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Monday, June 16, 2014

Monumental Stupidity and Control of the Past


What imperial purpose was served by deciphering the ancient Egyptian language, for example, and then restoring to the Egyptians knowledge of and pride in their forgotten, ancient past?
– Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West (1993)


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesha#mediaviewer/File:Mesha_Stele_%28511142469%29.jpg
 Mesha Stele CC BY 2.0 
Henri Sivonen from Helsinki, Finland 
Uploaded by Pieter Kuiper 
(via Wikipedia) 


If you’re looking for strange and romantic stories of discovery in the 19th century Middle East, it’s hard to top the saga of the Mesha Stele (or Moabite Stone), one of the longest and most significant inscriptions from the Iron Age southern Levant. The first Westerner to discover the stele was the missionary F.A. Klein, who observed it in 1868 at the site of Dhībān (biblical Dibon) in what is now Jordan. Klein alerted a Prussian scholar in Jerusalem, Julius Heinrich Petermann, who made arrangements for the Berlin Museum to negotiate the stone’s purchase. Before negotiations were finished, however, word of the discovery leaked to other scholars in Palestine, including the Frenchman Charles Clermont-Ganneau. Clermont-Ganneau sent two men to investigate the stele: the first to confirm its existence, the second, named Ya‘qub Karavaca, to make a squeeze. As the story goes, while paper was drying on the stele to make the squeeze, a fight broke out among the Bedouin who owned the stele at the time. Karavaca was injured, and he and the two horsemen accompanying him were barely able to ride off to safety. Before they hurried away, one of the horsemen retrieved the paper from the stone, torn in pieces but able to be reconstructed. But in 1869, the stone was broken into pieces by the Bedouin, who distributed the fragments among different clans. Clermont-Ganneau managed to locate and purchase most of the pieces, and bring them to the Louvre where the reconstructed stele remains today.