The Guardian: US accused of sending fake Roman mosaics back to Lebanon

2023-11-19 

Shafaq News/ Authorities in New York have been accused by leading academics in France and Britain of repatriating fake Roman artefacts to Lebanon, the Guardian reported.

Eight out of nine mosaic panels that the US authorities recently returned to the Middle Eastern country are not what they seem, according to claims made by Djamila Fellague of the University of Grenoble.

She claims to have uncovered proof that forgers had copied designs from original mosaics in archaeological sites or museums in Sicily, Tunisia, Algeria and Turkey. “Eight of the nine ‘returned’ mosaic panels were fakes that [are] relatively easy to detect because the models used are famous mosaics,” says Fellague.

She singled out a panel depicting an Anguiped Giant, that she believes is based on a section of the famous mosaics in the Villa Romana del Casale in Sicily, a Unesco world heritage site.

She also claims to have discovered that a mosaic of Neptune and Amphitrite took as its main model a mosaic found in Constantine, Algeria, which has been in the Louvre in Paris since the mid-19th century. Of the other mosaics returned to Lebanon, she claims that there is only one example for which the forgers were inspired by an actual mosaic from Lebanon – a well-known depiction of Bacchus in the National Museum in Beirut.

Christos Tsirogiannis, a guest lecturer at the University of Cambridge and a leading expert in looted antiquities and trafficking networks, believes the evidence is irrefutable. He said that were the revelation to be shown to be true it would be extremely embarrassing for the office of the Manhattan district attorney (DA), which had announced the repatriation of antiquities to Lebanon on 7 September.

Its press release at the time stated that nine mosaics included in the repatriation ceremony were among dozens of Middle Eastern and north African antiquities that were allegedly brought into New York by a Lebanese antiquities trafficker.

In 2022, the DA’s antiquities trafficking unit (ATU) had obtained a warrant for their arrest and applied for a red notice from Interpol.

“Even if you are not an expert, if you put the fake next to the authentic mosaic, you see how similar they are, but also how the quality is actually not that good,” claims Tsirogiannis.

He added that the alleged forgers had made the mistake of copying well-known mosaics, which have been extensively photographed by tourists with images widely available on the internet and in academic publications. “The whole thing is crazy. The authorities continually do these things without consulting experts.”

Tsirogiannis leads research on illicit antiquities trafficking for the Unesco chair on threats to cultural heritage at the Ionian University in Corfu, Greece. Over 17 years, he has identified more than 1,700 looted objects, alerting police authorities and governments and helping to repatriate items.

As soon as Fellague saw photographs of the mosaics in the press and online, following the September announcement, she says she sensed that most were “obvious fakes”.

“At first I fought against this idea, telling myself that an investigation that led to a warrant arrest, a red notice from Interpol and a restitution to a country must have been the subject of a rigorous scientific study,” she said.

She started to investigate further: “Very quickly, while searching, I found the models used by the forgers to make the forgeries.”

She said: “In the press and official press releases – on both the American and Lebanese sides – there has never been any scientific justification to prove that the mosaics were Roman, looted and plundered precisely in Lebanon.”

Before being seized by the US authorities in 2021, one of the mosaic panels was offered for sale in 2018 in a New York gallery, with an estimate of less than $20,000.

Fellague suspects that a forgers’ mosaic workshop was located somewhere in the Middle East, probably in the 1970s and 1980s, judging from other pieces that have surfaced on the art market.

A DA spokesman denied the accusations. “In order for these antiquities to be repatriated a court had to evaluate our evidence, which included expert analysis about their authenticity and significant details about how they were illegally trafficked. The court found based on the evidence – which these individuals do not have – that the pieces are authentic.”

 

US team retracts bombshell superconductor study after Chinese researchers challenge findings

• Science journal Nature has retracted a paper by a team of US scientists which claimed to have created a room-temperature superconducting material
• Doubt was cast over the findings when several scientific teams in China were unable to replicate the US researchers’ results

Ling Xinin Ohio

18 Nov, 2023

Science journal Nature has retracted a controversial paper claiming to have created a room-temperature superconducting material, which Chinese scientists took the lead to try to reproduce – and on which they raised strong doubts.

