• Iran Archaeology
• Published: August 2008
• 

  Persia: Ancient Soul of Iran
• A glorious past inspires a conflicted nation.
• By Marguerite Del Giudice

   

  Photograph by Newsha Tavakolian
• What's so striking about the ruins of Persepolis in southern Iran, an ancient capital of the Persian Empire that was burned down after being conquered by Alexander the Great, is the absence of violent imagery on what's left of its stone walls.
• Among the carvings there are soldiers, but they're not fighting; there are weapons, but they're not drawn.
• Mainly you see emblems suggesting that something humane went on here instead—people of different nations gathering peace­fully, bearing gifts, draping their hands amiably on one another's shoulders.
• In an era noted for its barbarity, Persepolis, it seems, was a relatively cosmopolitan place—and for many Iranians today its ruins are a breathtaking reminder of who their Persian ancestors were and what they did.
• The recorded history of the country itself spans some 2,500 years, culminating in today's Islamic Republic of Iran, formed in 1979 after a revolution inspired in part by conservative clerics cast out the Western-backed shah.
• It's argu­ably the world's first modern constitutional theocracy and a grand experiment: Can a country be run effectively by holy men imposing an extreme version of Islam on a people soaked in such a rich Persian past?
• Persia was a conquering empire but also regarded in some ways as one of the more glorious and benevolent civilizations of antiquity, and I wondered how strongly people might still identify with the part of their history that's illustrated in those surviving friezes.
• So I set out to explore what "Persian" means to Iranians, who at the time of my two visits last year were being shunned by the international community, their culture demonized in Western cinema, and their leaders cast, in an escalating war of words with Washington, D.C., as menacing would-be terrorists out to build the bomb.

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• You can't really separate out Iranian identity as one thing or another—broadly speaking, it's part Persian, part Islamic, and part Western, and the paradoxes all exist together.
• But there is a Persian identity that has nothing to do with Islam, which at the same time has blended with the culture of Islam (as evidenced by the Muslim call to prayer that booms from loudspeakers situated around Persepolis, a cue to visitors that they are not only in a Persian kingdom but also in an Islamic republic).
• This would be a story about those Iranians who still, at least in part, identify with their Persian roots.
• Perhaps some millennial spillover runs through the makeup of what is now one of the world's ticking hot spots.
• Are vestiges of the life-loving Persian nature (wine, love, poetry, song) woven into the fabric of abstinence, prayer, and fatalism often associated with Islam—like a secret computer program running quietly in the background?
• Surviving, Persian Style
• Iran's capital city of Tehran is an exciting, pollution-choked metropolis at the foot of the Elburz Mountains.
• Many of the buildings are made of tiny beige bricks and girded with metal railings, giving the impression of small compounds coming one after the other, punctuated by halted construction projects and parks.
• There are still some beautiful gardens here, a Persian inheritance, and private ones, with fruit trees and fountains, fishponds and aviaries, flourishing inside the brick walls.
• While I was here, two Iranian-born American academics, home for a visit, had been locked up, accused of fomenting a velvet revolution against the government. Eventually they were released.
• But back in the United States, people would ask, wasn't I afraid to be in Iran?—the assumption being that I must have been in danger of getting locked up myself.
• But I was a guest in Iran, and in Iran a guest is accorded the highest status, the sweetest piece of fruit, the most comfortable place to sit. It's part of a complex system of ritual politeness—taarof—that governs the subtext of life here.
• Hospitality, courting, family affairs, political negotiations; taarof is the unwritten code for how people should treat each other. The word has an Arabic root, arafa, meaning to know or acquire knowledge of. But the idea of taarof—to abase oneself while exalting the other person—is Persian in origin, said William O. Beeman, a linguistic anthropologist at the University of Minnesota.
• He described it as "fighting for the lower hand," but in an exquisitely elegant way, making it possible, in a hierarchical society like Iran's, "for people to paradoxically deal with each other as equals."

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• Wherever I went, people fussed over me and made sure that all my needs were met. But they can get so caught up trying to please, or seeming to, and declining offers, or seeming to, that true intentions are hidden.
• There's a lot of mind reading and lighthearted, meaningless dialogue while the two parties go back and forth with entreaties and refusals until the truth reveals itself.
• Being smooth and seeming sincere while hiding your true feelings—artful pretending—is considered the height of taarof and an enormous social asset.
• "You never show your intention or your real identity," said a former Iranian political prisoner now living in France. "You're making sure you're not exposing yourself to danger, because throughout our history there has been a lot of danger there."
• Geography as Destiny
• Indeed, the long course of Iranian history is satu­rated with wars, invasions, and martyrs, including the teenage boys during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s who carried plastic keys to heaven while clearing minefields by walking bravely across them.
• The underlying reason for all the drama is: location.
• If you draw lines from the Mediterranean to Beijing or Beijing to Cairo or Paris to Delhi, they all pass through Iran, which straddles a region where East meets West. Over 26 centuries, a blending of the hemispheres has been going on here—trade, cultural interchange, friction—with Iran smack in the middle.
• Meanwhile, because of its wealth and strategic location, the country was also overrun by one invader after another, and the Persian Empire was established, lost, and reestablished a number of times—by the Achaemenids, the Parthians, and the Sassanids—before finally going under.
• Invaders have included the Turks, Genghis Khan and the Mongols, and, most significantly, Arabian tribesmen.
• Fired with the zeal of a new religion, Islam, they humbled the ancient Persian Empire for good in the seventh century and ushered in a period of Muslim greatness that was distinctly Persian.
• The Arab expansion is regarded as one of the most dramatic movements of any people in history. Persia was in its inexorable path, and, ever since, Iranians have been finding ways to keep safe their identity as distinct from the rest of the Muslim and Arab world.
• "Iran is very big and very ancient," said Youssef Madjidzadeh, a leading Iranian archaeologist, "and it's not easy to change the hearts and identity of the people because of this."

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• They like to say, for instance, that when invaders came to Iran, the Iranians did not become the invaders; the invaders became Iranians.
• Their conquerors were said to have "gone Persian," like Alexander, who, after laying waste to the vanquished Persia, adopted its cultural and administrative practices, took a Persian wife (Roxana), and ordered thousands of his troops to do the same in a mass wedding.
• Iranians seem particularly proud of their capacity to get along with others by assimilating compatible aspects of the invaders' ways without surrendering their own—a cultural elasticity that is at the heart of their Persian identity.
• Welcome to Aratta
• The earliest reports of human settlement in Iran go back at least 10,000 years, and the country's name derives from Aryans who migrated here beginning around 1500 b.c.
• Layers of civilization—tens of thousands of archaeological sites—are yet to be excavated.
• One recent find quickening some hearts was unearthed in 2000 near the city of Jiroft, when flash floods along the Halil River in the southeast exposed thousands of old tombs. The excavation is just six seasons old, and there isn't much to see yet. But intriguing artifacts have been found (including a bronze goat's head dating back perhaps 5,000 years), and Jiroft is spoken of as possibly an early center of civilization contemporary with Mesopotamia.
• Youssef the archaeologist, an authority on the third millennium b.c., directs the digs. He used to run the archaeology department at the Univer­sity of Tehran but lost his job after the revolution and moved to France. Over the years, he said, "things changed." Interest in archaeology revived, and he was invited back to run Jiroft.
• Youssef thinks it may be the fabled "lost" Bronze Age land of Aratta, circa 2700 b.c., reputedly legendary for magnificent crafts that found their way to Mesopotamia.
• But thus far there's no proof, and other scholars are skeptical. What would he have to find to put the matter  unequivocally to rest? He chuckled wist­fully. "The equivalent of an engraved arch that says, ‘Welcome to Aratta.' "
• Prospects for more digs at the thousands of unexplored sites seem daunting. In Iran the price of meat is high, there aren't enough jobs, the bureaucracy is inscrutable, bloated, and inefficient, and state corruption—as described to me by three different people—is "an open secret," "worse than ever," and "institutionalized."
• "The country has many needs," Youssef said, "and certainly archaeology is not the main subject."
• But since Jiroft, "all the provinces are interested in excavating, and every little town wants to be known around the world like Jiroft. They're proud, and there are rivalries."

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• Superpower Nostalgia
• The legacy from antiquity that has always seemed to loom large in the national psyche is this: The concepts of freedom and human rights may not have originated with the classical Greeks but in Iran, as early as the sixth century b.c. under the Achaemenid emperor Cyrus the Great, who established the first Persian Empire, which would become the largest, most powerful kingdom on Earth.
• Among other things, Cyrus, reputedly a brave and humble good guy, freed the enslaved Jews of Babylon in 539 b.c., sending them back to Jerusalem to rebuild their temple with money he gave them, and established what has been called the world's first religiously and culturally tolerant empire.

• Ultimately it comprised more than 23 different peoples who coexisted peacefully under a central government, originally based in Pasargadae—a kingdom that at its height, under Cyrus's successor, Darius, extended from the Mediterranean to the Indus River.

    

  So Persia was arguably the world's first superpower.
• "We have a nostalgia to be a superpower again," said Saeed Laylaz, an economic and political analyst in Tehran, "and the country's nuclear ambitions are directly related to this desire."
• Iran continues to enrich uranium, insisting that it wants only to produce fuel for its nuclear power plants, but highly enriched uranium is also a key ingredient for a nuclear bomb. As a deterrent, the UN has imposed increasing economic sanctions.
• "At one time the area of the country was triple what it is now, and it was a stable superpower for more than a thousand years," said Saeed, a slender, refined man in glasses and starched shirtsleeves rolled to three-quarter length, sitting in his elegant apartment next to a lamp resembling a cockatoo, with real feathers. The empire once encompassed today's Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Jordan, Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, and the Caucasus region.
• "The borders have moved in over the centuries, but this superpower nostalgia, so in contradiction to reality," he said, "is all because of the history."

