
2:44:39
The Babylonian chronicles record what happened next. Cyaxeres
2:44:47
ferried across the river and marched upstream on the embankment of the Tigris,
2:44:53
and pitched camp against Nineveh. From the month Simanu till the month Abu, three battles were fought.
2:45:01
Then they made a great attack against the city.
2:45:06
We can see evidence of the fierce battle that unfolded here, left in the archaeological record. Excavations in Nineveh's southeastern
2:45:17
gate, the Halzi Gate, have found the ground here littered with skeletons
2:45:22
lying one on top of another on the cobbled pavement. The bodies of horses
2:45:28
also litter this gateway, along with countless iron spearheads and arrows.
2:45:35
All of them are lying exactly where they fell, in the last ditch defense of the city over 2,600 years ago.
2:45:46
The Babylonian chronicles recall the last desperate attempts of the defenders.
2:45:55
In the month of Abu, the city was seized, and a great defeat inflicted on the
2:46:00
entire population. On that day, Sin-shar-ishkun, the king of
2:46:05
Assyria, fled. The great spoil of the city and the temple they carried off. Many prisoners of the city, beyond
2:46:14
counting, they carried away. They turned the city into ruined hills and heaps of debris.
2:46:24
The destruction of Nineveh was recorded by Hebrew scholars of the time with an
2:46:30
understandable delight. One vivid account has survived in the
2:46:36
Hebrew Bible in a chapter known as the Book of Nahum,
2:46:41
and in these lines we can almost hear the sound and fury of the battle as the
2:46:47
soldiers of Medea and Babylon rampaged through the streets of Nineveh.
2:46:58
Chariots rush madly in the streets. They jostle one against another. They run to and fro like the lightnings. The shield of his mighty men is made red,
2:47:09
and the valiant men are in scarlet. Chariots of fire, of steel, in this day of
2:47:14
his preparation and the cypress spears are made to quiver. Behold, I am against thee, said the lord of
2:47:23
hosts, and I will burn her chariots in the smoke, and the sword shall devour thy young lions. I will
2:47:30
cut off thy prey from the earth, and the voice of thy messenger shall no more be heard.
2:47:46
Woe to the bloody city. It is full of lies. The horsemen charging and the flashing sword and the glittering spear, and a multitude of slain, and a heap of carcasses. There is no end of the corpses, and they stumble upon their corpses. All thy fortresses shall be like fig
2:47:56
trees with the first ripe figs. If they be shaken, they fall into the mouth of the eater.
2:48:11
For Nahum, the destruction of Nineveh was a moral judgment on an empire that had wrought
2:48:17
such suffering on the lands of others.
2:48:26
The lord is a jealous and avenging god. The lord avengeth and is full of wrath.
2:48:34
The lord taketh vengeance on his adversaries and he reserveth wrath for
2:48:40
his enemies. The lord has given commandment concerning thee, that no more of thy name be sown,
2:48:51
for thou art become worthless. Behold, the gates of thy land are set
2:48:57
wide open unto thine enemies. The fire hath devoured thy bars.
2:49:04
Oh, king of Syria, thy people are scattered upon the mountains and there is none to gather them.
2:49:12
There is no assuaging of thy hurt. Thy wound is grievous.
2:49:18
All that hear the report of thee, clap the hands over thee,
2:49:23
for upon whom has not thy wickedness past continually?
2:49:35
By the end of the year 612 BC, the three great capitals of Assyria,
2:49:41
Ashur, the religious heart, Nineveh, the administrative center, and Nimrud, the military capital, all lay in ruins.
2:49:56
The Medes made no attempt to occupy them, and instead set about destroying the
2:50:02
cities with the same viciousness that the Assyrians had once reserved for the
2:50:07
cities of Elam. The Assyrian king was killed in the battle, and one general named Ashur-Uballit
2:50:17
seems to have held out a brave resistance to the invaders, gathering what remained of the Assyrian army around him.
2:50:25
These were mostly troops brought back from Egypt who had arrived too late for
2:50:30
the defense of Nineveh, but they must have known that it was hopeless. They shut themselves up in the town of
2:50:38
Harran, and I wonder whether any of them remembered that this was the place where a century before, that woman had given
2:50:47
her prophecy of doom for the empire of Assyria. In 610 BC, two years after the sacking of Nineveh,
2:50:56
the Medean armies finally marched on Harran and crushed what remained of
2:51:01
Assyrian resistance. The general Ashur-Uballit
2:51:06
faded from history, and the empire of Assyria passed into dust.
2:51:12
The Babylonian king Nabo-polassar wrote the following inscriptions celebrating
2:51:19
the destruction of his great enemy. As for the Assyrians, who had ruled over the land of Akkad
2:51:28
because of the hatred of the gods and had made the people of the land suffer under its heavy yoke, I,
2:51:35
the weak and powerless one who constantly seeks out the lord of lords Marduk, with the powerful strength of the gods
2:51:42
Nabu and Marduk, my lords, I barred their feet from the land of Akkad and had the
2:51:48
Babylonians cast off their yoke.
2:51:54
As he grew older, Nabo-polassar increasingly relied on his son, the
2:51:59
prince Nabu-kudurri-Usur, who we know by the biblical name
2:52:05
Nebuchadnezzer. His reign would begin the line of Babylonian kings which would usher in the next phase of history in this region,
2:52:16
but the great cities of Assyria would never be reoccupied.
2:52:22
The ruins of Nineveh would have stood for some time as smoking heaps of
2:52:28
blackened rubble, its streets carpeted with bodies,
2:52:33
but slowly the wind-blown desert sands would have rolled over them.
2:52:38
Its walls and houses were covered in dust and earth.
2:52:44
The skeletons lying in its streets were buried by the sands.
2:52:49
The great library of the king Ashurbanipal was also buried.
2:52:54
In a twist of ironic fate, it was the destruction of Nineveh that ensured that
2:53:00
its texts would survive. The fires that tore through the city
2:53:05
baked the clay, hardening it, and meaning that the writing on these tablets was just as sharp on the day they were unearthed by
2:53:14
archaeologists as the day an Assyrian scribe wrote them twenty-six
2:53:19
centuries in the past. The people who destroyed Nineveh
2:53:25
celebrated by rampaging through the palaces of Ashurbanipal, Esarhaddon, and
2:53:31
Sennacherib. They looted them of all their valuables,
2:53:36
and celebrated by defacing some of the carvings that lined the palace walls.
2:53:43
They struck particularly at the carved faces of the Assyrian kings,
2:53:49
cracking the soft alabaster, and reveling in their destruction.
2:53:54
But of all the carvings, those depicting the lion hunt remained untouched.