Earlier this year, the paper made global headlines in both mainstream media and on social media after it was published in one of the oldest, most prestigious, scientific journals.

But in a retraction notice on November 7, eight of the paper’s 11 authors, most of them from the University of Rochester in New York, requested to withdraw the research as it “does not accurately reflect the provenance of the investigated materials, the experimental measurements undertaken and the data-processing protocols applied”.

This meant the study’s key data had been manipulated and the superconductivity observed was an experimental artefact, according to Dirk van der Marel, honorary professor at the University of Geneva in Switzerland.

“It means that there were serious problems with this paper, and that the material is not a room-temperature superconductor,” said physicist Jorge Hirsch from the University of California, San Diego. “These co-authors did the right thing, which takes courage.”

While unsuccessful replication efforts alone could not overturn the US team’s claim, they did play an important role in casting doubts on the reported findings, Hirsch and van der Marel told the Post via emails.

“Several groups in China played a leading role in this,” Hirsch said. “It provided encouragement to the co-authors of the paper to report the anomalies they knew about.”

The attention being paid to the paper had “hastened their decision to correct the scientific record”, said van der Marel, who also serves as editor-in-chief of the journal Physica C: Superconductivity and its Applications.

Nature earlier told the Post that they viewed the replication attempts as an extremely important part of the scientific process.

Chinese-led test raises doubts about US ‘room temperature’ superconductor

11 Mar 2023

“An inherent principle of publication is that others should be able to replicate and build upon the authors’ published claims,” a representative said.

Karl Ziemelis, chief physical sciences editor at Nature, wrote in an email to the Post that the retraction had been “a deeply frustrating situation”.

He said the original submission of the paper had received “a number of questions” from expert reviewers, but they were largely resolved in later revisions.

“What the peer review process cannot detect is whether the paper as written accurately reflects the research as it was undertaken,” he said.

“It is not uncommon for further issues to come to light following publication, at which point papers receive an even greater degree of technical scrutiny from the wider community.”

Nature had raised separate concerns with the paper’s data and carried out investigations to conclude that the concerns were “credible”, the retraction note said.

I don’t think the retractions should affect the reputation of the entire field

Physicist Jorge Hirsch

Since superconductivity was first discovered in 1911, scientists have been looking for different materials that carry electricity with zero resistance.

Such materials can potentially revolutionise the efficiency of power grids, computer chips, medical imaging and high-speed trains.

So far, superconductors only work under either very low temperatures (near absolute zero) or extremely high pressures (above one million Earth atmospheres).

Room-temperature superconductors are seen as the scientific holy grail to make practical applications come true.

In their paper published by Nature in March, the University of Rochester team led by Ranga Dias stunned the world by announcing that they had used hydrogen, lutetium and nitrogen to develop a compound that became a superconductor at around 21 degrees Celsius (about 70 degrees Fahrenheit).

In the weeks that followed, several labs in China moved quickly to synthesise samples according to the descriptions in the paper and test the reported findings. All of their attempts failed.

More China scientists challenge superconductor bombshell from US team

27 Mar 2023

A team from the Institute of Physics in Beijing was only able to achieve superconductivity at minus 203 degrees Celsius in their experiment.

A separate group from the same institute said it reproduced the colour changes reported by the US team, but no superconductivity was observed, down to minus 271 degrees Celsius.

It is not the first time Dias’ team has retracted papers from top-tier journals. In 2020, his team claimed that they created a new material by adding carbon to hydrogen sulphide, which turned out to be superconductive at 15 degrees Celsius. That paper was retracted by Nature in 2022.

Hirsch said repeated retractions could cast a negative light on superconductivity research, specifically in a field known as hydrides under pressure.

This is because researchers in this field often do not disclose background subtraction procedures they use and are often reluctant to provide details and raw data underlying their published results.

“But I don’t think the retractions should affect the reputation of the entire field of superconductivity research, which is strong and healthy,” Hirsch said.