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• At the foundation of which, again, is Cyrus, and in particular something called the Cyrus Cylinder—perhaps Iran's most exalted artifact—housed at the British Museum in London, with a replica residing at UN headquarters in New York City.
• It can be read as a call for religious and ethnic freedom; it banned slavery and oppression of any kind, the taking of property by force or without compensation; and it gave member states the right to subject themselves to Cyrus's crown, or not. "I never resolve on war to reign."
• "When I go abroad, people get surprised when they realize that 65 percent of the college students here are girls. Or when they see Iranian paintings and Iranian architecture, they are shocked. They are judging a civilization just by what they have heard in the last 30 years"—the Islamic revolution; the rollbacks of personal freedoms, particularly for women; the nuclear program and antagonism with the West.
• They know nothing of the thousands of years that came before, she said—what the Iranians went through to remain distinct from their invaders, and how they did it.

• For instance, she said, after the Arabs came, and Iran converted to Islam, "eventually we turned to the Shiite sect, which was different from the Arabs, who are Sunni."

    

  They were still Muslims, but not Arabs.

    

  "We were Iranian."
• In fact, the first thing people said when I asked what they wanted the world to know about them was, "We are not Arabs!" (followed closely by, "We are not terrorists!").
• A certain Persian chauvinism creeps into the dialogue. Even though economically they're not performing as well as Arab states like Dubai and Qatar, they still feel exceptional.
• The Arabs who conquered Iran are commonly regarded as having been little more than Bedouin living in tents, with no culture of their own aside from what Iran gave them, and from the vehemence with which they are still railed against, you would think it happened not 14 centuries ago but last week.
• I met a woman at a wedding who gave off the air of an aging movie star, her dapper husband beside her wearing his white dinner jacket and smoking out of a cigarette holder, and it wasn't five minutes before she lit into the Arabs.

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• "Everything went down after they came, and we have never been the same!" she said, wringing someone's neck in the air.
• And a friend I made here, an English teacher named Ali, spoke of how the loss of the empire still weighed on the national consciousness. "Before they came, we were a great and civilized power," he said, as we drove to his home on the outskirts of Shiraz, dodging motorcycles and tailgaters.
• Echoing commonly stated (though disputed) lore, he added: "They burned our books and raped our women, and we couldn't speak Farsi in public for 300 years, or they took out our tongues."
• The Iranians spoke Farsi anyway. The national language has been Arabized to some extent, but Old Persian remains at its root.
• The man credited with helping save the language, and the history, from oblivion is a tenth-century poet named Ferdowsi. Ferdowsi is Iran's Homer.
• Iranians idolize their poets—among many, Rumi, Sa‘id, Omar Khayyám, Hāfez (whose works are said to be consulted for guidance about love and life as much as, if not more than, the Islamic holy book, the Koran). When the people were oppressed by the latest invader and couldn't safely speak their minds, the poets did it for them, cleverly disguised in verse.
• "Sometimes they were executed," said Youssef the archaeologist, "but they did it anyway."
• So today, although Iran is home to many cultural denominations (and languages) other than Persian—Turkmen, Arab, Azeri, Baluchi, Kurd, and others—"everyone can speak Farsi," he said, "which is one of the oldest living languages in the world."
• The poet-hero Ferdowsi, a sincere Muslim who resented the Arab influence, spent 30 years writing, in verse with minimal use of Arabic-derived words, an epic history of Iran called the Shahnameh, or Book of Kings.
• This panorama of conflict and adventure chronicles 50 monarchies—their accessions to the throne, their deaths, the frequent abdications and forcible overthrows—and ends with the Arab conquest, depicted as a disaster.
• The most heralded character is Rostam, a chivalrous figure of courage and integrity, a national savior and "trickster hero," according to Dick Davis, a Persian scholar at Ohio State University who has translated the Shahnameh into English. "The stories of Rostam are their myths," he said. "This is how the Iranians see themselves."
• The work is haunted by the idea that those ethically most fitted to rule are precisely the ones most reluctant to rule, preferring instead to devote themselves to humankind's chief concerns: the nature of wisdom, the fate of the human soul, and the incomprehensibility of God's purposes.

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• The original Shahnameh is long gone, and all that's left are copies, including one in Tehran's Golestan Palace museum.
• the Iranians like to make little ceremonies out of everything, if they can.
• I had to wear a surgical mask to protect the manuscript from stray saliva and the condensation from my breath, and Behnaz put on white cotton gloves. She gently lifted the book, which dates to about 1430, out of its box and gingerly turned the pages with the tips of her fingers while I examined its 22 illustrations with a magnifying glass.
• They depicted scenes the collective cultural memory is steeped in—someone tied to a tree while awaiting his fate; Rostam unwittingly killing his own son, Sohrab, in battle; men on horseback with spears fighting invaders on elephants—all precisely drawn and vibrantly colored, using inks that were made from crushed stones mixed with the liquid squeezed from flower petals.
• It is said that just about anybody on the street, regardless of education, can recite some Ferdowsi, and there are usually readings going on at colleges or someone's apartment or traditional Persian teahouses, like one in south Tehran called Azari.
• The walls were covered with scenes from the Shahnameh, among them the one of Rostam killing Sohrab. A storyteller did a one-man dramatic reading, and afterward musicians played traditional music and sang about yearning for the love of a woman or for the love of Allah.
• People sat together at long tables or stretched out on platforms covered with Persian rugs, smoking their tiny Bahman cigarettes and clapping to the music, while waiters brought dates and cookies and tea in delicate little glasses with little spoons, followed by kebabs, yogurt milk, pickles, and beet salad.
• "They Can't Control What's Inside Us"
• Take the New Year: Nowruz, a 13-day extravaganza during which everything shuts down and the people eat a lot, dance, recite poetry, and build fires that they jump back and forth over.
• It's a thanksgiving of sorts, celebrated around the spring equinox, and a holdover holiday from Zoroastrianism, at one time the state religion of the Persians.
• By the time the Arabs arrived, bringing what was for them the new idea of worshipping a single God, Persians had been doing it for more than a millennium.

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• These days some officials see the bond with antiquity as a focus for hope. "We are a nation with such a history that the world could listen to us," Iranian Vice President Esfandiar Rahim Mashaee told me.
• "We hope that by taking pride in our archaeological sites, the people realize their capabilities, and it imbues the soul of the nation."
• But conservative Islamists who have no interest in reviving Persian identity can still hold sway. At times the government has tried to diminish the importance of Nowruz or replace it with a different New Year, such as the birthday of Imam Ali, the historical leader of the Shiite Muslims.
• "They would bring forces and arrest people," my friend Ali said. "But they couldn't get rid of Nowruz because we've been practicing Nowruz for 2,500 years! They don't really control us, because they can't control what's inside us."
• That has never stopped Iran's leaders from trying, or foreign powers from interfering—particularly after the country was discovered, around the turn of the 20th century, to be sitting on what Iran claims is an estimated 135 billion barrels of proven conventional oil reserves, the second largest in the world after Saudi Arabia.
• Adding to the drama is that the Persian Gulf is located along Iran's southern border. On the other side lies much of the rest of the world's crude, in the oil fields of Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
• There's also a hairpin waterway in the gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world's oil passes every day. So Iran is in a unique position to threaten the world's oil supply and delivery—or sell its own oil elsewhere than to the West.
• Oil was at the root of a 1953 event that is still a sore subject for many Iranians: the CIA-backed overthrow, instigated and supported by the British government, of Iran's elected and popular prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh.
• Mossadegh had kicked out the British after the Iranian oil industry, controlled through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later BP), was nationalized, and the British had retaliated with an economic blockade.
• With the Cold War on and the Soviet bloc located just to the north, the U.S. feared that a Soviet-backed communism in Iran could shift the balance of world power and jeopardize Western interests in the region.
• The coup—Operation TP-Ajax—is believed to have been the CIA's first. (Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., Teddy's grandson, ran the show, and H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the father of the Persian Gulf war commander, was enlisted to coax the shah into playing his part.

  • The father of the U.S. Commander of forces during Desert Storm, Schwarzkopf, H. Norman Schwarzkopf was involved in the 1953 CIA overthrow of the Iranian government in favor of the Shah. Small world it is, indeed.
• Its base of operations was the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, the future "nest of spies" to the Iranians, where 52 U.S. hostages were taken in 1979.)
• Afterward, the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was  returned to power, commercial oil rights fell largely to British and U.S. oil companies, and Mossadegh was imprisoned and later placed under house arrest until he died in 1967.
• To Iranians like Shabnam Rezaei, who has created the online magazine Persian Mirror to promote Iran's cultural identity, Operation TP-Ajax set the stage for later decades of oppression and Islamic fundamentalism. "I think if we had been allowed to have a democratic government," she said, "we could have been the New York of the Middle East—of all of Asia, frankly—a center for finance, industry, commerce, culture, and a modern way of thinking."

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• For the Love of God
• The shah had his own uses for Persian identity. He was big on promoting Persepolis and Cyrus while at the same time pouring Western music, dress, behaviors, and business interests into Iran.
• One attempt to instill nationalistic pride, which backfired and helped turn public opinion against him, was the ostentatious celebration he staged in 1971 to commemorate the 2,500th anniversary of Persian monarchy.
• It featured a luxurious tent city outside the entrance to Persepolis, VIP apartments with marble bathrooms, food flown in from Paris, and a guest list that included dignitaries from around the world but few Iranians.
• The shah's vision apparently involved too much modernizing too fast, and many Iranians bristled.
• "We were getting westernized," said Farin Zahedi, a drama professor at the University of Tehran. "But it was superficial, because the public had no real under­standing of Western culture." Iranians experienced it as a cultural attack and rebelled in the press and with street demonstrations.
• The more paranoid the shah became, the more heavy-handed were his secret police—SAVAK, created in 1957 with the help of American and Israeli advisers.
• At least hundreds of people are believed to have been executed by SAVAK; many others were imprisoned, tortured, and exiled, and more than a thousand were killed by the army during demonstrations.
• So when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini spoke in the late 1970s of liberating the people from this latest yoke, they were moved by his eloquence and moral rectitude, and for a time the reemergence of religion after the shah's relentless modernism felt like a cleansing.
• Yet many Iranians by nature are not particularly religious, in the sense of being mosque­goers and fasters.
• "They have a powerful soul and spirit," said a carpet salesman named Arsha, "but that is not the same." There's a tendency to follow more of a Zoroastrian model from antiquity, with its disdain for rules and for the presumption that an intermediary, such as a mullah, is required to know Allah.
• The spiritual journey has tended to be more inward, in keeping with the Persian proverb "Knowledge of self is knowledge of God."
• So while Iranians at first were open to the idea of an increased role of Islam in public life, they weren't prepared for it to be forced on them with such rigor, especially given the Koran's specific instruction that there should be "no compulsion in religion."
• They certainly didn't expect the clerics to take over commerce, government administration, the courts, and day-to-day life, down to and including how to go to the bathroom and how to have sex.
• Punishments reminiscent of the Dark Ages—public stonings, hangings, the cutting off of fingers and limbs—were put into effect.
• The central government now discourages some of these archaic practices, but stubborn conservative mullahs out in the provinces cling to the old ways. Beneath it all is the spiritual aim to serve Allah and prepare for paradise.
• "They're forcing heaven on me!" Ali said.

