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Authorities say Hobby Lobby's Gilgamesh tablet is stolen, must go back to Iraq

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Re: Authorities say Hobby Lobby's Gilgamesh tablet is stolen, must go back to Iraq

#201

Post by hrktb »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #42
legerdemain wrote: post #8

One of the outcomes of the US-Iraq war was Iraq's national heritage of antiquities getting plundered and sold illegally.[1] The burning of the Library of Alexandria is a potent symbol in Western culture, but the world has repeatedly suffered massive losses of cultural and historical artifacts in the last few decades. The public quickly develops historical amnesia for recent events. Compare, for example, the loss of B…

Ironically, purely from an amoral preservation point of view, having the antiquities in a museum in the United States or Western Europe has a higher chance of preserving the artifact for future generations.

Granted. Though there’s an argument on what preserving the antiquities is for in the first place.

If we think there is a value provided to visitors seeing them in person, then preserving them far away deprives the Iraqi from these benefits making the preservation neutral at best in the short/middle term (long term? will it ever come back ?). It might feel like having your pet living abroad in a shelter, on one side it gets to live, on the other it doesn’t help you much to cope with your life.

Re: Authorities say Hobby Lobby's Gilgamesh tablet is stolen, must go back to Iraq

#202

Post by newyankee »

econcon wrote: post #152
deathgrips wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a tragedy. Most westerners don't realize that when Europeans were living in mud huts and emptying their chamber pots into the streets, the Muslim world had plumbing, water filtration, surgery, advanced mathematics, and many more amazing scientific advances which quickly spread throughout Muslim countries due to the cultural exchange at Mecca. I wonder what the world could have been like if the Mongols had never…

>the Muslim world had plumbing, water filtration, surgery, advanced mathematics, and many more amazing scientific advances A lot of which came through Indian traders, first evidences of human surgeries are found in Indian subcontinent, Indus valley civilization had pretty advance irrigation system for the time and mathematics: quadratic equations, notion of zero, notion of limits and inifinty were here in philosophic…

Hell Arabic numerals are actually the Indian nos which trader Arabs exported to Europe. I find the characterisation that Arabs invented no system used in so many places so misleading. It is almost as if western historians do not want to give adequate acknowledgment to South Asia.

Re: Authorities say Hobby Lobby's Gilgamesh tablet is stolen, must go back to Iraq

#203

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

luckydata wrote: post #147
deathgrips wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a tragedy. Most westerners don't realize that when Europeans were living in mud huts and emptying their chamber pots into the streets, the Muslim world had plumbing, water filtration, surgery, advanced mathematics, and many more amazing scientific advances which quickly spread throughout Muslim countries due to the cultural exchange at Mecca. I wonder what the world could have been like if the Mongols had never…

Ehm, plumbing is a bad example since the Romans did that WAY ahead of the Muslim world. For that AND sidewalks, you're welcome. Thanks for the numbers, that was handy.

>you're welcome

I hope that was a joke. It's very sad to see people take credit for achievements of others just on the grounds that they happen to share the same nationality/race/religion/birth place.

Sure, someone of your tribe achieved X in the past, very well done, but how did YOU contribute to that? Winning the lottery of birth is not an achievement.

Re: Authorities say Hobby Lobby's Gilgamesh tablet is stolen, must go back to Iraq

#204

Post by newyankee »

khawkins wrote: post #173
legerdemain wrote: post #8

One of the outcomes of the US-Iraq war was Iraq's national heritage of antiquities getting plundered and sold illegally.[1] The burning of the Library of Alexandria is a potent symbol in Western culture, but the world has repeatedly suffered massive losses of cultural and historical artifacts in the last few decades. The public quickly develops historical amnesia for recent events. Compare, for example, the loss of B…

Given the region's susceptibility to Islamic State uprisings, I'm not convinced Iraq and Syria are going to be good stewards of antiquities in the long-run. [1][2] These areas haven't been stable for decades. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_cultural_herita... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_Mosul_Museum_ar...

A good example would be the destruction of Bamiya Budha statues in Afghanistan by the Taliban

Re: Authorities say Hobby Lobby's Gilgamesh tablet is stolen, must go back to Iraq

#205

Post by MandieD »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #42
legerdemain wrote: post #8

One of the outcomes of the US-Iraq war was Iraq's national heritage of antiquities getting plundered and sold illegally.[1] The burning of the Library of Alexandria is a potent symbol in Western culture, but the world has repeatedly suffered massive losses of cultural and historical artifacts in the last few decades. The public quickly develops historical amnesia for recent events. Compare, for example, the loss of B…

Ironically, purely from an amoral preservation point of view, having the antiquities in a museum in the United States or Western Europe has a higher chance of preserving the artifact for future generations.

Aside from a couple brief but extremely violent periods this past century, sure. The city I live by had its old town reduced to rubble in 1944-45 and is still rebuilding, despite being in one of the most prosperous regions of a rich, powerful country. The Germanisches National Museum wasn't spared, and they still lost stuff, despite preparing for bombardment. Countless works of art were destroyed throughout the city, despite the citizenry's pride in their cultural heritage.

Or maybe because of an excess of pride in that cultural heritage, if you look at the big picture...

I'm talking about Nuremberg/Nürnberg, of course. I love living here now, but oh boy was the evil of an evil time concentrated here. It's hard to reconcile the lovely place I live now with what I grew up learning about it, to the extent that I think of it as Nürnberg today, but Nuremberg when considering the horrors of the 30s and 40s.