Van der Marel highlighted the trust factor. “The fact that scientists commit fraud doesn’t exactly inspire trust in science. The fact that some of this fraud is brought to light compensates for this, but only partly so,” he said.

OPINIONISTA
The destruction of cultural heritage as a weapon of war and genocide


By Rosabelle Boswell and Ismail Lagardien
19 Nov 2023 
DAILY MAVERICK, 

SOUTH AFRICA

Mahatma Gandhi famously said: “What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty or democracy?”

In saying this, he compelled the world to see war and conflict from the perspective of those least able to defend themselves. War and conflict, however, have impacts beyond senseless killings.

Looking over our shoulder to war over the last century, the destruction of Dresden’s Frauenkirche on 13 February 1945, what we have come to understand as an act of bravado by the Allies during World War 2, was perceived by eyewitnesses as “the traumatic signature of a completely wanton attack on one of Europe’s greatest cultural treasure troves”.

The writer Kurt Vonnegut quite eloquently captured the destruction of Dresden in his book Slaughterhouse Five.

At the end of World War 2, soldiers from the US (and western Europe) looted Germany’s cultural artefacts. As recently as 2021, one of the world’s largest collections of German art, notably Nazi propaganda, was in a warehouse at Fort Belvoir in northern Virginia. Individual soldiers were responsible for some of the cultural vandalism and looting of German art.

Soviet soldiers took “millions” of cultural artefacts from the collapsed German state after the war. Not that it needed reminding, but the Yves Saint Laurent Auction Controversy (where art works that had been looted during the Opium Wars was put on sale) demonstrated, in our times, the persistence of war booty in the world.

Destruction of cultural heritage is, then, not always physical “destruction” but includes the raiding, looting and carrying away of “war booty”. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) defines cultural property as “movable and immovable property of great importance”.

In a statement of principle, a former director-general of Unesco, Irina Bokova, has said: “Heritage, before being a building, is a consciousness and a responsibility. When violent extremism attacks culture and cultural diversity, it is also necessary to respond with culture, education, knowledge, to explain the meaning of sites and share the message of tolerance, openness and humanity that heritage carries.”

Notable heritage sites destroyed by organised violence (war), include Aleppo and Palmyra in Syria; religious sites in Timbuktu, Mali; the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan; China’s Old Summer Palace in Beijing; the former Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall that was destroyed by the US atomic bomb in Hiroshima; and Jonah’s Tomb in Iraq.

This is not an exhaustive list, but it is consistent with the belief that destruction of a society’s cultural heritage is part of war. The destruction of tangible cultural heritage, however, can, and often does include destruction of ritual practice, beliefs and symbolism. These forms of destruction, while not necessarily involving the physical death of individuals, can herald the psychosocial and cultural “death” of communities.

It is early to assess or measure with any accuracy what damage to cultural heritage sites will emerge from the present Palestine-Israel conflict. In past conflicts, sites of cultural value have been targeted.

However, what is clear is that the ongoing conflict does impact on peoples’ ability to safely practise and express their intangible cultural heritage and thereby, affects their human right to culture.

The UN recognises the impact of war on cultural heritage. It recently reported that within the first three or four months of the Ukraine war, 152 cultural sites in Ukraine were partially or totally destroyed, including 70 religious buildings, 30 historical buildings, 18 cultural centres, 15 monuments, 12 museums and seven libraries. The organisation swiftly instituted measures to restore some of these heritages, even in the face of ongoing conflict.
‘Peace in the minds of men’


The purpose of Unesco, founded at the end of World War 2, is to establish “peace in the minds of men”. This is to be achieved by identifying, nominating and conserving cultural diversity expressed in culturally valuable sites, monuments and artefacts, as well as intangible cultural expressions of universal value.

Unesco has conserved cultural heritage (inter alia), via its World Heritage Convention (1972) and the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003). The latter, often discussed as the ICH Convention, is for the safeguarding of globally valued ritual practices, beliefs, symbolism, songs and oratory.