2:54:00
The sorrowful expressions of those hunted lions would have stared out with their sad eyes over the abandoned halls, once so full of life,
2:54:12
as the days and months rolled by. Ash and dust soon filled the rooms. Eventually, the roof beams rotted and
2:54:24
collapsed. Grasses would have begun to grow in the halls of the Assyrian kings. Birds and wild foxes would have made
2:54:34
their homes among the ruins, and bluish tamarisk bushes would have
2:54:39
soon filled up the corridors. Hundreds of years later, when the Greek
2:54:45
writer Xenophon marched past with his 10,000 Greeks, fleeing from the Persian army that pursued them, the people who lived in
2:54:54
this region would not even remember the names of the people who had built this
2:54:59
city. They would say only that it might have been the Medes and that for some reason,
2:55:06
the gods had punished them and turned their cities into a mound of ruins.
2:55:17
Writing in the 1850s, the Victorian archaeologist Austen Henry
2:55:23
Layard visited the ruins of Nineveh and wrote the following account
2:55:28
of the sight of these desolate ruins.
2:55:34
During a short stay in this town, we visited the great ruins on the east bank
2:55:39
of the river, which have been generally believed to be the remains of Nineveh.
2:55:45
From the summit of an artificial eminence, we looked down upon a broad plain separated from us by the river.
2:55:53
A line of lofty mounds bounded it to the east, and one of a pyramidical form rose
2:56:00
high above the rest. Its position rendered its identification easy; this was the pyramid which Xenophon had
2:56:08
described, and near which the 10,000 had encamped. The ruins around it were those which the Greek generals saw 22 centuries before,
2:56:20
and which were, even then, the remains of an ancient city. Layard was struck with the haunting
2:56:29
beauty of these empty places, where the ruins hardly even seemed to bear the
2:56:35
marks of human construction. Were the traveler to cross the Euphrates and seek for such ruins in Mesopotamia
2:56:45
as he had left behind him in Asia Minor or Syria, his search would be in vain. The graceful column rising above the thick foliage of
2:56:55
tile myrtle, ilex, and oleander, the gradines of the amphitheater covering a gentle
2:57:02
slope and overlooking the dark blue water of a lake. None of this can be found. All are replaced by the stern, shapeless
2:57:12
mound rising like a hill from the scorched plain, the fragments of pottery,
2:57:18
and the stupendous mass of brickwork occasionally laid bare
2:57:23
by the winter rains.
2:57:30
Layard, like Xenophon more than two millennia before, was struck by the
2:57:36
immensity of what these ruins represented, their silent testimony to
2:57:41
the vast gulf of time that separates their time from ours.
2:57:50
The scene around is worthy of the ruin he is contemplating.
2:57:56
Desolation meets desolation. A feeling of awe succeeds to wonder. There is nothing to relieve the mind, to lead
2:58:08
to hope, or to tell of what has gone by. These huge mounds of Assyria made a
2:58:13
deeper impression upon me, gave rise to more serious thoughts and more earnest reflection than all the temples of Balbec and the theatres of
2:58:24
Ionia.
2:58:29
It's only through the painstaking and meticulous work of generations of
2:58:34
scholars that the texts of the ancient Assyrians have been slowly deciphered and translated,
2:58:42
and their voices have once more been allowed to speak to us from the clay,
2:58:47
breaking the silence of millennia.
2:58:55
I want to end the episode with one of these voices. It's a mysterious poem written by an unknown author in the
2:59:05
language of Akkadian, and it's known as The Lament for a City.
2:59:12
While these kinds of sorrowful laments were common in the earlier language of Sumerian, they're less well-known in the Assyrian age.
2:59:21
The poem speaks in the voice of a goddess whose city has been destroyed,
2:59:27
and who now wanders the bare and level deserts alone, mourning for the place that she once called home.
2:59:36
This poem, broken and fragmentary, full of gaps and silences, captures what
2:59:43
must have been the feeling of loss felt in those days
2:59:49
by all the peoples of Assyria. As you listen, imagine what it would feel
2:59:54
like to live in the rich heart of the world, knowing that the final days of the
3:00:00
empire stretched out before you. Imagine how it would feel to live in the
3:00:06
center of an empire that had caused so much suffering to others as the other
3:00:12
peoples of the world finally gathered around you and demanded their revenge. Imagine how it would feel to watch the
3:00:21
grand painted halls covered in carved alabaster, the gardens overflowing with
3:00:27
rare trees and flowers, the libraries full of books and stories,
3:00:33
the city full of your memories of childhood, your family and loved ones, all of it
3:00:41
going up in flames and then covered finally in the drifting dust and sand of
3:00:49
the desert. Who stood where I stand to cry out, to cry out like a helpless one on her
3:00:58
bed? Among the established cities, my city has been smashed. Among the established populace, my man
3:01:07
has gone away. Among the gods residing there, I too have surely fled. My lost lamb cries out in the land of
3:01:17
the enemy. My lamb is bleating. My sheep and her lamb, they have been taken away. When my sheep crossed the river, she
3:01:25
abandoned her lamb on the bank. My birds, all of them with their wings cut off. Where is my house that I used to dwell
3:01:36
in?
3:01:45
Thank you once again for listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast.
3:01:50
I'd like to thank my voice actors for this episode; Mustafa Raee, Peter Walters,
3:01:56
Lachlan Lucas, Carson Wishart, Nick Denton, Rhy Brignell, and Annie Kelly.
3:02:03
Many thanks to the assyriologist Dr. Ellie Bennett at the University of Helsinki for acting as a special consultant on this episode.
3:02:14
Reading the ancient Greek of Xenophon's Anabasis was Pavlos Kapralos, and reading
3:02:20
the Book of Nahum in Hebrew was Rabbi Yaakov Wolbe, who hosts the Jewish
3:02:26
History Podcast. For the last few months, the team behind Fall of Civilizations has been working on a sister project which is now being
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released. It's called Vaccine. Vaccine is a podcast that tells the
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story of the global fight against smallpox through the ages, from its earliest history as a folk demon through the history of its treatment along the
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Silk Road and in the libraries of Baghdad, up to its eradication by a global effort in the 1960s.
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It's the story of human triumph and tragedy, and explores the debates that
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raged throughout history around power and public health, and what they can teach us today. Vaccine is available now on all
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podcasting platforms, and to YouTube as a video series today.
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I love to hear your thoughts and responses on Twitter, so please come and tell me what you thought. You can follow me at @PaulMMCooper, and
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if you'd like updates about the podcast, announcements about new episodes, as well as images, maps, and reading suggestions, you can follow the podcast at Fall_of_
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Civ_Pod with underscores separating the words. If you enjoyed this episode, you might also enjoy a novel I wrote, titled All
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Our Broken Idols. It's a story set during the time of King Ashurbanipal in the
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final days of the Assyrian Empire, and during the fall of Mosul in 2014.
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It's available from all bookstores today. This podcast can only keep going with the support of our generous subscribers
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Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

Postby admin » Sun Dec 18, 2022 2:20 am

The $350 Million Haul Of Stolen Medieval Art Found In Texas
The Liberators
Perspective
Nov 11, 2021

A tiny Texas town. $350 million worth of medieval treasure. The discovery is just the beginning.

