News: Suicide Bombings and Archaeology: Unpredictable Connections

Suicide Bombings and Archaeology: Unpredictable Connections
mud-brick.com
Monday, May 17th, 2010

In 1933 and 1934, archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld excavated an astonishingly large cache of inscribed tablets at Persepolis, once the monumental capital of the Persian Empire, and now a UNESCO World Heritage site.

On Sept. 4th, 1997, a Hamas-sponsored suicide attack at the Ben Yehuda mall in Jerusalem took the lives of five people, including three young girls.

Thought these two events would be completely disconnected? So did I, and maybe normally they would be. What they have in common is the Islamic Republic of Iran, the country where the tablets were found, and the country that partially funds Hamas. This connection has linked the tablets and the suicide bombing together in an unpredictable lawsuit that threatens the increasingly fragile nature of international archaeological cooperation...

Go to the chronicle of news on Persepolis.

Go to the chronicle of news on the Persepolis Fortification Archive.

Lecture at Cornell: From Persepolis before Persepolis: the Persepolis Fortification Archive in Chicago

Scholar to speak about Near East archives

Matthew W. Stolper, The John A. Wilson Professor of Oriental Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and the College at the University of Chicago, will spend two days on campus and deliver a lecture on Thursday, May 6 at 4:30 p.m. in the Hedges Conference Room in The Commons.

The lecture, titled “From Persepolis before Persepolis: the Persepolis Fortification Archive in Chicago,” will discuss not only the discoveries from the Persepolis Fortification Archive and the knowledge we have gained and will gain of the ancient Persian Empire, but also the cultural heritage issues surrounding the tablets. The lecture will be the first event introducing Persepolis, ancient and modern, to the Cornell community as part of the One Book, One Campus, One Community program. This year’s book is the graphic novel Persepolis II...

News: Iran Gambles with its Cultural Heritage in U.S. Lawsuits

Iran Gambles with its Cultural Heritage in U.S. Lawsuits
Apr 29, 2010
E. E. Mazier

By ignoring lawsuits against it and failing to take an active role in the post-judgment phase of those cases, Iran is at risk of seeing a major component of its cultural heritage broken up and sold in pieces. That was the underlying message of an April 27, 2010 lecture by Matthew W. Stolper at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia about the Persepolis Fortification Tablets...

Go to the chronicle of news on Persepolis.

Go to the chronicle of news on the Persepolis Fortification Archive.