Ancient treasure rises from Berlin rubble
GERMANY: When an incendiary bomb hit in World War II, Berlin's Tell
Halaf archaeological museum went up in flames and its 3,000-year-old
statues were smashed to smithereens.
It has taken nine years of piecemeal work, but 60 artifacts have now
risen again, phoenix-like, from 27,000 fragments of stone found in the
ruins.
The ancient treasure - monumental deities from Aramaean civilisation
and relief slabs depicting hunting scenes - will soon be back on public
display.
A century after it was first discovered in the Syrian desert and
nearly 70 years after its bombed and broken shards were dumped into
crates and buried anew in the cellars of Berlin's Pergamon Museum, the
story of its salvation is itself an unlikely tale.
"We have reconstructed more than 90 percent of the artifacts from the
Tell Halaf museum," said German archaeologist and restoration manager
Lutz Martin, 56.
"Of the 27,000 pieces, there are only 2,000 left over" that could not
be fitted back, he added.
The labour of love, undertaken by a small technical team, was
financed by the banking family of Max von Oppenheim, the archaeologist
who first discovered the Aramaean palace of Tell Halaf shortly before
the outbreak of World War I in an area today located in northern Syria,
on the border with Turkey.
He stumbled across the ruined palace as German engineers toiled
nearby on the Berlin-Baghdad railway line.
After two campaigns of excavations, from 1911 to 1913 and 1927 to
1929, he brought back many of his finds to Berlin where they were housed
in their own museum.
The building was bombed in November 1943 and all artifacts made of
wood and gypsum burnt. Only the basalt rock statues survived the
inferno, but cold water used to put out the fire fractured them nearly
beyond repair. "The whole museum reached temperatures of over 1,000
degrees (centigrade) and then it was suddenly cooled down with water and
this put severe stress on the stones which just exploded," said Kirsten
Drueppel, an expert at Berlin's Technical University's department of
mineralogy involved in the project. BERLIN, AFP
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