Spoils Off War: Recovering Stolen Art | The Liberators (Full Documentary)



Transcript

0:14
so when did you become mayor of white right texas eight of 1984
0:21
and aided for 30 years did you know the meadow family oh yeah i
0:27
knew all of the sisters the him the uncles the son the nephew the whole
0:33
bunch and had you seen the treasures before this whole crazy story broke no i i
0:39
didn't in fact no one knew i was coming in from work and i seen all these cameras and
0:46
pictures and people running all over town they said they waiting on you to come and i said what
0:51
they said they just found the treasure in town i said what what do you mean treasure
0:59
an astonishing turn today in a trail that leads from europe in the final days of world war ii to a small desolate
1:06
texas town near the oklahoma border and perhaps to a treasure trove of masterpieces
1:12
[Music]
1:24
[Music]
2:12
[Music]
2:30
my name is willy corte and what i've been doing for a living for the last 30 years is
2:36
recover stolen art klaus goldman told me that at the end of world war ii
2:42
half of the treasure disappeared during the occupation by the americans and that he had some documents and what
2:48
i was interested to have a look at it and could possibly research more about this story
2:54
i mean the cued limb book treasures of course are you know tremendous religious historical value
3:00
it's not just another painting you know or another museum's piece it is something that has a history of over a
3:06
thousand years and and and um i couldn't think of any any other case
3:12
that i could ever pursue you know for the rest of my life that would have that kind of significance
3:21
the treasure was known to me because i'd visited kweilenberg as a graduate
3:26
student but knowing that parts of it had been lost during the war many of the earliest objects in the
3:33
treasure a wonderful ivory comb that is very exotic and its carving almost took
3:39
on a reliquary and holy status at a very early date once they arrived in quedlenberg these
3:46
objects took on their own beauty and life and sanctity there's a
3:52
story from a saints life where a famous autonian woman hathamoda had one
4:00
of these hanging over her bed and there was a miracle associated with it so they
4:05
were seen as almost miraculous stuff and they were things that to some extent in the private possession of these queens
4:11
these princesses etc they're really very very precious objects most books are are
4:17
composite objects they comprise all kinds of different materials like textiles and wood and ivory and
4:25
parchment and obviously medieval manuscripts are a very special category that can involve
4:31
you know precious stones and gold and metals but when they have these fantastic treasure bindings on them the
4:38
books can be difficult to handle safely in a way that preserves both the cover and the illuminations inside these are
4:45
medieval manuscripts are often extraordinary works of art
4:55
[Music]
5:13
my father was in a precious metal business at the end of the war when he had to flee from dresden on the soviet
5:21
occupation he hid a good deal of gold and silver before he he fled so
5:30
once german reunification takes place we could go back and dig up the
5:38
treasures i grew up with with the idea that
5:43
the family has a treasure in a place that is
5:50
inaccessible and one day we should be able to go there and
5:55
and recover it and i actually went to east germany to recover the treasure but
6:02
but it was gone well this is the
6:08
national record center in siouxland maryland and at the time when i did the kudlenberg research it also
6:14
had a reading room for the national archives and the military records which were the ones that were most relevant for my
6:21
research were actually in this building so this is where i did all the essential research on the quedlinberg case
6:29
the job that i initially had from klaus goldman was to go through the records of
6:34
the u.s military government pertaining to the knowledge in those documents as far
6:41
as the fate of these missing museums because they had evacuated pretty much everything
6:48
when i started the research in 86 we still had a full-blown east germany
6:54
so i i didn't know what what records existed in cretelenburg
7:00
and and the only place i could go to was the national archives and do the research on the unit that was in
7:06
queensland work at the time and from there try to find out who the thief or the thieves could have been
7:18
i needed and received the help of klaus goldman who then introduced me to bill hornan at the new york times
7:26
well bill holland from the new york times initially was rather skeptical of the whole story but i think once he had
7:32
accepted it as a credible story he got very excited about it and
7:37
we worked very closely together it was really a very productive i think
7:43
type of sort of secret collaboration for both of us and and i think we we developed a very
7:49
sort of friendly type of cooperation so i had to go back to washington and we
7:56
document and sit hours and hours in the archives for weeks and weeks things like the cuddling book treasures
8:03
works of art are usually stolen by officers
8:09
because they had privileged access to places you know if if there was a castle
8:14
full of artworks they are the ones who could go in they are the ones who had the opportunity to
8:19
uh you know to pick out the pieces and and and they wouldn't be seriously questioned if they would walk out with
8:26
something because i mean they could be taking it to you know higher headquarters or whatever what i was
8:32
looking for was information pertaining to the discovery of valuables in or around
8:40
cuddling work [Music]
8:49
i had been told at the time that the city moved its most valuable possessions
8:55
into this cave i was looking for some information in
9:01
the military documents that reported the discovery of the cave and to find proof
9:08
that the americans had discovered the cave and secondly find some details on the particular unit smaller unit
9:16
that either had discovered it reported it guarded it or whatsoever and i read
9:22
like documents like this and i think it's time to you know turn the page
9:28
and then somehow something tells me are you sure you read everything carefully
9:33
then you have to read the whole thing again so so it's it's very time consuming
9:39
finally i found this entry for april the 20th 1945 cave at and then
9:48
coordinates are given big room statues and crates two rooms in upper level oil
9:53
paintings and records fourth squadron once i had these coordinates i could
9:58
then locate the specific place that these coordinates referred to and that
10:04
indeed was right there where the cave was in kwedlenburg once i'm in the archives
10:11
and i have a question in front of me and and it doesn't go very well you know
10:19
i know there must be something somewhere i have a tendency to not give up easily and and
10:25
and that kind of an attitude i had at the time where i at least want to find out who was in kwetlenburg
10:37
[Music]
10:50
soldiers sailors and airmen of the allied expeditionary force
10:56
you are about to embark upon the great crusade [Music]
11:03
the countryside is peaceful green rolling very lazy looking in general there's a very neat little farm off to
11:09
the left with neat barns haystacks that look like a bread pan full of hot ponds or toadstool patch
11:16
on the approach from the rear one finds that that sweet smelling haystack stinks with a jerry anti-tank gun inside
11:22
well the problem is solved fire incendiary at the haystack then we have roasted gerry in about 20 minutes
11:29
the tradition began um years in september
11:37
in 1942 the english american started to destroy
11:42
german towns the his first town was leaving
11:53
borderlands [Music]
12:08
a
12:17
[Music]
12:28
[Music]
12:48
[Music] b [Music]
12:59
when circle has inside that expansion folded their shots then
13:04
[Music]
13:11
when american bombardment of germany began in about 1943 himmler who'd fallen in love with them
13:17
had them uh secreted in this cave didn't himmler think that he was the reincarnation of
13:24
some past german yes he did uh he was quite a screwball and believed
13:30
that he was a reincarnation of heinrich the first
13:35
she said the american came after the world war no they came
13:42
to finish the war and my native town is on the elk and
13:48