Big Western countries don't have constant, low-level instability like our former colonies - we have rare but all-encompassing blowouts. We've just been lucky in the US and Canada that geography protected us for so long (aside from the evil various European powers visited upon people we encountered or forcibly brought there).

More historically, think about spasmodic but intense episodes in the West, like the iconoclastism during the Protestant Reformation. Good luck to any ancient religious art that happened to be in Switzerland at the time... and think about the various flavors of religious nuttery in the US, now being concentrated and inflamed with social media. The Hobby Lobby founders fortunately wanted these artifacts as evidence for their flavor of religious nuttery, but what would have stopped them from acquiring artifacts that they felt needed to be destroyed?

Re: Authorities say Hobby Lobby's Gilgamesh tablet is stolen, must go back to Iraq

#206

Post by lopmotr »

legerdemain wrote: post #8

One of the outcomes of the US-Iraq war was Iraq's national heritage of antiquities getting plundered and sold illegally.[1] The burning of the Library of Alexandria is a potent symbol in Western culture, but the world has repeatedly suffered massive losses of cultural and historical artifacts in the last few decades. The public quickly develops historical amnesia for recent events. Compare, for example, the loss of B…

Something 1000s of years old hardly belongs to any particular modern country. Perhaps if whoever is looking after it can't protect it from theft, they don't deserve to be looking after it and it's better that it got stolen. If an entire country is too weak to protect artifacts, then they should be given to somewhere that has that capability.

Who would want to return artifacts to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan just because the Taliban happened to control that piece of land at the time? Nobody cares about some little political group on the scale of 1000s of years.

Re: Authorities say Hobby Lobby's Gilgamesh tablet is stolen, must go back to Iraq

#207

Post by IG_Semmelweiss »

nemo wrote: post #121
Amezarak wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comes across a little patronizing. The poster is making the point that North Africa had been part of a civilized empire for centuries, and full of wealthy cities, some famous for their learning. Some of history’s greatest minds lived in Roman North Africa. These cities were conquered. Some were sacked and destroyed. There was major loss of life, economic destruction, and loss of property, including written works…

Your understanding of the region is not an accurate account. Not at all. There have been various sophisticated civilizations in the region, among them various Islamic states. The rises and falls of various sophisticated civilizations came about for a variety of reasons, most of which were prior to the Islamic world existing. The Islamic Golden Age brought Alexandria back from being a declining backwater with its scho…

you studied classics in grad school but you should have also studied debate. As it is abundantly clear to the posters before me and those who replied above, no one except you contended that the islamic golden age did not exiat.

What your classics academia instruction seems to have short changed you is in the entire period of history where arab conquest reduced most mesopotamian and north african development to rubble, mostly in the name of religion.

Re: Authorities say Hobby Lobby's Gilgamesh tablet is stolen, must go back to Iraq

#208

Post by DrScump »

cambalache wrote: post #59
laingc wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait until you read about the Roman Republic thousands of years before this time - you’re gonna love it.

Yeah but besides the sanitation system,the aqueduct, the roads, the irrigation system, medicine,oratory, law, historians, dramatists,Vitruvius..what did those lousy Romans have?

ROMANES EUNT DOMUS

Re: Authorities say Hobby Lobby's Gilgamesh tablet is stolen, must go back to Iraq

#209

Post by Red_Tarsius »

deathgrips wrote: post #35
keiferski wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The destruction of Baghdad itself, including the House of Wisdom (large library), by the Mongols in 1258 is probably a more apt comparison. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Baghdad_(1258)

What a tragedy. Most westerners don't realize that when Europeans were living in mud huts and emptying their chamber pots into the streets, the Muslim world had plumbing, water filtration, surgery, advanced mathematics, and many more amazing scientific advances which quickly spread throughout Muslim countries due to the cultural exchange at Mecca. I wonder what the world could have been like if the Mongols had never…

Islam actually slows down scientific progress. The golden age is nothing more than Muslims taking credit for the swan song of conquered cultures. If anything, Islamic culture might be the second worst thing that happened to the middle east after the Mongol invasion. There are many hypotheses as to why Muslim-majority countries produce a disproportionately small share of world scientific output even today. The following paper was an interesting read: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/chaney/files/paper.pdf

>Most westerners don't realize that when Europeans were living in mud huts and emptying their chamber pots into the streets...

North Europeans were more advanced than you're giving them credit for. Different biomes open up different strategies and possibilities. You can't expect a city like Rome – marble and all – in ancient Scandinavia. But we found samples of skilled craftsmanship (nebra sky disk, waldalgesheimer fürstengrab) that go against the cartoon narrative you described.

Re: Authorities say Hobby Lobby's Gilgamesh tablet is stolen, must go back to Iraq

#210

Post by iamacyborg »

feteru wrote: post #148
nemo wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>in Egypt, the Great Pyramid was once covered with gleaming white limestone, but this was removed and used to build mosques This is a very misleading distortion of history. The limestone casing on the Great Pyramid was destroyed in an earthquake in 1308 CE. The limestone rubble was pulled from the base of the pyramid and repurposed for building though much of it was also burned in kilns for lime like the marble of ma…

Any recommendations for fun-to-read books about this period?

I read these on holiday in Morroco a couple years ago and thoroughly enjoyed them. Not necessarily the correct period so I'm open to see other people's suggestions too.

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/878061.Moorish_Spain

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/336859.The_Golden_Trade_...

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4398835-the-berbers-and-...

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