Tag Archives: smuggling

Jihadist and Young Archaeologist

February 1, 2010

Did Mohamed Atta,  the man who flew American Airlines Flight 11 into a World Trade Center tower, pay for his  flying lessons by selling looted antiquities? It now looks like a distinct possibility. According to The Art Newspaper,  a senior Italian official has stated publicly on several occasions that Germany’s secret service, BND,  possesses testimony documenting Atta’s attempt to sell looted Afghan artifacts to a German archaeologist in 1999.

Atta, as you may recall, was born into a wealthy Egyptian family and graduated from the University of Cairo in 1990  with a degree in architecture.  After a short stint as an architectural planner in Cairo,  the young Egyptian  moved in 1992 to Germany,  where he enrolled at the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg.   There Atta studied under Dittmar Machule, an expert on Middle Eastern architecture who was conducting an archaeological excavation at a Bronze-Age site in northern Syria.

So interested did Atta become in archaeology that Machule invited him to visit the Syrian dig in 1994.  The German professor later recalled what happened  in an interview with ABC television.   Atta,  said Machule,   “slept in the tent as we all slept and he was very interested in the excavation.  I explained to him what we are doing, the methods of archaeology, the research and I remember that he wanted to help.”

Five years later,  in 1999,  says Guiseppi Proietti,  secretary general of Italy’s Ministry of Culture, Atta approached a University of Goettingen archaeologist with a business proposition.  He offered to sell the unnamed archaeologist Afghan artifacts,  explaining that he needed the money to pay for flying lessons he wanted to take in the United States.   The archaeologist declined the offer.

How might Atta have obtained these artifacts?  As investigators have now established, Atta became increasingly radicalized during his studies in Germany and disappeared for lengthy periods of time.  During the university’s winter break in 1997, for example, he vanished for three months, and applied on his return for a new passport,  claiming he had lost his–a common strategy that jihadists employed to conceal their travel to a terrorist camp.

With his newfound knowledge of archaeology,  Atta may have spent his spare time in Afghanistan looting remote sites and collecting antiquities.  And it certainly seems possible that he sold the plunder privately or through auction houses  in order to finance the flying lessons that ended in such terrible tragedy.

This is an appalling scenario–European collectors financing one of the worst terrorist attacks in recent memory.   I sure would like to know more about this.

Off with Their Mummified Heads

January 7, 2010

Why do so many of the world’s major museums hold bizarre collections of mummified body parts from ancient Egypt–a human head here,  for example,  and a withered hand there?   This is not the kind of question that often pops up in casual conversation, even in the circles I run in.   But it came to mind this morning after reading Josie Glausiusz’s excellent review in Nature of  a very cool new exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum.

The museum’s  “Body Parts:  Ancient Egyptian Fragments and Amulets,”  explores artistic body parts from Ancient Egypt–bits and pieces of worked wood,  bronze and obsidian that curator Yekaterina Barbash found tucked away on storage shelves.  And Josie Glausiusz,  a writer whose work I like a lot,  makes several lovely points in the review.  She notes, for example,  that Egyptian artists were very fond of depicting human perfection.  (This is one reason,  I suppose, why we see so many young, slender, beautiful people painted on Egyptian tombs.)  But some artists were not at all shy about depicting human frailties such as dwarfism or scoliolis,  as artifacts in the exhibition demonstrate.

But back to my question about the mummified body parts.   While researching  my book,  The Mummy Congress: Science, Obsession and the Everlasting Dead,  I toured dozens of museums around the world, and was stunned to  learn about  all the disembodied heads,  hands and the like.  The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford,  for example,  owns the head of a woman,  and a hand with a scarab ring.  The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicag0 possesses  five mummy heads.  The Louvre has two heads and a hand.  And on it goes.

So what’s going on?  The answer,  I’m afraid,  relates to an old antiquities trade.  During the nineteenth century, wealthy European tourists clamored to buy Egyptian mummies as souvenirs of their Grand Tours.  Indeed,  few stately homes were complete at the time without a mummy or two propped up in the corridors.   In 1835,  however,  the Egyptian government passed legislation to control the antiquities trade there:  it banned exports of its ancient treasures,  including mummies.

But enterprising and unscrupulous travelers  were not to be denied their souvenirs.  They began to smuggle mummies out–something that proved very tricky.   It was impossible, after all, to cram a whole mummy into the  steamer trunks of the day,  and larger shipping containers attracted too much attention.   So antiquities dealers developed a whole new trade.  They dismembered Egyptian mummies, hewing and chopping off heads,  hands, and feet–the very parts that travellers craved as souvenirs.  Back at home,  many travelers had these mementos  mounted in Victorian glass cases,  a fashionable addition at the time to many a mantel.

Grotesque,  isn’t it?  Particularly when the Egyptians deliberately mummified their dead so that their bodies would be preserved whole and intact for eternity.  I guess they didn’t count on Victorian souvenir hunters.