from the west the american conquered it they came to tangamwinde in the night and
13:56
the house of my parents is on the town wall they needed this house
14:03
to look for german soldiers and
14:08
therefore was a machine gun in our room so they were sitting on the
14:13
floor and they read a newspaper and i write whose word is that and that was
14:19
the news on 13th of april 45 [Music]
14:26
two years after the end of the second world war we had to learn that our
14:33
own soldiers had done criminality at the top criminality other
14:41
muslim land of the adults
14:46
the list of things stolen by the nazis is as broad as anyone can imagine if it had monetary value or historic value it
14:52
was stolen if it wasn't destroyed beforehand the monuments officers are there to protect it regardless of what country it
14:58
came from including things that belong to germany their view was dispassionate in that
15:04
regard despite having very strong passions about the horrific war crimes that they were also witness
15:11
to here you have this conundrum of the united states government being on
15:18
the side of the hated ss the most brutal organization
15:25
uh hitler's nazi germany was not a friendly attitude towards germany and the germans right at the end
15:32
of the war you will not be friendly you will be aloof watchful and suspicious every german is a
15:39
potential source of trouble therefore there must be no fraternization with any of the german
15:45
people looting spoils of war was generally accepted usually these
15:52
units were stationed in larger buildings outside cities so they were often castles and estates and so forth
15:59
i sent home the second book it has a hammered gold cover with some 80 jewels and laid in it please store it most
16:06
carefully for me as it is very valuable in the history of warfare
16:11
taking of spoils of war was a commonly accepted practice in fact armies sometimes paid their soldiers by
16:17
allowing them to take the things that they could walk away with that's what makes world war ii such a demarcation
16:23
line with how wars have been fought in the past that you had the western allies
16:28
through general eisenhower's orders stipulate that this policy was going to
16:34
be different than how things have worked in the past these works of art and cultural treasures were not going to be taken and in fact an enormous amount of
16:41
resources were going to be put into place to try and identify who the rightful owners were and get them back
16:47
the first thing they did they go into the basement and see what's in the wine cellar after the cognac and the red wine is gone then
16:54
they go upstairs and they picked out something which they took home from for mother as a souvenir
17:00
and and it was one piece now joe you know obviously wanted to take more than just
17:05
one souvenir from mother he wasn't a different devil we'll imagine people going into quindlenburg which was not
17:10
damaged by the war and the primary draw of people going into the church
17:16
are these great relics that are gone stolen and even worse by american forces
17:21
but it brings shame on the american army and soldiers that one soldier
17:27
would choose to do something like that which is why the soldiers that were able to be identified right at the end of the war were so severely punished was to
17:34
send the message you know this isn't going to be tolerated our cultural treasures our heritage as a civilization
17:40
that defines who we are is one of the reasons they were fighting so the fact that one of these soldiers
17:47
would have stolen stuff from so many other millions of troops were risking lives to try and protect as part of
17:53
their overall mission is disrespectful and offensive to every one of the troops that served and in
17:59
particular those that didn't come home because they're buried in europe
18:04
[Music] i'm perfectly happy that the book got home
18:10
it is a very valuable thing so care for it there's one more on the way somewhat like it
18:16
also a chest at the same time except the chest has a bunch of ivory and lay in it
18:21
life here is most boring nothing to do at all all the high rank takes all the passes
18:26
to paris to brussels to antwerp to italy to switzerland
18:32
we just sit here in the woods going nuts slowly
18:38
you should know that during the cold war we had no real chance to speak with
18:44
the soviet union or with the united states of america or great
18:51
britain or france about the returning of treasures which were stolen during the
18:57
war and i believe personally i believe also the gdr government had no interest no
19:04
interest [Music]
19:12
the folks of kwedlenberg complained at the end of the war that numerous pieces
19:17
were missing ever since the americans were in town so there was this original list that i
19:24
had of the the pieces that were missing from puedlin book you have to keep in mind when i did the research
19:30
i couldn't get any research done in cretelenburg which was east germany
19:36
one of the reasons why the church was trying to keep a low profile because they feared
19:43
that the government would remove the remaining pieces and put them
19:48
in a museum the church was always fearful that they would lose the remaining
19:54
pieces in the beginning it was very risky for everybody my family and me we were observed for
20:02
several months around our house we had cars with
20:07
officials of the secret service of the gdr and the people who came to me
20:14
were controlled by them and i i found also uh
20:21
in my file of the secretary that they had a lot of people who
20:28
were responsible to deliver information about my
20:33
private life my contacts and also my all my activities
20:41
i came home from school by bus and my boys 14 and 10 were still sitting in front of
20:47
the television and i said well what are you doing here why aren't you
20:52
in bed and george my my other son said well the border is open
20:58
so they were sitting and watching this and i was sitting and watching this i couldn't really believe it
21:04
because you you weren't prepared for that that it went so that that it went so fast it
21:10
went really too fast it was my official job to check
21:16
where are our objects of this museum therefore i had to check
21:22
what really happened at the end of the war i found that many many published stories
21:30
are pure lies and now it was an open question
21:37
where can it be then so i tried to puzzle it together from
21:44
the records in the archives unfortunately those records were not maintained these records don't come with
21:51
with rosters so i still didn't know you know who served at that time
21:58
in which unit the place to go to for personnel related information
22:04
is not in washington business in lewis so i went to saint louis with the hope
22:10
of finding the rosters for these units i couldn't just call them up i didn't
22:16
say listen do you know anything about the quellenberg pressure and what happened to them because i never knew who i was talking
22:23
to i could have called up one of the thieves that was before the internet
22:29
anything i wanted to find out i had to call people up i had to send them faxes
22:35
i had to drive because i didn't have the money for an airplane ticket so i drove down
22:41
there and and slept in my car
22:46
and come back empty-handed this was my first contact with willie in this case and and he was driven
22:53
he drove me he's very good at getting people to do what he wants he was passionate about
23:00
solving this case it became pretty time consuming and pretty
23:05
pretty frustrating and i'm not sure how much i much longer i could have continued if
23:11
that samuel gospel wouldn't have shown up
23:17
[Music]
23:24
it had been a 10-year long effort of joe tom meadors brothers and sister
23:30
to sell this material and to find a buyer for it they've showed these things
23:36
to 10 private dealers and also christie's the art auction house and christie's didn't think it was necessary
23:43
to alert the german government it is it is outrageous in my view but that is their opinion and
23:51
uh so after having kept these treasures two of the most valuable of them the manuscripts for nearly half a year
24:00
uh ins and and determining beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was stolen property what did they do did they do
24:06
what you and i would do which is call the police or at least notify the germans as you as you suggested no they
24:12