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• At his home one night, half a dozen friends sat in a circle and confided how awful it was to be trapped in an environment of fear and secrecy, not knowing if a friend or a loved one has been put in a position to make reports on what you're thinking and saying and doing.
• "The ayatollahs and the ordinary people—everyone has to pretend," said a soft-spoken locksmith with a huge mustache named Mister D. "You don't know who is telling the truth; you don't know who is really religious and who isn't."
• The Persians have a saying: The walls have mice, and the mice have ears.

• "You can't trust your own eyes," Ali said.

    

  "If you breathe in or breathe out," Mister D said, "they know."
• The Generation of the Revolution
• As for the revolution's effect on Persian identity? A typically Iranian thing seems to have happened.
• For ten years the doors to the West were closed, and conservative clerics running the government went about trying to minimize any cultural identification that was pre-Islamic, a period referred to in much of the Muslim world as Jahiliya, age of ignorance.
• In official documents, where possible, references to Iran were replaced with references to Islam. Zoroastrian symbols were replaced with Islamic symbols, streets were renamed, and references to the Persian Empire disappeared from schoolbooks.
• For a time it seemed that Ferdowsi's tomb—a big, pale-stone mausoleum outside the holy city of Mashhad, with a beautiful reflecting pool leading up to it and chirping birds racing about the columns—might be destroyed. Even Persepolis was in danger of being razed. "But they realized this would unite the people against them," Ali said, "and they had to give up."
• The people had welcomed the removal of cultural junk from the West, said Farin, the drama professor, as we sipped tea in her tasteful Tehran apartment. "But we soon realized that the identity the government was introducing also was not exactly who we were."
• In the cultural confusion, "elements of the old culture"—traditional music, Persian paintings, readings from Ferdowsi—were rekindled. "We call it 'the forgotten empire.' "

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• A young underground Persian rap singer named Yas joined us then. He had black spiky hair, stylishly long sideburns, handsome eyebrows shaped like two black bananas, and around his neck he wore a silver fravahar, the Zoroastrian winged disk that signifies the soul's upward progress through good thoughts, words, and deeds.
• He's part of the Generation of the Revolution, who grew up after 1979 and account for more than two-thirds of the country's 70 million people.
• Variously described as jaded and lacking belief in their futures—"a burned generation," as Kurdish filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi put it—they are increasingly leaving for Europe and elsewhere.
• Some have a rich consciousness of their Persian past while at the same time supporting the idea of Islamic unity; some feel only Persian or only Islamic; and others immerse themselves in Western culture through television programming received on illegal satellite dishes. Farin said: "They're schizophrenic."
• One of his most popular cuts, "My Identity," was in response to the movie 300, about the famous battle at Thermopylae between the Spartans of Greece and the so-called Persian immortals. "The Greeks were portrayed as heroic, innocent, and civilized," Yas said. "The Persians were shown as ugly savages with a method of fighting that was unfair."
• Yas raps about Persian poets, grandparents, and the history of Iran.
• The movie set off a tirade from Iranians here and abroad, who experienced it as a cultural attack. In defense, Yas rapped about Persepolis and Cyrus but also chastised his fellow citizens for resting on the laurels of greatness past.
• An irony is that the Islamic revolution—at times referred to here as the "second Arab invasion"—appears to have strengthened the very ties to antiquity that it tried so hard to sever; it has roused that part of the national identity that remains connected to the idea, memorialized in places like Persepolis and Pasargadae, of Iranians as direct descendants of some of the world's most ancient continuous people.
• A civil engineer named Hashem told me of a recent  impromptu celebration at Cyrus's tomb. People text messaged each other on their cell phones, and a couple of thousand "coincidentally" showed up, buying multiple entrance tickets to support restoration of the tomb. The celebration was informal. No speeches, no ceremony. "Just to honor Cyrus and show solidarity."
• As Farin put it, shaking her lowered head with an air of world-weariness, "there has been this constant onslaught on our identity, and the reaction has always been to return to that deepest identity. Inside every Iranian there is an  emperor or an empress. That is for sure."

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• A TX Reader Explains The "Southern Dimension" Of The "Patriotic Immigration Reform" Movement
• From:       Don Reynolds (email   him)
• Re:      "A   Pennsylvania Reader Says Immigration Reform Patriots   Have Better Things To Do Than Argue About The Civil War;   etc."
• I have read and re-read this note several times and it   is priceless.
• I must   thank the writer for reminding me,   and many other Southerners, of the fact that our Yankee   cousins strongly disapprove of many things that we   think, do, and believe.
• I cannot estimate the magnitude   of misinformation that packed into this short note, but   I am convinced that the writer actually believes every   word.
• I certainly hope he will continue with his   South-bashing, notably his disrespectful remarks about    Robert E. Lee and other    Confederate leaders. He’s the perfect example of why   this Union of States cannot continue indefinitely.
• We   are different people and our societies are incompatible.
• Is there a Southern dimension to the  "Patriotic   Immigration Reform" movement in this country?   Undoubtedly the South is the most consistent and steady   part of that movement.
• If you map the    Senate votes in favor of amnesty for illegal aliens,,   you will find that very few of those votes were from the   eleven states of the former Confederacy.
• It is Yankee   senators to see who is trying to force amnesty on this   nation.
• Mr.   Cleburne did not write his article to annoy   anyone...nor should his article about the Civil War. He   was rightly responding to the silly comparisons of    Obama to Lincoln lately, which are at least   premature and probably deliberately misleading.
• Let me be the first of what will likely be many   Southerners who will encourage this writer to disrespect   the South. It makes our job much, much easier.
• Reynolds is a city planner and economist. His previous   letters about bias in journalism, the   U.S.  enemy identification problems, the folly of a third   party and Ron Paul are    here,    here,    here and    here.
• Patrick Cleburne comments:   Before his death, the South was well defended on    VDARE.COM by  Sam   Francis. Subsequently, the task is often handled by  Mike   Scruggs (see    here). This    letter by Scruggs is also of interest.

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• Stone Age satnav: Did ancient man use 5,000-year-old travel chart to navigate across Britain
• By  David Derbyshire
   Last updated at 9:07 AM on 15th September 2009

• It's considered to be one of the more recent innovations to help the hapless traveller.

  But the satnav system may not be as modern as we think.
• According to a new theory, prehistoric man navigated his way across England using a similar system based on stone circles and other markers.
•   

  Connected by triangles: Some of the sites created by Stone Age man (below)

• The complex network of stones, hill forts and earthworks allowed travellers to trek hundreds of miles with 'pinpoint accuracy' more than 5,000 years ago, amateur historian Tom Brooks says. The grid covered much of southern England

   

  and Wales and included landmarks such as Stonehenge and Silbury Hill, claims Mr Brooks, a retired marketing executive of Honiton, Devon.
• He analysed 1,500 prehistoric sites in England and Wales and was able to connect all of them to at least two other sites using isosceles triangles  -  these are triangles with two sides the same length.
• This, he says, is proof that the landmarks were deliberately created as navigational aides. Many were built within sight of each other and provided a simple way to get from A to B.
• For more complex journeys, they would have broken up the route into a series of easy to navigate steps.
• Anyone starting at Silbury Hill in Wiltshire, for instance, could have used the grid to get to Lanyon Quoit in Cornwall without a map.

• Mr Brooks added: 'The sides of some of the triangles are over 100 miles across, yet the distances are accurate to within 100 metres. You cannot do that by chance.

    

  One of the monuments was on Silbury Hill, Wiltshire. It was part of a giant geometric grid used for navigating
• 'So advanced, sophisticated and accurate is the geometrical surveying now discovered, that we must review fundamentally the perception of our Stone Age forebears as primitive, or conclude that they received some form of external guidance.'
• On the question of 'external guidance', he does not rule out extraterrestrial help.
• However, Mike Pitts, editor of British Archaeology, said: 'The landscape of southern Britain was intensively settled and there are many earth works and archaeological finds. It is very easy to find patterns in the landscape, but it doesn't mean that they are real.'

