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Old December 11th, 2016 #1
RickHolland
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Join Date: Apr 2009
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Default Does Aleppo prove that we westerners should keep the world’s antiquities?

If the Aleppo room was still in Aleppo, and not a museum in Berlin, it might well have been destroyed, burned in the indulgence of fire which consumed much of the old city two years ago when even the great mosque and minaret of the Omayad crashed to the ground


The Ishtar Gate comes from Babylon in modern-day Iraq. Would it have survived the 1991 war on Iraq?

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The Aleppo room comes from a Christian home in the northern Syrian city; built in around 1600 it is probably the oldest surviving painted panelled room from the Ottoman empire. It is a blaze of red and ochre and crimson and inlaid doors. Hundreds of years later, the Beit al Wakil would become a hotel and this reception room was, like most ancient Syrian homes, built around a courtyard. It was a “divan”, a place where guests removed their shoes and sat on low cushions amid opulent furnishings, a unique memory of the greatest civilisation of an equally unique empire.

And what a moment, as Aleppo’s tragedy is being played out to the end, to walk around this extraordinary place. The fact that the Aleppo room belonged to a Christian family – then, as now, a minority in this great and tortured city – makes it especially valuable. Painted on the wall panels are Jesus as a child, the Last Supper, Salome dancing before Herod and Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac – a scene familiar to Muslims and Jews as well as Christians – and there are five illustrations of the Virgin Mary. But there are Islamic motifs as well as wrestlers and dragons and a mythical Persian bird, tulips and hyacinths and the animals of the Creation.

Of course, if the Aleppo room was still in Aleppo, it might well have been destroyed, burned in the indulgence of fire which consumed much of the old city two years ago when even the great mosque and minaret of the Omayad crashed to the ground. But in 1912, the old Syrian Wakil family sold their Aleppo room to the Kaiser’s Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin – wood panelling was by then regarded as passé – and so this magnificent structure, a symbol of Christian-Muslim culture and probably painted by a Persian, moved to the capital of the Reich.

Was this a blessing, a prescient saving grace that allowed this small divinity to travel thousands of kilometres to Germany and thus spare its immolation today? The massive Pergamon museum in present-day Berlin does not specifically says so – but archly implies just that. For outside the room, on the wall, the curators have affixed an aerial photograph of the ruins of the old city of Aleppo taken only last year. It shows bomb craters and roofless houses, and on the photograph is the very location of where the Aleppo Room would have stood – or not have stood – had it not been removed just over a century ago and sent to the sanctuary of civilised western Europe. It’s a perspective that is well worth dwelling upon.

For me, there was a special irony when I presented my museum ticket to the Berlin official whose job was to let me through the main door. He was not German, as I had guessed at once. I asked him in Arabic where he was from and his face lit up and he said: “Syria. I am from Qamishleh.” Ah yes, Qamishleh, cut off by pro-Syrian Kurds to the east, a hostile Turkey to the north, Isis to the south around Hassakeh, defended by a Syrian army tank unit and a parachute regiment, a mixed Sunni-Christian town where once, in the 1920s, at about the time the Wakils sold the Aleppo Room to Berlin, a certain General de Gaulle was based as a young officer in the French mandate.

But needless to say, my wicked mind had already framed the lesson of this brief encounter; a Syrian had been hired to check visitors – including me – to the European museum which had nicked his country’s antiquities in one of the biggest cultural heists of modern history. Well, hold on, you might say. The Aleppo Room was sold to the Germans – true – and many of the massive artifacts in the Pergamon would have been lost forever or destroyed in situ had they not been originally excavated at great cost by 19th- and early 20th-century Germany archaeologists. The Ishtar Gate and Processional Way – yes, you can actually see the very 6th century BC brick gate and walls painted with lions and bulls and dragons through which Nebuchadnezzar II himself must have walked – was brought in tiny fragments to Berlin after their discovery in 1902 and pieced together over many years. The Ishtar Gate comes from Babylon in modern-day Iraq. Would it have survived the 1991 war on Iraq? Or the 2003 invasion? Or the looters of 2004 and 2005 and 2006 who have gutted so much of Iraq’s southern archaeological heritage?
Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/...-a7449406.html
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