didn't they surreptitiously returned them to the presumptive thief
24:20
s-a-m-u-h-e-l samuel so it's spelled in an odd way but that's but that's just
24:27
one page of it and it's just wonderful a later carolingian
24:32
gospel book so each gospel matthew mark luke and john is has a preface
24:38
of the evangelist sitting there writing his gospels the world is small when it
24:43
comes to things like this because there are only so many specialists whose opinions might matter if a family
24:50
is trying to sell or get an appraisal of a an illuminated
24:56
medieval manuscript for example not to speak of one as valuable
25:02
as the gospels or the other works that were part of the quinlan work treasures
25:07
the price tag has been put on them they are said to be worth more than 200 million dollars they
25:14
were said to be worth more than a van gogh painting and they're just extraordinarily valuable my wife uh who's a religious
25:21
person um and i think that i'm you know a person sort of lacking faith i said
25:27
listen don't worry about my my faith
25:33
i think i'm i'm clearly a person of faith because certain things happened along
25:39
the way in the quentin brook case that were highly unexpected
25:44
after the samuel gospels had reappeared i was going to go to see mr falter at
25:51
h.p krause to whom the samuel gospels had had been offered
25:58
and i wanted to have a witness with me because mr falter could have told me
26:03
anything and afterwards could have denied everything bill honan had heard about the rumors of
26:10
reappearance of the quedlinburg treasures and he referred willie corte to me so willie
26:16
searched for the treasures and i tried to make sure that no mistakes were made and that a legal claim could be brought
26:22
if he found them i went back to folder uh and said listen is there anything else you can tell me then i guess falter
26:30
thought well i mean the story's over so there's nothing for me to gain or lose anymore he
26:36
gave me a copy of the letter that he had received from the bank offering him
26:42
the two manuscripts of course it was anonymous so i didn't know from whom the letter came and then falter helped me
26:48
further by opening in the atlas with a map of texas and then putting a pencil
26:55
underneath the name of white right i got on the next plane and flew to
27:01
dallas drove into white right
27:10
[Music] i stood in front of the bank and the
27:16
question was how do i go into a bank and and say listen i'm looking for the quinlan book treasure
27:22
they told me i have to go to denison so i drove to denison
27:28
we were up in john farley's office one afternoon making some phone calls and
27:34
the secretary came up and said you have some visitors and
27:39
it was willie corte [Music]
27:46
i introduced myself and what i did have at the time was this article from the new york times this
27:53
front page story the business card he gave us was was just kind of
27:58
had a bunch of scratch through marks and stuff and so we really didn't know who they were
28:03
the giveaway was that i gave farley the article from the new york times the front page story that was about the
28:10
samuel gospels and the way he read it he read it with interest
28:16
i was convinced that you read it the way somebody reads it who has a
28:23
connection to what it is he's reading and then he called in sylvester and said
28:29
hey you gotta come in here listen to this story and close the door so when they left
28:36
we thought we need to come up with a plan because it had been
28:42
in the dallas morning news like that monday morning so we contacted
28:48
a law firm haynes and boone in dallas we hinted at what it could possibly be
28:54
and could they possibly meet with us the attorney that specialized in art was very excited she said she had seen the
29:01
article in the paper and it mentioned white right texas so and she said i wondered when
29:07
somebody would come up with this and she never dreamed that she would have the opportunity to be the attorney
29:13
working on the case i subsequently got a call to meet with the lawyers in dallas
29:20
who initially represented the bank and then represent the bank and the family and i
29:25
think i was sitting across the table with four or five lawyers
29:31
who pretty much told me young man there is nothing really here to pursue
29:38
this this is a lost cause and and they gave me i remember all
29:43
kinds of all kinds of legal explanations
29:48
why under texas law u.s law international law there was nothing that the church or
29:56
anybody else could really successfully pursue and and and i listened to all of this and
30:02
and i just said listen uh to me this looks like just stolen property
30:08
you know nothing else
30:14
[Music]
30:26
bill honen of course was still continuing the research on the thief
30:31
so he went back to white right and dennison and continued what i had to to give up
30:38
on which was asking people who amongst you was a world war ii veteran
30:44
who served in europe and so forth and so forth it was a matter of uh pursuing a whole
30:51
bunch of leads a lot of telephoning and then finally uh triangulating you
30:57
might say where i picked up various hints
31:03
joe did go to north texas he did major in art so he had
31:09
i don't know that he knew necessarily what these things were but he knew they were pretty
31:14
i mean he had he had good taste yeah there's you know and i don't know that he knew they were that
31:21
valuable it wasn't like no i brought them home and they're worth a
31:26
billion dollars or anything like that you know what any of that sort of thing that's just that's the way it was
31:31
joe was so happy with his treasures that he wanted really to show them off
31:40
but he was afraid to most people didn't have any idea what they were they were
31:46
beautiful but they didn't know where they came from
31:52
one day this man came in and said he was looking for a picture of joe meador and i said well seems like i remember
31:59
something in our file let me go see what i have so i pulled the file out and i found i think there were three negatives
32:05
of him holding some orchids that he grew and so we talked a little while and he
32:11
said he was from new york and he was doing i remember that he said he was doing something on orchids
32:16
i said well i don't know that we would need three negatives of this so here you can take one of them and you don't have
32:21
to worry about bringing it back because he was dead he had died already died and i couldn't see why we would need a
32:28
picture of a man who was deceased with an orchid so i gave him one of the negatives and
32:34
the next day it came out in the new york times [Music]
32:40
the reporter asked me if i had come to school with joe thomas i was incensed i
32:46
said no you want me to smack you and he really jumped back a little bit and so after
32:52
that since i didn't know that much about the whole magilla in the first place i'm sure he thought crazy
32:58
we went to work that morning and everything was fine and all of a sudden we had all these newscasters bursting in
33:04
the doors and wanting to film in the building and all this out in the other
33:11
it got to be a mess and then there was one person that lived out in white rock which is a few miles
33:17
up by my out of here and i knew him very well and i and he used to drive joe
33:23
meadows to dallas all the time and and i asked him and we called him skunk
33:30
and i said skunk i said have you heard anything about this so-called treasure stuff around here and
33:37
he said well i've seen some of it but i didn't know what it was you sit around all the time wanting
33:42
something big to happen you know big murder case or a big something robbery or something and then when it happens
33:49
you know you remember it everybody knew joe towns everybody knew mrs mitter
33:55
and the met her family for pity sex jack gene everybody [Music] he was very well educated
34:02
he he knew his way around he was worldly before i graduated i was invited up to
34:08
his one room apartment and while i was there he casually talked about
34:14
the german jewels they were just out on tables and i don't know how much it was there
34:21
they were there and he was very open about showing he had a lot of art in the in the apartment and there was a painting
34:28
that somebody did of him in i imagine the early 40s and it was like a military he wasn't in
34:36
military guard but it set the style for joe all all along he was he liked to dress