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• Friday, Oct. 2, 2009
• The dogu have something to tell us

• Neither human nor animal, Japan's Jomon sculptures are a mystery to be enjoyed
• By VICTORIA JAMES

     

  Special to The Japan Times
• LONDON — They are, according to their kanji, part earth and part spirit, somewhere between animal and human. They are dogu,
• the most remarkable products of Japan's Jomon Period, a Neolithic era before the advent of rice cultivation, when the Japanese archipelago supported higher population densities than any other pre-agricultural society in the world.
• The dogu are humanoid forms shaped in clay, large and small, richly decorated or homely and unadorned.
• Some 18,000 of them have been unearthed to date, in Jomon-period settlements stretching from Kyushu, north through Tohoku to Hokkaido.
• The oldest are nearly 10,000 years old, the youngest a mere 2,300. Yet despite their advanced age, they're on the move.
• Sixty-seven dogu, loaned from collections across Japan, have taken up temporary residence in the British Museum, London, for a new exhibition: "The Power of Dogu."
• In December, they return home for three months' display at Tokyo National Museum.
• The dogu are oddly hypnotic, a parade of the beautiful, brutal and uncanny: a cat-faced dogu, designed without legs; a dogu with an outsize heart-shaped face; a sturdy dogu wearing an enigmatic triangular mask, and perhaps most famous of all, a "goggle-eyed" dogu from Kamegaoka covered in stippled and corded markings.
•    Tanabatake "Venus": A big-bottomed dogu from Nagano Prefecture, 2500-1500 B.C.        CHINO CITY BOARD OF EDUCATION
• There are dogu with horns, with flat heads, bow-legs, dogu wearing bodices, knee-pads, dogu holding pots.
• Some dogu invite immediate empathy, like the fragmentary figure of a mother cradling a baby; others, like the lofty standing dogu, nearly half a meter tall, appear hieratic and inscrutable.
• It seems hard to believe they could all represent a common phenomenon, one to which Meiji Era archaeologists in 1882 first gave the name "dogu."
• "The rich diversity of the dogu tradition is one of the themes we wanted to present in the exhibition," explains curator Dr. Simon Kaner, an archaeologist of the Sainsbury Institute who specializes in the prehistory of Japan.
• "The Japanese archipelago during the Jomon period was occupied by a large number of different groups of people, or different societies — we should talk not of Jomon culture but Jomon cultures, Jomon peoples and not Jomon people.
• They probably spoke a number of different dialects and expressed themselves through a huge range of pottery styles — over 400 local styles have been recognized to date."
• Indeed, the dogu are both an intensely local form of expression, and also manifest a shared urge by Neolithic peoples around the world to represent the human form in clay.
• Humanoid figures of a comparable age have been found as far afield as Mexico, Turkey, Ecuador, Romania and Egypt.
• Curiously, Japan's nearest neighbors do not appear to have had an equivalent tradition.
• "There are very few ceramic figures from the Korean Peninsula," says Kaner. "And in China the human form was represented by painting on pots, or by very different forms, like the 'temple' or 'shrine' from Niuheliang, which has life-size unbaked clay figures around the walls."
• So what did the dogu mean to their Jomon makers?
• The British Museum exhibition is part of an ongoing debate in the field of Neolithic studies as to the nature and purpose of early sculptural representation of the human form.
• The 1960s saw a proliferation of theories around so-called "mother goddess" figures, often nicknamed "Venus." (Indeed, pride of place in the current exhibition goes to a big-bottomed dogu known as the Tanabatake "Venus" — a label Kaner agrees is "not very helpful.")
•     Dogu aesthetics: A hollow clay figure, 1500-1000 B.C., from Chobonaino, Hokkaido.     © OGAWA TADAHIRO / HAKODATE CITY BOARD OF EDUCATION
• The "Venus" theory has declined in popularity in recent years, while scientists working on a hoard of 2,000 figures found at Catalhoyuk in Turkey announced earlier this month a new hypothesis that the artifacts were not ritual objects, but simply toys.
• Many were, like the Catalhoyuk figurines, "everyday" objects — the majority have been found broken, some in heaps. If they were toys, what does that imply about the status of children, or the very idea of childhood, in Jomon cultures?
• The function of dogu remains mysterious
• Some dogu were, certainly, given special treatment — placed alongside burials or "enshrined" in pits.
• Kaner thinks "there is scope for both 'everyday' figures and objects of veneration within the dogu tradition."
• Whatever their ritual or workaday function, the dogu are also, irresistibly, art. Their whimsical forms enchant, and their craftsmanship — some dogu are large and hollow, many are perfectly balanced and freestanding — is undoubted.
• An essay in the handsome catalog makes a case for the dogu as art, and for the current exhibition as a "turning point" in the wider recognition of that artistry.
• Their first champion in this regard, however, was the avant-garde artist Taro Okamoto, whose "The Myth of Tomorrow" was unveiled in Shibuya Station last year.
• Okamoto's work, both painting and sculpture, was profoundly influenced by his affinity with Jomon design.
• He wrote of one encounter with a piece of Jomon pottery: "My blood boiled to a tremendous heat and then burst into flames."
• On another occasion, he reflected: "The violent existence of Jomon ceramics manifests itself in a pulse of energy that can never be grasped by normal aesthetics and intellectual control."
• Another Jomon enthusiast was Nobel prize-winning author Yasunari Kawabata, who had a dogu on his desk. It is a lugubrious figure with a heart-shaped face, and Kawabata described in an essay how "it is sitting here in front of my writing paper and speaking to me."
• Dogu still speak — albeit through rather different media today. They feature in the "Understanding Japanese History" comic-book series narrated by cult robocat Doraemon, whose human sidekick Nobita remarks that they "look like aliens."
• In the PlayStation game "Dokioki," the dogu are indeed aliens. Shinji Nishikawa's "Dogu Famir," a seven-volume comic series, features a family of figurines trying to fit into everyday life — shopping, attending school and protecting the usual assortment of scantily-clad manga heroines from an evil, UFO-controlled dogu.

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• Archaeologist Claims Human Sacrifice Performed At Cahokia Mounds

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• bnd.com - Human sacrifice! Victims buried alive! Read all about it in "Cahokia -- Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi."
• According to this new book by University of Illinois archaeologist and professor of anthropology Tim Pauketat, the mound builders were not always the idyllic, corn-growing, pottery-making, fishing-hunting gentle villagers depicted in various dioramas at the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Collinsville.
• Pauketat said these long-vanished people practiced human sacrifice of women and men on a mass scale and weren't always careful to bury only the dead.

  • Wondering in that dem American past if the Mound Builders of North America and the pyramid builders of South and Central America did not have some relationship one to another in their respective constructions as well as human sacrifices
  Add Sticky Note
• Based on years of study of artifacts including many from the extensive excavation of the site's Mound 72 during 1967-71, Pauketat's book is getting national attention. The Washington Post described it as "undeniably hot." A national online review service used the headline, "Sacrificial virgins of the Mississippi."
• But the "virgins" angle may be a bit of an overstatement, said Pauketat, but not by much.
• "In the book I do not use the word virgin. I used female sacrifices," he said, noting that close study of the pelvic area of some of 53 female skeletons found in a huge pit below the mound showed clear signs of childbirth.
• "They were selecting women of a certain age, but it's not like they're selecting virgins," he said. Most of the sacrificial victims were in their early 20s, he said.
  
• The existence of 260 skeletal remains including of women all retrieved from within and under Mound 72 was not previously unknown in the metro-east. But because of the book, it's sensational news in other parts of the country, especially in big Eastern cities where residents are unfamiliar with the Midwest's often savage early history.
• Pauketat said that the vast collection of data from the mound excavation included reports from the original archaeologist who found finger bones extended deep into the sand below some of the skeletons, evidence that victims were alive when buried.
• "That's the interpretation of the original excavator. He's quite sure of that. I talked to him in person," Pauketat said.
• "Basically, the book came together after we reached a critical threshold, all of the little pieces started falling into place. A lot of pieces from the Mound 72 dig are important because they help make sense of all the other pieces that have been found."
• Ancient Cahokia, which reached its peak about 1150 A.D. with a population of 20,000, was a religious center of farmers and hunters that probably influenced much of what archaeologists call the Southeast Ceremonial Complex, a string of similar but smaller sites found from Illinois to northern Florida.
• It was abandoned about 100 to 200 years later and its descendants are believed to be the various tribes from historic times.
• At the time of its zenith, Cahokia rivaled London in population and was America's most-populous city until Philadelphia eclipsed it in the 18th century.
• About 80 of the original 120 mounds survive, including Monks Mound, the largest prehistoric earthen structure north of Mexico.
• In this society, often referred to as the Mississippian Culture, women played much more of a role than convenient sacrificial victims, Pauketat said. And even in this death ritual, women were respected, unlike some of the men whose remains were found with heads lopped off.

  • So much for the glorified and lately proferred "goddess worship societies of peace and harmony"
  Add Sticky Note
• "The women never show injury. There is no trauma. So that means either they drank poison or they were strangled. But, that's speculation. They were very carefully placed into these pits," he said.
• And in the practice of various religious rites, evidence has been found that women were the rivals of this society's male religious leaders.
• Ancient Cahokia's big draw, according to the book, was religion
• Pauketat said the evidence is in the form of curious female figurines carved from a type of clay found just south of St. Louis known as flint clay. The reddish substance dries rock hard.
• Just last month, a small, 4-inch high female figure was found at a state-run archaeological dig in East St. Louis. Pauketat said only 23 other such figurines are known, including the largest, about 16 inches high.
• The elevated status of women in religion in Cahokian society is illustrated, Pauketat said, by the decorations on the figurines that include a highly prized serpent figure, and of depictions of staple foods like corn and squash.

  • Females and serpent figures...interesting..Native American memories of the Genesis Garden of Eden record?
  Add Sticky Note
• On some figurines, baskets that have been interpreted as holding the bones of ancestors also have been carved into the statues.
• "Clearly, a lot of the artwork of female gods and female figureheads show that women were probably highly elevated at Cahokia."
• Pauketat said that at Cahokia, religion drew people from small farming villages all over the metro-east and from where present day St. Louis stands.
• "People recognized in that place (Cahokia) a supernatural power on a scale and of a kind that was probably unknown in North America north of Mexico," he said
• As for the female sacrifices, Pauketat said important women may have been chosen because of their status.
• "These female sacrifices might not have been of unimportant people. This may have been a very honored role to fill. It may have been people who were impersonating some kind of corn goddess," he said, "And their duty was to die."