During war, cultural artefacts and sites of cultural and natural value are often destroyed. People are also scattered from their socially meaningful places. The cultural relations which sustain social cohesion and the integrity of tangible heritage sites may be destroyed.

A significant mandate of Unesco is to safeguard and restore cultural heritage during and after war. This is a difficult task because of geopolitical alliances and the fact that humanity has a diverse and often violent heritage of war.

There are wars of honour and codes of honour in war. In Sun Tzu’s Art of War for instance, warring states are advised to attack cities and civilians only as a last resort.

But globally, wars remain both violent and dishonourable. Colonial wars divide communities and reduce the dignity of human beings. Remote, dirty wars attempt to hide the true human cost of conflict. Civil wars often lead to gross human-rights violations against women and children. In the case of the present Israel-Palestine conflict, children are targeted, and those in Gaza appear trapped in a conflict waged in apartheid confines.

Given the United Nations concern for human rights, it is important that Unesco recognises and responds to what we call abhorrent cultural heritages. War and conflict are abhorrent cultural heritages.
Abhorrent cultural heritage


If the UN and Unesco are true to their mandates, they should adopt three immediate global actions. First, the UN should publicly condemn the Israel-Palestine conflict (as well as the war in Ukraine) as abhorrent, and Unesco should declare war and conflict forms of abhorrent cultural heritage. War abhors and erodes the protection of human rights, and it leads to the destruction of cultural heritage.

War is abhorrent because it also erases the complexity and dynamism of cultural heritage. It erases the multiplicity of human existence, shared cultural spaces and meaning. It erases the possibility of crossing cultural boundaries and of learning from others who appear different from ourselves.

Anthedon, the first seaport of Gaza (now on Unesco’s Tentative List of heritages to be preserved) is one of the world’s most ancient coastal sites, but it is also one of the world’s most diversely constituted sites. It, and nearby areas, hold multiple spiritual, archaeological and political histories.

Cultural heritage signification in Anthedon has changed over time. Thus, war is not just about the assertion of symbolic power when political regimes change, nor is it merely about the looting of artefacts of value – it can erase a history of diversity, including histories of collaboration and cultural sharing.

At its most extreme, war is abhorrent because it can lead to mass murder. For this reason, as well, Unesco should (in collaboration with other relevant UN agencies) initiate a swift set of “actions” to condemn and intervene in the present Israel-Palestine conflict because it has the potential to lead to genocide.

War-led genocide was apparent in World War 2, in the Nigerian Civil War (1967), Somali Civil War (1991), Bosnian War (1992–1995) and in Rwanda (1994). These wars also led to the gross violation of women and children’s rights. Countless women and children were violated and brutalised during these wars. The examples are too heinous to contemplate.

It is impressive that more than 1,000 heritage monuments and sites are inscribed on Unesco’s World Heritage List and that these cultural heritages showcase the creativity and beneficence of humankind.

However, the world needs to acknowledge that it has heritages that are also deeply problematic, morally ambiguous and destructive. By recognising the existence of Abhorrent Cultural Heritages and what needs to be done to condemn and limit their effects, Unesco will play a more critical and valuable role in advancing a world where peace truly reigns in the minds of all.

Unesco has a unique opportunity to act. The world hopes that it does, not just for those directly affected by war, but for all those who are witnessing the violent consequences of war and conflict.

Those who now witness war and its atrocities, experience it vicariously. It is much worse, in our view, to be at war and to experience its abhorrence, first hand. Unesco needs more courage. Courage is rare.

But as Edmund Burke reminds us: “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph in the world is that good men do nothing.” 

DM

Professor Rosabelle Boswell is an anthropologist, poet and DSI-NRF Chair in Ocean Cultures and Heritage at Nelson Mandela University. Dr Ismail Lagardien is a writer, columnist and political economist with extensive exposure and experience in global political economic affairs. He was educated at the London School of Economics, and holds a PhD in International Political Economy.
The destruction of tangible cultural heritage can, and often does, include destruction of ritual practice, beliefs and symbolism. These forms of destruction, while not necessarily involving the physical death of individuals, can herald the psychosocial and cultural ‘death’ of communities.