34:43
fancy he had beautiful hair that he kept perfectly quaffed and
34:49
one of the things that i remember is towards the end of his life after he had gotten cancer
34:55
he had to get away but his wigs sort of went askew and
35:01
we very gently tried to straighten it for him without him realizing because he was a sensitive and proud proud man
35:09
and vain [Music]
35:25
[Music] this is some of the stuff that [ __ ] up
35:30
and they're very artistic and that that's one of hers
35:37
that is not that is and basically all this over here
35:44
is from the from the meadow family grandmother used to teach uh art class
35:50
out here in this this shed behind us my grandmother was very into into painting
35:55
and she would paint china she was always painting painting something
36:01
this was this was the the step up to the to the greenhouse
36:06
you have the uh you know that's where where uh she taught her art classes in that in
36:13
that building right there i guess the best way to describe joe
36:19
would be a renaissance man joe was a an intelligent man um
36:25
didn't say a lot but it was the kind of guy that when when he talked you you listen of course i was a i was a little
36:31
child and so i i was raised to listen anyway uh but he uh
36:37
he was very very very seemed like he had a lot of wisdom
36:42
he always wanted to be the best or he wanted to buy the best um
36:48
if it meant saving for a long time to buy something he would do that to get the best
36:53
with his orchids he tended those orchids
36:58
day in and day out all the time one of one of joel's primary purposes you know during that time
37:04
period was taking care of his mom and i think that's why he moved back back here later in life
37:11
simply to take care of her they were very very close but i'm gonna say something awful here
37:18
aren't most gay men
37:23
[Music] some people didn't like to think about
37:28
that but he was he never bothered anybody anybody here in white right
37:36
and that was his lifestyle and that is fine you know he's grown man i don't
37:43
well it's just none of my business what he does on the weekend he wasn't it wasn't ever in your face it wasn't ever
37:50
i'm a gay man and here's here's my boyfriend it was just it was very [Music]
37:56
he was very discreet with that i remember
38:01
reading or hearing that joe would walk around and disguise us not to be seen and
38:06
and dress up in odd characters and that that was so far from the truth
38:13
then he was you know this this had this dual personality or dual
38:18
life well he didn't have a dual life he was compassionate he was he was he was true to his word
38:24
for them to make him out as this you know person that they did this grand
38:30
arch connoisseur you know it's just it's it's irrational
38:37
it's it's irrational it's not true joe showed you what
38:43
he wanted to show you and in many cases i think what he thought you wanted to see
38:51
now bill honan ended up going to the library in denison
38:56
where they had this obituaries and there was joe meadow's obituary so bill honan
39:03
had a most likely candidate but he didn't know what the dual matter
39:09
you know was that your matter who was in the unit in the archives which is why he asked me so he could put
39:16
one and one together and then have a story i at the same time was now you know
39:21
negotiating with the lawyers in dallas who were eager to keep this all
39:26
confidential so i had a serious problem
39:32
so all i gave to bill honen was the information from the national
39:37
archives which is a matter of public record anyway i mean he could have done it himself
39:43
i gave it to to bill with the the strong request to not run the story until monday of
39:51
course that didn't happen particularly you know when it's a front-page story and bill rightfully
39:58
said you know we don't want to lose this story to anybody else particularly the dallas papers
40:05
so sure enough when we were supposed to meet with the
40:12
lawyers on friday we had the front page story on the new york times which meant the
40:18
story was all across the country [Music]
40:29
[Music]
40:38
[Music] [Applause] [Music]
40:43
we had half of the country's media in front of the law firm and i had reporters following me to my hotel room
40:51
standing in front of my door in order to get a follow-up story so we all got together at the adolphus waiting
40:59
for the lawyers to take us to the warehouse where the remaining pieces were supposed to be including the second
41:05
manuscript which we were supposed to photograph and send the photos to quedlenberg so they could identify the
41:11
pieces positively so we waited and waited and waited everybody was sort of scared to to leave
41:18
because we never knew when when it was time to now go to the warehouse so so
41:23
you know nobody went for dinner or anything like that and then i think shortly before
41:28
what midnight vilhonen came and took me aside and said willie i'm gonna run a
41:34
story tomorrow about the second manuscript which has just been offered
41:41
in switzerland to the germans we saw that the cultural foundation of the
41:48
states had purchased the second book and so we felt that we were dealing with people
41:55
who were capable of anything to sell a book while we were negotiating
42:00
over it in fact it had agreement about it and so we thought we had to
42:06
uh take legal action so i was able to reach minister goslar
42:11
in korlenburg from dallas texas and explained to him
42:16
what was going on i said listen we need to go to court on monday
42:22
and i need your authorization so he basically asked me well what do you
42:29
think i need to do i said you need to authorize me
42:38
[Music] off dr marie says we can't lead us too
42:47
and he said well if that's what you think i need to do then that's what i do and then of course he was bit concerned
42:53
about money i said it's too late for that now so
42:58
i was now you know properly authorized on the weekend before we went to court
43:05
but but of course we had no money
43:13
we went to the courthouse at nine o'clock monday morning and filed a lawsuit and then
43:18
uh you know we had the hearing with the judge about the temporary training order because now of course we were extremely
43:23
concerned that if there was anything else it would quickly leave the country it was very important for us to get the
43:29
depositions on the way because we knew so little about joe matter and the family and their whole involvement in
43:34
the case there was no basis for trust between the church
43:40
and the texans they were completely different worlds the wall had just come down there was
43:45
really no communication between east and west no reasonable expectations the education
43:52
we had about east germany was minimal education they had about the west i'm sure was all twisted they were very
43:58
moscow oriented we were very western oriented in this country when willie and
44:03
i showed up in texas we were vilified particularly and
44:08
their lawyers the lawyers for the family were extremely hostile
44:16
yeah willie cartey i didn't really realize it was going to
44:21
be a depth position i was a little bit little bit annoyed i was a little bit annoyed and i think
44:27
willie picked up on that pretty big he kept pacing back and forth and standing up and i'm going oh lord huge big long
44:33
conference table german lawyers on one side our lawyers and myself on the other and it was just
44:39
question after and they would um they would ask a question and you'd answer and then they'd ask it another
44:45
way and you'd answer and then they'd ask it in another way the man from germany uh willie court
44:53
he contacted us i got a letter from somebody one of the priests or something
44:59
in germany he said if you have these things god will get you and i called the attorney and i said you tell him to
45:04
where he can put it what do you want me to i don't know where it's at i don't know what happened i don't know how i got there i don't
45:09
know when they decided to do this there was never a basis for trust between us and the families one of the family
45:15
members came out and said to me uh a one-eyed ass could have found those
45:20
treasures they asked where i got the stuff when did he give me this stuff what did he tell me about the stuff it absolutely
45:27
wore gene and jack out and of course you know and mom too uh you know they were they were up in
45:33