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• Pre-Islamic period of Afghanistan
• From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• This article needs additional citations for verification.
   Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (February 2007)
• Archaeological exploration of the Pre-Islamic period of Afghanistan began in Afghanistan in earnest after World War II and proceeded until the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan disrupted it in December 1979.
• Louis Dupree, the University of Pennsylvania, the Smithsonian Institution and others suggests that humans were living in ancient Afghanistan at least 50,000 years ago, and that farming communities of the country were among the earliest in the world.^[1
• Artifacts typical of the Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron ages were found.^[2]
• Prehistory
• It is not yet clear, however, to what extent these periods were contemporaneous with similar stages of development in other geographic regions.
• The area that is now Afghanistan seems in prehistory, as well as ancient and modern times, to have been closely connected by culture and trade with the neighbouring regions to the east, west, and north.
• Urban civilization, which includes most of Iran, Afghanistan, North Western Province of Pakistan which are Pashtoons, may have begun as early as 3000 to 2000 BCE (see also Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex and Indus Valley Civilization).
• The ancient city of Mudigak may have been a provincial colony of the Indus Valley Civilization or closely affiliated, but this remains largely circumstantial and speculative.
• Archaeological finds also indicate the possible beginnings of the Bronze Age which would ultimately spread throughout the ancient world from Afghanistan.
• It is also believed that the region had early trade contacts with Mesopotamia.
• Ancient Afghanistan: From the Aryans to the Medes. 1500 BCE–551 BCE
• Between 2000–1200 BCE, a branch of Indo-European-speaking tribes known as the Aryans began migrating into the region.
• They appear to have split into old Persian peoples, Nuristani, and Indian groups at an early stage, possibly between 1500 and 1000 BCE in what is today Afghanistan or much earlier as eastern remnants of the Indo-Aryans drifted much further west as with the Mitanni.
• The Aryans (thought to be ancestors of Pashtoons), Nuristanis, and western Indo-Aryans dominated the modern day plateau, while the Indo-Aryans ultimately headed towards the Indian subcontinent.
• The Avesta is believed to have been composed possibly as early as 1800 BCE and written in ancient Ariana (Aryana), the earliest name of Afghanistan which indicates an early link with today's Iranian tribes to the west, or adjacent regions in Central Asia or northeastern Iran in the 6th century BCE.^[3]
• The western Indo-Aryans stayed in Afghanistan and North Western Province of Pakistan, which is the Pashtoons.
• Due to the similarity between early Avestan and Sanskrit (and other related early Indo-European languages such as Latin and Ancient Greek), it is believed that the split between the old Persians and Indo-Aryan tribes had taken place at least by 1000 BCE.
• There are striking similarities between the Old Afghan language of Avestan and Sanskrit, which may support the notion that the split was contemporary with the Indo-Aryans living in Afghanistan at a very early stage.
• Also, the Avesta itself divides into Old and New sections and neither mention the Medes who are known to have ruled Afghanistan starting around 700 BCE.
• This suggests an early time-frame for the Avesta that has yet to be exactly determined as most academics believe it was written over the course of centuries if not millennia.
• Much of the archaeological data comes from the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC and indus Valley Civilization) that probably played a key role in early Aryanic civilization in Afghanistan.
• It has also been surmised by many researchers that the Aryan prophet Zoroaster was born somewhere in ancient Aryana, possibly in the ancient city of Balkh, and the timeframe of his life literally spans millennia from as early 2000 BCE to as late as 600 BCE.
• Zoroastrianism spread throughout the region alongside early pagan beliefs and centuries later Buddhism.
• During this early period, the Pashtuns or some of their early Aryan ancestors are believed to have originated near the vicinity of Kandahar and/or the Sulaiman Mountains and possibly begun to expand into other parts of Afghanistan.
• Herodotus mentions a tribe called the Pactyan as inhabiting much of what is today Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan, and it is speculated by some that these people were the ancient ancestors of the Pashtuns, although, aside from phonetic name similarities, this remains unproven.
• Others such as Strabo relate the existence of tribes west of the Indus as part of Ariana, whereas the east is referred to as 'India',it is somehow clear abouth the various Pashtun tribes that Strabo is referring to.
• Arrian's Indica also makes reference to various tribes west of the Indus who may have been ancestors of the Pashtuns.
• The Rig Veda makes mention of a group called the Pakhat and it is possible that either this is a reference to the ancestors of the Pashtuns or a reference to an Indo-Aryan-speaking group or some other tribe altogether.
• Though predominantly pagan, some Pashtuns may have adopted Buddhist and Zoroastrian traditions, whereas other eastern Afghans remained pagans not unlike their neighbors the Kafirs of Nuristan as well as the Kalash.
• The Medes, a Western Persian people, arrived from what is today Kurdistan sometime around the 700s BCE and came to dominate most of ancient Afghanistan.
• They were an early tribe that forged the first empire on the present Iranian plateau and were rivals of the Persians whom they initially dominated in the province of Fars to the south.
• Median domination of Afghanistan would last until the Persians challenged and ultimately replaced them from their original base in Fars in southern Iran near ancient Elam.
• Early Indo-Aryans prior to their move to India
• In the region around what is today Kabul and eastern Afghanistan, an early Indo-Iranian or specifically some early Indo-Aryan culture may have emerged as eastern Afghanistan could possibly have been either the site of the Vedic civilization, that later came to influence and dominate the culture of northern India, or had links to it somewhere to the east either along the Indus or Ganges river valleys.^[4]
• At some point that has yet to be determined, but possibly between 12th to 8th century BCE, Gandhara - which spans from Kandahar to some of the other Pashtoon provinces in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Kamboja, two of the sixteen Mahajanapadas (in Sanskrit 'Great Kingdoms') frequently referred to in Buddhist and Hindu religious texts are believed to have evolved as important political entities in what is today south-eastern Afghanistan.
• Many scholars believe that while the Gandharans were early Indo-Aryan-speakers, the Kambojas were either Iranian or Indo-Iranian-speaking.
• Both groups find frequent mention in numerous ancient Sanskrit and Pali texts, in particular the Mahabharata and numerous Puranic literature.
• Alexander’s historians refer to the tribal population of Paropamisade as consisting of such clans as the Parsyetae (Parshu/Parshava), Aspasii (Aspasians), Asteknois (Hastiyanas), and Assakenois (Ashvakanas) and others.
• This nomenclature possibly demonstrates that while most of this tribal population was, there were also some population segments which may have spoken early Indo-Aryan tongues prior to their movements to India.
• This is because while the tribal name Parsyete implies Old Afghan affinities and the Aspasii (derived from Farsi-Dari also Pashtu word Aspa) also indicates an Aryanic horse culture,
• the Assakenois (Sanskrit Ashvakan) of the Swat valley, on the other hand, were possibly an Indo-Aryan horsemen culture as their name derives from the Sanskrit Ashva (horse).
• The Aspasian peoples are believed to be the western branch of the Ashvakas or Assakenians (Political history of Ancient India, 1996, p 216; Cambridge History of India, 352, n 3).
• The Assakenois and Aspasios of the classical writings or the Ashvakas of the Sanskrit texts are believed by numerous scholars to have been sub-sections of the ancient Kambojas in reference to their equestrian nature.
• The rock edict V of Emperor Ashoka found at Shahbazgarhi and Mansehra prominently refers to the Yonas (Ionian Greeks), Kambojas and Gandharas,
• while rock edict XIII refers to the Greeks and Kambojas (Yonakambojesu) as people of the western frontiers.
• It is noteworthy that Ashoka’s rock edicts/inscriptions written exclusively in Aramaic have been discovered only in the Paropamisade (region between river Kabol and Hindukush Mt), whereas those in Greek and Aramaic were discovered in Arachosia (south-east Afghanistan) and in Prakrit and Aramaic in Gandhara region (Peshawer to Rawalpindi).
• Scholars believe that the Greek version of Ashokan inscriptions was intended for the Yonas (the Greeks or Aryans), the Prakrit version for the Indo-Aryan Gandharas, while the Aramaic version was directed at the Kambojas
• This shows that Paropamisade region (an Aramaic territory) was inhabited by early Persian Kambojas as the Aramaic was an official language for the Persian tribes under Achaemenid rulers.
• Moreover, as a Greco-Aramaic inscription (known as Shar-i-Kuna inscription) was discovered in 1957 in Kandhahar also, this, according to some scholars, may attest that a section of the Aramaic-knowing Kambojas (or other Iranian tribes) were also possibly located north of Kandhahar as neighbors to the Greeks.
• Dr Michael Witzel identifies the region from Kabol valley to as far as Kandhahar as inhabited by the ancestors of Pashtoons, Persica-9, 1981, pp 86–123).
• The compound expression Yonakambojesu of Ashoka’s Rock Edict XIII as well as of Buddhist Majjhima Nikaya (43.1.3), powerfully supports this view.
• It is now generally accepted by many Indic scholars that the Kambojas were an early Pashtoon people who migrated to today's Iran who may have been partially absorbed into larger tribes in Afghanistan and/or else partially forced to move east where they were further absorbed into the populations of what is today northern Pakistan and India^[5].
• Current minuscule population of Kamboj, Kamboh and Kamoz, the modern representatives of ancient Kambojas, in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan is estimated to be approximately around 1.5 millions.
• The chronology of major events and corresponding archaeology remains highly sporadic as does the religious connotation which remains unverifiable.
• Achaemenid Rule, and rise of Zoroastrianism ca. 550 BCE–331 BCE
• The city of Bactria (which later became Balkh), is believed to have been the home of Zarathustra, who founded the Zoroastrian religion.
• The Avesta refers to eastern Bactria as being the home of the Zoroastrian faith, but this can be a reference to either a region in modern Afghanistan or Border line of Afghan-Pakistan.
• Regardless of the debate as to where Zoroaster was from, Zoroastrianism spread to become one of the world's most influential religions and became the main faith of the old Aryan people for centuries.
• It also remained the official religion of Persia until the defeat of the Sassanian ruler Yazdegerd III—over a thousand years after its founding—by Muslim Arab.
• In what is today southern Iran, the Persians emerged to challenge Median supremacy on the Iranian plateau.
• By 550 BCE, the Persians had replaced Median rule with their own dominion and even began to expand past previous Median imperial borders. Both Gandhara and Kamboja Mahajanapadas of the Buddhist texts soon fell a prey to the Achaemenian Dynasty during the reign of Achaemenid, Cyrus the Great (558–530 BCE), or in the first year of Darius I.
• According to Pliny's evidence, Cyrus II had destroyed Kapisa in Capiscene (Naturalis Historia, VI, 25, 92) which was a Kamboja city.
• The former region of Gandhara and Kamboja (upper Indus) had constituted seventh satrapy of the Achaemenid Empire and annually contributed 170 talents of gold dust as a tribute to the Achaemenids.
• By the fourth century BCE, Persian control of outlying areas and the internal cohesion of the empire had become somewhat tenuous.
• Bactria had a special position in old Afghanistan, being the capital of a vice-kingdom.
• Although distant provinces like Bactriana had often been restless under Achaemenid rule, Bactrian troops nevertheless fought in the decisive Battle of Gaugamela in 330 BCE against the advancing armies of Alexander the Great.
• The Achaemenids were decisively defeated by Alexander and retreated from his advancing army of Greco-Macedonians and their Iranian allies.
• Darius III, the last Achaemenid ruler, tried to flee to Bactria, but was assassinated by a subordinate lord, the Bactrian-born Bessus, who proclaimed himself the new ruler of Persia as Artaxerxes, but was unable to mount a successful resistance to the growing military might of Alexander's army.
• Fleeing to his native Bactria, Bessus attempted to rally local Aryan tribes to his side, but was instead turned over to Alexander who proceeded to have him tortured and executed for having committed regicide.
• Alexander the Great, Seleucid-Mauryan rivalry, and Greco-Bactrian Rule, 330 BCE–ca. 150 BCE
• This article is missing citations or needs footnotes. Please help add inline citations to guard against copyright violations and factual inaccuracies. (March 2009)
• It had taken Alexander only six months to conquer Iran, but it took him nearly three years (from about 330 BCE–327 BCE) to subdue the area that is now Afghanistan.
• Moving eastward from the area of Herat, the Macedonian leader encountered fierce resistance from the local tribes of Aria (West Afghanistan), Drangiana (now part of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Eastern Iran), Arachosia (South and Central Afghanistan) and Bactria (North and Central Afghanistan).
• In a letter to his mother, Alexander described his encounters with the western and northern tribes (Afghans) thus: "I am involved in the land of a 'Leonine' (lion-like) and brave people, where every foot of the ground is like a wall of steel, confronting my soldier. You have brought only one son into the world, but everyone in this land can be called an Alexander.”

  • Alexander's letter to his mother regarding Afghanistan and it's tibes and people
  Add Sticky Note
• Local resistance and the difficult terrain made it difficult for Alexander's forces to subdue the region as many invaders have found the mountainous terrain of Afghanistan similar to a maze that often trapped outside invaders.
• Alexander also met his Bactrian/Sogdian bride, Roxana—who was reportedly born in Balkh—while trying to consolidate his rule over ancient Afghanistan and adjacent regions in Central Asia.
• Their union reportedly produced one sole heir, Alexander IV, who was later killed in Greece by Cassander.
• Although Alexander's expedition through ancient Afghanistan was brief, he left behind a Hellenic cultural influence that lasted several centuries.
• Upon Alexander's death in 323 BCE, his empire, which had never been politically consolidated, broke apart as his companions began to divide it amongst themselves. Alexander's cavalry commander, Seleucus, took nominal control of the eastern lands and founded the Seleucid dynasty.
• Under the Seleucids, as under Alexander, Greek colonists and soldiers colonized Bactria, roughly corresponding to modern Afghanistan's borders.
• However, the majority of Macedonian soldiers of Alexander the Great wanted to leave the east and return home to Greece.
• Later, Seleucus sought to guard his eastern frontier and moved Ionian Greeks (also known as Yavanas to many local groups) to Bactria in the third century BCE.
• Mauryan Period (305-180BCE)
• While the Diadochi were warring amongst themselves, the Mauryan Empire was developing in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent.
• The founder of the empire, Chandragupta Maurya, confronted a Macedonian invasion force led by Seleucus I in 305 BCE and following a brief conflict, an agreement was reached as Seleucus ceded Gandhara and Arachosia (centered around ancient Kandahar) and areas south of Bagram (corresponding to the extreme south-east of modern Afghanistan) to the Mauryans.
• During the 120 years of the Mauryans in southern Afghanistan, Buddhism was introduced and eventually become a major religion alongside Zoroastrianism and local pagan beliefs.
• The ancient Grand Trunk Road was built linking what is now Kabul to various cities in the Punjab and the Gangetic Plain.
• Commerce, art, and architecture (seen especially in the construction of stupas) developed during this period. It reach its high point under Emperor Ashoka whose edicts, roads, and rest stops were found throughout the subcontinent.
• Although the vast majority of them throughout the subcontinent were written in Prakrit, Afghanistan is notable for the inclusion of 2 Greek and Aramaic ones alongside the court language of the Mauryans.
• Inscriptions made by the Mauryan Emperor Ashoka, a fragment of Edict 13 in Greek, as well as a full Edict, written in both Greek and Aramaic has been discovered in Kandahar.
• It is said to be written in excellent Classical Greek, using sophisticated philosophical terms. In this Edict, Ashoka uses the word Eusebeia ("Piety") as the Greek translation for the ubiquitous "Dharma" of his other Edicts written in Prakrit:
• "Ten years (of reign) having been completed, King Piodasses (Ashoka) made known (the doctrine of) Piety (εὐσέβεια, Eusebeia) to men; and from this moment he has made men more pious, and everything thrives throughout the whole world. And the king abstains from (killing) living beings, and other men and those who (are) huntsmen and fishermen of the king have desisted from hunting. And if some (were) intemperate, they have ceased from their intemperance as was in their power; and obedient to their father and mother and to the elders, in opposition to the past also in the future, by so acting on every occasion, they will live better and more happily." (Trans. by G.P. Carratelli^[6])
• The last ruler in the region was probably Subhagasena (Sophagasenus of Polybius), who, in a ll probability, belonged to the Ashvaka (q.v.) background.
• Greco-Bactrian rule
• In the middle of the 3rd century BCE, an independent, Hellenistic state was declared in Bactria and eventually the control of the Seleucids and Mauryans was overthrown in western and southern Afghanistan.
• Graeco-Bactrian rule spread until it included a large territory which stretched from northeastern Iran in the west to the Punjab in India in the east by about 170 BCE.
• Graeco-Bactrian rule was eventually defeated by a combination of internecine disputes that plagued Greek and Hellenized rulers to the west, continual conflict with Indian kingdoms, as well as the pressure of two groups of nomadic invaders from Central Asia—the Parthians and Sakas.
• The Kushan Empire, ca. 150 BCE–300 CE
• The Parthians established control in most of what is Iran as early as the middle of the 3rd century BC;
• In the third and second centuries BC, the Parthians, a nomadic Iranian people, arrived in ancient Afghanistan.
• about 100 years later another Indo-European group from the north—the Tocharian Kushans (a subgroup of the tribe called the Yuezhi by the Chinese)—entered the region that is now Afghanistan and established an empire lasting almost four centuries.
• The Kushan Empire spread from the Kabul River valley to defeat other Central Asian tribes that had previously conquered parts of the northern central Iranian Plateau once ruled by the Parthians.
• By the middle of the 1st century BCE, the Kushans' base of control became Afghanistan and their empire spanned from the north of the Pamir mountains to the Ganges river valley in India.
• Early in the 2nd century under Kanishka, the most powerful of the Kushan rulers, the empire reached its greatest geographic and cultural breadth to become a center of literature and art.
• Kanishka extended Kushan control to the mouth of the Indus River on the Arabian Sea, into Kashmir, and into what is today the Chinese-controlled area north of Tibet.
• Kanishka was a patron of religion and the arts. It was during his reign that Mahayana Buddhism^{[citation needed]} , imported to northern India earlier by the Mauryan emperor Ashoka (ca. 260 BCE–232 BCE), reached its zenith in Central Asia.
• Though the Kushanas were predominantly Zoroastrian themselves^{[citation needed]}, they also supported local Buddhists and Hindus as well as the worship of various local
• Sassanian Rule, ca. 300–650
• In the 3rd century, Kushan control fragmented into semi-independent kingdoms that became easy targets for conquest by the rising Iranian dynasty, the Sassanians (ca. 224–561) which annexed Afghanistan by 300 CE.
• Sassanian control was tenuous at times as numerous challenges from Central Asian tribes led to instability and constant warfare in the region.
• The disunited Kushan and Sassanian kingdoms were in a poor position to meet the threat of a new wave of nomadic, Indo-European invaders from the north.
• The Hephthalites (or White Huns) swept out of Central Asia around the fourth century into Bactria and to the south, overwhelming the last of the Kushan and Sassanian kingdoms.
• Some have speculated that the name Afghanistan land of the Afghans derives from which could be an adjective such as brave, chivlarious, valour, which was to use for the people in today's Afghanistan. Historians believe that Hepthalite control continued for a century and was marked by constant warfare with the Sassanians to the west who exerted nominal control over the region.
• By the middle of the sixth century the Hephthalites were defeated in the territories north of the Amu Darya (the Oxus River of antiquity) by another group of Central Asian nomads, the Göktürks, and by the resurgent Sassanians in the lands south of the Amu Darya.
• It was the ruler of western Göktürks, Sijin (aka Sinjibu, Silzibul and Yandu Muchu Khan) who led the forces against the Hepthalites who were defeated at the Battle of Chach (Tashkent) and at the Battle of Bukhara.
• The Shahi Kings
• The Shahi dynasties ruled portions of the Kabul Valley (in eastern Afghanistan) and the old province of Gandhara (northern Pakistan and Kashmir) from the decline of the Kushan Empire in third century to the early ninth century.^[7]
• They are split into two eras the Buddhist Turk-Shahis (also known as the Kushano-Hephthalites and the later Hindu-Shahis with the change-over occurring around 870, and ruled up until the Islamic conquest of Afghanistan.
• When Xuanzang visited the region early in the 7th century CE, the Kabul valley region was ruled by a Kshatriya king, who is identified as the Shahi Khingal, and whose name has been found in an inscription found in Gardez.
• The Turk Shahi regency was overthrown and replaced by a Mohyal Shahi dynasty of Brahmins who began the first phase of the Hindu Shahi dynasty.
• These Hindu Shahi kings of Kabul and Gandhara may have had links to some ruling families in neighboring Kashmir and other areas to the east.
• The Shahis, though Hindu, were rulers of a predominantly Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Hindu and Muslim populations and were thus patrons of numerous faiths, and various artifacts and coins from their rule have been found that display their multicultural domain.
• In 964AD, the last Mohyal Hindu Shahi was succeeded by the Janjua overlord, Jayapala, of the Panduvanshi dynasty.
• The last Shahi emperors Jayapala, Anandapala and Tirlochanpala fought invading Muslim Turks from Central Asia and were gradually defeated and eventually exiled from their domains into northern India.
• Archaeological remnants from Afghanistan's pre-Islamic period
• Most of these early Zoroastrian, Greek, Hellenistic, Buddhist, and Hindu cultures were replaced by the coming of Islam and little influence remains in Afghanistan today.
• Along ancient trade routes, however, stone monuments of the once flourishing Buddhist culture did exist as reminders of the past. The two massive sandstone Buddhas of Bamyan, thirty-five and fifty-three meters high overlooked the ancient route through Bamyan to Balkh and dated from the third and fifth centuries.
• They survived until 2001, when they were destroyed by the Taliban.
• In this and other key places in Afghanistan, archaeologists have located frescoes, stucco decorations, statuary, and rare objects from as far away as China, Phoenicia, and Rome, which were crafted as early as the 2nd century and bear witness to the influence of these ancient civilizations upon Afghanistan.