age at that time and and i honestly do not well matter of fact i can i can pretty
45:40
pretty vehemently say that if they had known the firestorm was able to later cause this would have this caused they
45:47
wouldn't have touched it because it was a mess i mean it was it was a mess and it
45:53
wasn't just a mess for a minute you know mama's mom was talking about if i you know i could go to prison i'm like
46:00
what for what the story that
46:05
i understood was that he had uh the priest at the church had
46:11
approached him and asked him to get this group of valuables out of the country
46:17
and that he would get with him later and get them back this is where
46:22
page by page you slowly get to see the depth of the man as chaotic
46:31
as it was perhaps for him to take all of this from quailenburg
46:37
germany for whatever reason uh in his own mind you know i i could
46:43
see it i can see it in his personality that he really believed it he really believed in his own mind that he was
46:48
saving part of civilization he was an interesting fellow i never knew him but every description of joe meador
46:54
was that he was very aesthetic and
47:00
appreciated the historical value and beauty of the things that he took
47:07
but he did take him this is not really like war booty like captured guns or
47:13
uniforms or helmets or things like that this was real treasure at the end of the war when he was in the
47:20
south of france and stole silverware for that he got court-martialed
47:25
so was he a pathological thief or was it this sort
47:31
of attitude that the spoils of war go to the victor
47:36
i i don't know the witness accounts we got were that he was a step beyond the normal
47:43
souvenir hunting he had been educated in art it taught
47:49
art when he came home he operated this small hardware store with his brother
47:56
we had this impression that he and his brother had separate desks at this hardware store in separate entrances and
48:02
separate safes because the brother disapproved of his homosexuality the pictures that you see of him like from
48:08
texas monthly show a very complex intelligent well-educated person [Music]
48:15
was tormented apparently about these treasures tried to keep the queenberg treasures together but
48:21
maybe lived off other things he stole he didn't necessarily talk about it but
48:29
he had written extensively letters home
48:35
if not daily weekly the whole entire time he was in the war and
48:40
we had read those letters over the years i mean they were there they were beautiful letters he was very
48:46
descriptive in his writing and i'd read a letter you know at some point in the game
48:53
that he had mailed home some objects you know put them up
48:58
and i'll take care of it when i get home and they came in a wooden box with brown
49:04
paper around it and after everybody died the box was still in the attic i mean we we found it
49:10
you know and it was written on he'd written on this wooden crate that's apparently how joe got these
49:17
things back to texas he mailed them two books a box
49:23
you know it had some other things on the box up in the attic you know i don't even know
49:28
i don't even know what happened to it so if he mailed things uh you know there
49:35
should have been things that were mailable in other words it's highly unlikely that he mailed you know
49:41
large size paintings i'm not trying to justify what joe meador did but a lot of people were
49:46
doing things like that and he bundled this up and sent it back you know the us
49:52
army they could have taken a look at it to see what it was maybe they did and just didn't care
49:58
there were a number of people that were involved in this he couldn't have done it by himself and didn't do it by himself
50:04
that's not to cast blame on anyone else it's just it's a fact
50:09
i don't know what i would have done but i very well might have done the same thing but i can't
50:15
justify what joe did and we're talking about a cathedral a church a thousand-year-old
50:23
collection you know it just goes and on
50:31
i knew that my efforts had been somewhat successful
50:36
in flushing out the second manuscript so to speak but it was in switzerland so
50:41
there was nothing else to do in dallas now that would that left me with the
50:47
remaining pieces which indeed i still hadn't seen so by
50:53
by then we had a temporary straining order on something i had no idea what it was
51:00
so that's that's why then we went to when we finally went to denison to the bank with the federal marshals
51:06
all the excitement and tension was back on my shoulders because now it was the moment of truth
51:14
whether what folly you know was bringing up in his cardboard box from from the file cabinet not from not
51:21
from the safe but from the file cabinet where he had kept it was actually you know anything that had
51:28
anything to do with kwadlenburg the judge had an approved list of people
51:34
who were allowed to attend the inspection and so we had all these attorneys
51:39
representing the matters we had our attorneys representing the bank and then we had
51:44
willie corte and the attorneys representing the german church they they brought
51:52
art handlers who wore all these white gloves and and they very delicately handled
51:58
all these artifacts their intent was to verify that these were indeed the treasures that were in
52:05
question and our question was well just because they say these are the
52:12
treasures how do we know it really is what proof do we have that they have a claim
52:19
and as it turned out they brought a notebook that had eight by ten black
52:24
and white photographs that were taken by the germans before the u.s and allied
52:29
occupation of germany they knew that was coming and to protect art they put all
52:35
this in a cave and they inventoried it and they took pictures of
52:41
each item the big box was wrapped so they took it out of the box and the guy then unwrapped it and it sat there the
52:48
photographer took all these multiple photographs you know from all different
52:54
sides and of course each time the flash lights went off so it it really put this
53:00
put the the the the the reliquary in the sort this you know flashing glowing bright light
53:08
as if it had sort of like a phoenix you know come out of out of the ashes
53:15
and and reveal itself it's you know something like we have in some of these movies you know where something
53:20
irregularly appears [Music]
53:28
i was absolutely flabbergasted at the quality and beauty of these objects here's something as you thought
53:35
had been lost to history but here they were brought back to life because they survived
53:42
once willie saw he knew that he had found the treasures it was kind of interesting to watch his reaction i mean
53:49
years and years of work and and everything was coming to fruition he was
53:55
almost giddy to to actually be able to see it and touch it after all the work he had put
54:01
in and i could understand that
54:16
the treasures came out of the box and we saw that we really had found the quellenberg treasures and we shared a
54:21
little private handshake that we had really done what we had set out to do
54:26
and and that was really the moment you know that i had been waiting for all those years basically because now
54:33
i had confirmation that all this effort all this risk that we all had taken
54:39
[Music] had been worth it [Music]
55:03
right over here see the door uh at the back of the bank just across the street is where the wetters and
55:09
their uh lawyer and their people came out then they loaded them in this van
55:14
and took off to dallas we were kind of glad to see them go we were afraid you know somebody might hold
55:20
them up or something you know in them while they were coming out but anyway it was just right across the street well
55:26
willie and i went to germany together uh
55:32
several months later and we had a series of meetings in bonn
55:38
and berlin quentlenberg machterberg because the case needed to be regularized
55:46
and so i was present at the meeting where he was fired from the case
55:51
i spoke with the head of the cultural affairs department uh at a time you know when we had
55:57
reached this sort of level where i had been to texas and and i said now
56:03
now we have to get serious about it um they try to discourage me
56:10
they thought it was politically a bad idea to to to do that meaning to
56:17