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• Islamic Conquest
• Afghanistan History
• In 637 A.D., only five years after the death of the Prophet  Muhammad, the Arab Muslims shattered the might of the Iranian  Sassanians at the battle of Qadisiya, and the invaders began  to reach into the lands east of Iran.
• The Muslim conquest  was a prolonged struggle in the area that is now Afghanistan.
• Following the first Arab raid into Qandahar in about 700, local  rulers, probably either Kushans or Western Turks, began to come under the control of Ummayid caliphs, who sent Arab   military governors and tax collectors into the region.
• There was a period of peace under the  rule of the caliph, Harun al Rashid (7&S-809), and his son, in  which learning fluorished in such Central Asian cities as Samarkand,  located in what is now the Soviet Union.
• By the  middle of the eighth century the rising Abbasid Dynasty was  able to subdue the area.
• Over the  period of the seventh through the ninth centuries, most inhabitants  of what is now Afghanistan, Pakistan, the southern parts  of the Soviet Union, and some of northern India were converted  to Sunni Islam, which replaced the Zorastrianism,  Hinduism, Buddhism, and indigenous religions of previous  empires.
• During the eighth and ninth centuries, partly to obtain  better grazing land, ancestors of many of the Turkic-speaking
    groups now identifiable in Afghanistan settled in the Hindu  Kush area.
• Some of these tribes settled in what are now Ghor,
    Ghazni, and Kabul provinces and began to assimilate much of  the culture and language of the already present Pashtun tribes.
• By the middle of the ninth century, Abbasid rule had  faltered, and semi-independent states began to emerge  throughout the empire.
• In the Hindu Kush area three shortlived,  local dynasties emerged. The best known of the three,  the Sammanid, ruling out of Bukhara (in what is now the Soviet  Union), extended its rule briefly as far east as India and west  into Iran.
• Although Arab Muslim  intellectual life still centered on Baghdad, Iranian Muslim  scholarship, i.e., Shia Islam, at this time  predominated in the Sammanid areas.
• Bukhara and neighboring Samarkand were centers of  science, the arts, and Islamic studies.
• By the mid-tenth century  the Sammanid Dynasty crumbled in the face of attack from  the Turkish tribes to the north and from a rising dynasty to the  south, the Ghaznavids.

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• The Real Story of Nazi Egyptology
• Submitted by owenjarus on Tue, 09/01/2009 - 12:52
• Thomas Schneider is exploring a subject that has never been studied before.
• The University of British Columbia professor is examining the history of German Egyptology during the Nazi era. The period that lasted from when Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933 - until he committed suicide in his bunker in 1945.
• The research is a work in progress and Professor Schneider continues to receive new archival documents and information. He plans to turn his work into a book length manuscript.
• While popular fiction, such as the Indiana Jones trilogy, depicts action packed films about this topic, the real story is far more complex.
• Professor Schneider generously took the time to talk about his research with me. He also provided me with detailed written notes, that outline his research, to help me write this story.
• Hitler Comes to Power
• In January 1933, Adolf Hitler, head of the far-right National Socialist (Nazi) party, was sworn in as Chancellor.
• Over the next few years he and the Nazi party would gain control over Germany’s institutions and levers of power, allowing Hitler to govern as a de-facto tyrant.
• One of those institutions was the universities which, before the rise of the Nazis, had enjoyed a level of autonomy.
• A tradition established in the 19th century saw the state as a “benevolent patron” for academic life. With Hitler in power, that quickly changed.
• 

  Professor Thomas Schneider. Published on University of British Columbia website
• “Since its inception, National Socialism strove for implementing a new system of education in agreement with its doctrine across the country's institutions of learning,” Professor Schneider wrote.

  • Sounds very current in modern day USA
  Add Sticky Note
• “This policy was meant to be applied in a particularly stringent way to the institutions of higher learning which were seen as the potential spearheads of the new nation but also feared for their intellectual independence and power.”
• Before Hitler’s rise to power Germany was a respected centre of Egyptology. The foreign affairs ministry financed an archaeological institute in Cairo that was used as a base to conduct scientific research.
• The country’s scholars had made important contributions. To name a few examples, Adolf Erman helped unravel the grammar of Egyptian writing.Ludwig Borchardt uncovered the bust of Nefertiti and Heinrich Schäfer broke new ground in the understanding of Egyptian art.
• Professor Schneider pointed out that, in this pre-Nazi era, many American Egyptologists received their training in Germany, including James Henry Breasted (who, ironically, some regard as an inspiration for the Indiana Jones character).
• A Changing Situation

• Professor Schneider urged me to get an important point out in this story:

   

  You need to “warn the public against believing the discipline during the Nazi period was uniform,” he said.
• “You’re dealing with a number of individuals, a number of professors,” he said, adding that the situation also changed depending on the year and the institution.
• 

  Photo from wikimedia, in public domain. Before the rise of the Nazis, Egypt was a respected centre of Egyptology. James Henry Breasted, pictured here, got his PhD from the University of Berlin.
• As I listened to the professor, and read his notes, I came to understand his viewpoint. The people involved in Egyptology, during this time, reacted to Nazism and its belief in the supremacy of an “Aryan race,” quite differently. 
• There is only a small cast of characters involved. Egyptology, in Nazi Germany, was a relatively small discipline. In 1945 there were only six chairs dedicated to the subject in the Reich with further positions as junior professors or museum staff. “The people they knew each other,” said Schneider.
• Egyptology Challenged
• In 1935, Helmut Berve, a professor of ancient history at the University of Leipzig and a dedicated Nazi, questioned Egyptology’s right to exist as a discipline.

• He wrote:

   

  The study of the Ancient Near East as far as it relates to peoples of a foreign race, of a nature alien to us and thus impossible to comprehend fully in its peculiarity, is doomed to resignation as soon as the problems exceed what can be established rationally.

   

  Therefore, it fails with regard to the new claim of values and losses its right to exist (...). Where the threshold of deeper questioning has been tred upon – as in Egyptology –, serious decisions have now to be taken.
• 

  Photo in public domain. Source United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. May 10, 1933, SA members and university students march in a torchlight procession around the bonfire of "un-German" books on the Opernplatz. In this environment Egyptology's right to exist was questioned.
• He expected that.
• Ancient Near Eastern Studies in Germany will automatically focus on the peoples akin to us in terms of race and mind; Egyptology and Assyriology will recede into the background.
• Schneider writes, “Berve pleaded for a national history both committed to and committing German nationhood ('volksverbunden und volksverbindlich') and tied the possibility of historical understanding to race ideology.”
• Pharaoh as Fuhrer

• Walther Wolf was an Egyptologist at Leipzig who had pro-Nazi leanings.

   

  He is known for lecturing while wearing a SA uniform.
• The SA was a pro-Nazi organization that sprang up in the 1920’s. They were the main force in Hitler’s unsuccessful coup attempt in 1923.
• In 1937 Wolf authored a defence of Egyptology as a discipline “Wesen und Wert der Ägyptologie.”
• Professor Schneider writes that Wolf’s defence, “unveils the distinct will to align his discipline with the doctrinal requirements of the new ideology. It postulates for Ancient Egypt a predominant significance of the racial collective ("Volksgemeinschaft") which Wolf believes to have been essential for the shaping of Egyptian culture (kulturprägend) and which he said was owed to "soil and blood" (Boden und Blut).”
• Adding, “Wolf construes pharaoh as the realizer of forces lying dormant in the national collective and waiting to be set free.”
• If these ideas sound familiar, they should, this leadership model for pharaoh is very similar to that which Hitler used for himself.

• Wolf viewed Akhenaten to be a poor pharaoh because he 'Did not uncover ideas that were lying dormant in the depth of their Volkstum, and fight for their full potential of development.'

   

  “This is clearly worded on the template of the role assigned to Hitler,” wrote Schneider.
• 

  Photo by Andrea B. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic. Photo of a statue of Akhenaten, in the National Museum of Alexandra. Pro-Nazi Egyptologists Walther Wolf and Hermann Kees, despised the Amarna pharaoh. Kees wrote that he, "possessed too many traits that were contrary to the Ancient Egyptian ideal of a master race."
• The Anti-Nazi League
• As Wolf attempted to twist Ancient Egypt into something the Nazis could agree with, a prominent Egyptologist stood up against this. Alexander Scharff held an Egyptology chair at the University of Munich. He was strongly anti-Nazi and in 1938 authored a piece that dismissed Wolf’s attempt to see Egyptology through the lens of Nazism. 

• Said Scharff of Wolf’s work:

   

  In it the attempt is made to understand the Egyptian culture from a new angle of view which is apparently rooted in National Socialistic ideology (...). Such slogans of today which may have a predominant significance in other areas, are of little use with regard to Ancient Egypt.
• There is no question of "race" being a factor in the formation of Ancient Egypt (...). It seems to me that a political event, and be it of the scale of the German revolution of 1933, cannot at this moment transform our understanding of a past civilization to the extent the author would like to make us believe with his treatise which to all appearances is meant to be programmatic. Academic arguing has always proceeded with measured steps, without being tied to particular dates.
• Professor Schneider told me that despite Scharff’s anti-Nazi leanings he managed to keep his job until the end of the war.
• George Steindorff was a prominent Egyptology Professor at Leipzig. He was also Jewish. He edited the journal Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache and was in charge of other editorial projects.

• In a 1935 letter to Adolf Erman, he lamented what was happening in Germany. He wrote-

   

  The Nuremberg legislation has completely paralyzed us and cut our thread of life, it has annihilated our zest of life and my zest of work (...). I was always proud to be able to say "civis Germanus sum", and cannot bear it to be locked up in a ghetto.
• We are likely to spend the few years that fate grants us with wandering all over the world, deprived of our homeland. In the place where I worked honestly for more than 40 years and where I was conferred all honours, I don't want to and cannot stay any longer.
• 

  Photo in public domain. Source United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Goebbels speaks at a book burning in May 1933. His propaganda ministry would force George Steindorff out of his job and eventually, out of Germany.

  Facing a Concentration Camp
• No power of the world will (make) me take my pride; I don't want to be pitied, rather I pity the other. But there is one thing I have learnt in these days (...): to hate.
• Professor Schneider said that it appears as if the Ministry of Propaganda found it intolerable that a Jew have these editorial responsibilities and pressured Steindorff heavily to quit.
•  “There was a directive from Berlin that Steindorff could no longer be the protagonist of those publishing projects in Germany, those should go to a Nazi official.”
• Steindorff was forced to quit the journal in 1937 and in 1939 left for the United States.
• Walther Wolf, the SA uniform wearing Egyptologist mentioned earlier, was his replacement. Schneider believes it’s probable that Joseph Goebbels himself made the decision to force Steindorff out.
• In 1938 Steindorff was in a desperate situation and was saved by an Egyptology colleague Dr. Hans Bonnet.

• Steindorff wrote in 1945, after he was safely in the United States that,

   

  During my darkest days at Leipzig, some weeks after the pogrom of November, 1938, he came to our house in Leipzig and invited me and my wife to go with him and find asylum in his house at Bonn, though to give us sanctuary might well have resulted in his confinement in a concentration camp.
• A Base in Egypt
• When the Nazis took over Germany they inherited the Cairo office of the German Archaeological Institute.
• In other countries a special SS unit, the Ahnenerbe, was used to conduct archaeological research. Professor Schneider explained to me that the SS left Egypt alone and archaeological work was done by the institute`s Cairo office.
• The Cairo office operated until the war started in 1939. During that time Professor Schneider believes that the Nazis used it as a base to advance their interests in the Middle East.
• It was “a local outpost that could be instrumentalized for the government,” he told me. Germany had a number of interests in the area, including talking to Arab leaders who opposed Jewish settlement in Israel.
• The head of the institute, after the Nazis came to power, was Hermann Junker. He was an established Egyptologist. During the time of Nazi rule he conducted digs in the Cairo-Memphis area and Nubia. But, he spent the bulk of his energy excavating at the Great Pyramids at Giza.
• He was, “deeply involved in national socialism and a member of the NSDAP and other Nazi organizations during the war,” said Schneider.
• I asked Professor Schneider whether the Nazis got involved in his fieldwork, directing him to excavate at the Great Pyramids or telling him to look for certain artefacts.
• Schneider said that he has found no evidence of that kind of control. He believes that, when it came to excavations, Hitler’s government let Junker pursue his own agenda. 
• The details on what the institute was being used for are still being researched. But there is evidence that is was used for more than archaeology.
• In June 1945 George Steindorff, now living in the United States, wrote a letter to John Wilson, a professor at the Oriental Institute in Chicago. In the letter he discussed the involvement of different German Egyptologists with Nazism. 

• He wrote about Junker that,

   

  It is very difficult to describe the character of this man because he has none. I have heard that it was rumored in England that Junker acted as a spy in Egypt.  I do not believe it.  He was too clever to compromise himself by such activity.  He played safe. 
• However, he used his position and the State Institute to promote Nazi propaganda. The Institute was always available for Nazi meetings, Junker's house was always open to Nazi guests, chiefly Austrian.  Every Nazi found a cordial reception in the German Institute in Cairo.  I appreciate Junker as a scholar of the first order.  More than that, I am sorry I cannot say.  At best, his actions and opinions have always been ambiguous.
• The Göttingen Manifesto
• Hermann Kees was a professor of Egyptology at the University of Göttingen.
• According to Schneider’s research he was president of an extreme right-wing group Deutschnationale Volkspartei and played an indirect role in driving Albert Einstein out of Germany. 
• He was, “instrumental in the expulsion of Jewish faculty in 1934, after the laws for the restitution of the Civil Order were put into force,” Schneider wrote.
• In 1934, after the death of German president Paul von Hindenberg, Hitler implemented a series of laws that barred Jews, and people opposed to Nazism, from serving in government positions.

• Albert Einstein (then based in Berlin) and his colleage at Göttingen, Nobel Laureate James Frankh, both resigned in protest. They were hoping that other professors would resign in solidarity.

   

  That didn’t happen.
• Fourty-two professors at Göttingen published a manifesto condemning Frankh's resignation and calling for a faster implementation of the "necessary measures of purging."
• “This happened fast,” wrote Schneider. “One day after the publication of the manifesto, the first six Jewish professors were relieved of their duties. The man who initiated the manifesto and the expulsion of Jewish faculty was Hermann Kees.”
• Einstein’s and Frankh's hope had failed at Göttingen.

• Kees certainly didn’t hide his far-right views. On Akhenaten he wrote,

   

  One is certainly wrong to portray Amenophis IV as a gushing idealist who wished to turn the world's quarrels to eternal peace by the gracious sermon of human reconciliation and who therefore declined any warfare abroad.
   

   

  To be a great reformer, he lacked the creative force to anticipate, in the way of a seer, issues that were fermenting and wanted to take shape, and to shape them, and not the least did his personality lack authoritative charisma, carrying the stigma of repulsive ugliness.

• He himself possessed too many traits that were contrary to the Ancient Egyptian ideal of a master race; he was licentious, effusive, led by emotions, morally debauched and obstinate.

   

  

  Courtesy German Federal Archive and wikimedia. Photo of a model of "Germania" Hitler's revamped Berlin. It would have included a museum where Nefertiti's bust was close to Hitler's.
• Hitler’s Own Views
• Hitler’s own personal views on Egyptology remain something of a mystery. Professor Schneider said that more archival research needs to be done to determine this
• He does appear to have had an interest in Egyptian Art.
• Professor Schneider sent me an intriguing photo, dating to February 1939. It shows the opening of an Ancient Egyptian Art exhibition in Berlin. Sitting on the front row is Hitler himself.
• Unfortunately I cannot post this photo on the web since the copyright is still valid and is held by a photography firm. 
• Schneider points out that Hitler was particularly interested in the bust of Nefertiti and vetoed its return to Cairo.
• Hitler was planning to build a new museum in “Germania,” (his name for what would have been the transformed city of Berlin). According to Professor Schneider’s research the bust of Nefertiti would have been close to that of Hitler himself.
•  A Turning Point in Egyptology
• It’s difficult to gauge the full impact that the events of 1933-1945 had on German Egyptology. But certainly the impact was negative.

• “This was, what I think, a decisive turning point in the international history of Egyptology,” Said Professor Schneider. 

   

  “Germany lost its status and it has to struggle for many decades after the war until it again became recognized and appreciated (in) the discipline,” he said adding, “Germany had basically sacrificed, through the NS regime, its academic standing.”
• The loss of people such as Steindorff, hindered the country’s knowledge base.
• “They came not only from Egyptology but dozens of other disciplines, they established their fields of knowledge abroad, above all in the United States, and had they been given a perspective in a Germany without National Socialism they possibly would have stayed there.
• And many important strands of thinking or pools would have developed in Germany that now developed in the States,” said Professor Schneider.
• “(The) people who stayed in Germany, or younger generations, as a direct consequence were different people than those who would have lived and had a career in (a) Germany without the Nazis,” he said. 
• “It is difficult to say how the discipline would look today without National Socialism but we can very certainly say that Germany would have a different standing today.”
• The German Archaeological Institute in Cairo did eventually reopen after the way and today Germany is again a centre of Egyptological research.
• Herman Kees and Walther Wolf were both removed from their positions after the war. Although in 1963 Wolf did get a professorship at the University of Münster. Kees notes were confiscated as part of de-nazification efforts something which hindered his writing efforts.
• Years after the war Hermann Junker, while writing his memoirs, would choose to not write about the time of Nazi rule. Only saying that, “this was a dark time.”
• About The Author

  Owen Jarus
  

  Owen Jarus is a freelance writer based in Toronto ,Canada. He has written articles on archaeology for a variety of media outlets including The Canadian Press newswire (CP), U of T Magazine, The Mississauga News and The Guelph Mercury. Education: BA from the University of Toronto in History, Geography and Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations. BJourn in Journalism from Ryerson University.

  Last three pieces by this author: The Egyptian Pharoah Who Helped Win a Nobel Prize, 2,000 year old, Ten Commandments scroll image now on Heritage Key, Interview: Jean-Francois Millaire on Exploring Gallinazo Group

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