for for the germans to pursue an american soldier and accuse him of being a thief
56:25
so my relationship with the folks who had initially encouraged me
56:31
and say you know go ahead that would be interesting uh then were the same people who
56:37
who really didn't want to deal with me after willie was fired he continued to
56:44
want to talk to me and we communicated once in a while about what was going on with the case
56:50
but since he was not part of the team i couldn't share client information with him or
56:55
confidences or strategy and
57:00
i couldn't stop him from going to the press
57:06
when we settled the case he made it known that he was not enthusiastic about the settlement
57:11
so i think he he maintained his own independent posture i can't say that i know
57:17
everything he was doing though [Music]
57:36
i went to the this federal trial that they had at sherman we had an old judge up there
57:42
named brown and he asked that prosecutor how come he was that long getting it
57:48
done she says well that was wasn't any rush on it they suggest they
57:54
are the statute's limitations it says it's done run out he dismissed the case
58:01
and boy you talked about somebody mad that gal was mad she lost her case right there in front
58:08
of everybody and the whole town was in that courtroom just about the statute of limitations had run and that's a law
58:14
that's written to guard against
58:20
prosecutions when the case has become so old
58:26
that the witnesses have lost their memory or evidence is hard to come by or
58:32
memories fade and evidence goes away
58:37
it was not easy it was a very close call but i'm i'm proud to say that he did
58:43
exactly what was right in the fifth circuit agreed you know people and honen did it he said
58:50
well it's a technicality but the old the old saw among lawyers is a technicality is a law that the other
58:57
side didn't research and we did the law is the law
59:03
it's not a technicality [Music] well mother always laughed and said the big pickle building downtown the big
59:09
building downtown dallas with the green lights on that we bought five floors so yeah the lawyers got a big chunk of
59:16
that and then the rs got a big chunk so
59:21
so it wasn't as lucrative as as it looks like on paper maybe
59:28
[Music] joe had given me a heart a silver heart
59:36
and i had a house down in east texas that we rented and it laid on the coffee table
59:43
and was decoration on a coffee table in my rent house for about two years and
59:48
when i got the call that said hey they're gonna they want anything and everything that joe ever gave you
59:53
or anything that might be and by that time we had a list of what the items were and there was a silver heart listed
59:59
and so i had to call my renter and say hey you know you might take that heart and put it in a drawer until i can get down
1:00:06
there and get it and you know it had had a little cloth on the inside and i'd push on the cloth you know try to figure out what it said
1:00:13
and now i probably have damaged things i shouldn't have but oh well
1:00:19
[Music]
1:00:25
you know like one of the final numbers was 354 million dollars at one point that's what they said and it's like
1:00:32
for this wow you know we had it all these years who knew who knew
1:00:38
it normal people don't have that and so if we were normal people
1:00:44
and we had it so it's like how do you how do you even wrap your head around that kind of number
1:00:50
those kinds of decisions would not be made today there's absolutely no basis for
1:00:56
a government to reward someone by purchasing back things that were stolen clearly from
1:01:02
an important church within their country i really felt like the whole thing was was
1:01:08
meant to be i felt like it was meant to be returned to to the church and
1:01:13
i felt like even though joe meador took it
1:01:21
he protected it and most of it was returned had it fallen
1:01:26
into other i think he had an appreciation for art and
1:01:33
by having that appreciation he protected it and it didn't had it gone to someone
1:01:39
else who knows what would have happened to it there was no physical damage as i
1:01:44
remember at the time i took extensive notes on it but i i think there was the
1:01:50
damage was minimal considering the harsh treatment they had it was surprising
1:01:56
they did survive so well
1:02:04
[Laughter] [Music] it's not like we were trying
1:02:10
to be sneaky and be crooks and you know go around and make a whole bunch of money it's just
1:02:17
there were some financial issues maybe these are worth something and we can't this will help
1:02:22
and so to be done settled and done yeah
1:02:27
yeah how can you how can you describe somebody that you don't know
1:02:33
you know from what you read or what you hear if you don't know the person what gives you the right to judge that person
1:02:40
it's called gossip gossiping hearsay it's just my opinion
1:02:47
there's always another part of the story i have found that
1:02:53
frequently good people do bad things
1:02:58
and that doesn't make them bad people i have an attitude about that that
1:03:03
even though someone may have committed a criminal act
1:03:09
that they deserve consideration for the way that they've lived the rest of their lives what's not not right that this
1:03:16
young american lieutenant took the the things from the treasure
1:03:23
but on the other hand there were so many dreadful things that happened during the war
1:03:28
so many people who lost their lives that well let him take those old bibles
1:03:36
at least i like to think about a progression of culture to greater and greater levels of
1:03:41
humanity in spite of what we learned in the 20th century and i think the cultural expressions of
1:03:47
people are preserving them and appreciating them trying to understand them is one way for
1:03:53
us to do that scholars who have studied the movements of relics have have
1:03:58
noticed that saints have power over their relics and they can move when they want to uh they don't think they're
1:04:04
getting enough prayers or have enough federation from the local populace so they want to go somewhere else where
1:04:09
where they're they're going to be more important and they can
1:04:14
go where they want to people say well why should i care about cultural treasures one they belong to
1:04:20
you whether they're in iraq whether they're in syria whether they were in
1:04:26
soviet union during world war ii they're the shared cultural treasure of everybody which is why joe tom meador's
1:04:32
theft of the quinlanberg treasures is offensive on all levels it didn't belong to him it didn't belong the united
1:04:39
states didn't belong to his family and it really doesn't belong to quinlenberg it just happens to be there within that
1:04:45
church available for people around the world to go and see these things and understand something that's important
1:04:52
going back to the 9th century about western civilization but it belongs to everybody so when you steal something
1:04:58
like that you're stealing it from you and me and anybody else that's out there you don't own things like this they own
1:05:04
you if you steal them i had no reason indeed from a my
1:05:11
professional situation at the time nor my personal qualifications
1:05:16
[Music] to do this i mean i was not an story in pursuing
1:05:22
you know aspects of museums losses honestly
1:05:28
i didn't really bring anything in particular to the table which on the other hand may have
1:05:35
been a good thing because if i would have been sort of knowledgeable in this area
1:05:42
i may have not had this curiosity this desire
1:05:47
to find out
1:05:55
[Music]
1:06:06
[Laughter] [Music]
1:06:14
i wanted to talk a little bit if you're comfortable about um there were the two items that were still
1:06:21
missing and what you think might have happened to one of them are you comfortable talking about that
1:06:28
i don't know i'm not sure okay on camera i don't know um
1:06:34
just because i don't want any i don't know that that's what happened it's just kind of a speculation as to
1:06:40
what that that's what happened but it's not anywhere that you it's not in the family oh no no no no no
1:06:47
no no no go check the goodwill i don't know
1:06:52
i won't say a name how about that there is a possibility that it was given
1:06:57
in a sack of other costing jewelry to some employees
1:07:04
how's that that's good [Music]
1:07:27
you
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