Mahatma Gandhi

Letter written by Mahatma Gandhi just before his assassination in 1948 is up for auction in London, creating ruffles in the government which has initiated efforts to acquire it.
With information reaching about the letter being auctioned on July three, the Prime Minister’s Office has swung into action and asked the Ministry of Culture to take steps to acquire it.
The Ministry of Culture has written to the External Affairs Ministry for help in the matter.
The rare letter was written by Gandhi, 19 days before his assassination, for the ’Harijan’ on January 11, 1948. In the letter, the Mahatma had pleaded for tolerance towards Muslims.
The letter, being auctioned by Christie’s, is estimated to be sold at around 12,000 pounds.
The attention of Prime Minister’s Office was drawn by two Gandhians-- Basant Kumar Birla and Satya Paul, a senior life member of the Servants of the People Society.
They were disturbed by the fact that the letter was being auctioned and requested the Prime Minister to acquire it.
“We have written to the MEA (Ministry of External Affairs) for their advice about how to go about acquiring the letter. India is keen to get this letter,“ Culture Ministry sources told PTI.
In a similar instance in 1998, 18 letters written by Gandhi on Hindu-Muslim unity and non-violence were auctioned by Sotheby’s in London.

Dresden, Germany

The Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean have been put on a list of endangered world heritage sites by UNESCO because of the growing pressure from tourism, the UN’s culture organization said.
Situated 1,000 kilometers (625 miles) off the coast of Ecuador, the 19 islands have a unique wildlife and were the first ever site to be placed on UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites in 1978, AFP reported.
UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee is currently meeting in Christchurch, New Zealand to consider new additions to the prestigious list as well as sites under threat.
In a statement released at its headquarters in Paris, UNESCO said that the Galapagos Islands were “threatened by invasive species, growing tourism and immigration.“
“The number of days spent by passengers of cruise ships has increased by 150 percent over the past 15 years....This increase has fuelled a growth in immigration and the ensuing inter-island traffic has led to the introduction of more invasive species,“ it said.
The islands are home to several species not found elsewhere in the world including the giant tortoise and the land iguana. The unusual local fauna inspired British scientist Charles Darwin in his formulation of the theory of evolution.
UNESCO also placed Niokolo-Koba National Park in Senegal on the endangered list because of the threat of poaching and a proposed dam on the Gambia River.
Placing a site on the endangered list is intended to be a goad to greater conservation efforts. Without change, the site can ultimately lose its world heritage status.
Also UNESCO has given the German city of Dresden a year to come up with alternative traffic plans or face the risk of being struck from the list of world heritage sites, the UN’s culture organization said.
The Dresden Elbe Valley, which was declared a World Heritage Site in 2004, has been on a second list of “endangered
sites“--under threat of being declassified--since local authorities announced plans to build a four-lane road bridge over the Elbe river.
The Committee said that “if present plans for a bridge were replaced by a solution that respected the outstanding universal value of the cultural landscape the site would remain on the World Heritage List.“
However otherwise the site would be removed, it said. The committee is to reconsider the matter in 2008.
Dresden, dubbed by Germans Florence on the Elbe, is the former home of the kings of Saxony and for centuries has been an important cultural and artistic centre. Although Allied bombing in World War II destroyed much of the city, many key historical landmarks such as the Frauenkirche church have been rebuilt.

Chinese scientists have discovered a petrified forest believed to date back one to two million years in east China’s Anhui Province.
The 200-square-meter forest, in which the trees have turned into silica, was discovered in Xianyu Mountain, Dongzhi County.
Some of the petrified tree stood as tall as 3.5 meters and were 1.2 meters in diameter, said She Xianbing, an official with Dongzhi tourism bureau.
Scientists with Nanjing Institute of Palaeontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, says the forest are the fossilized remains of pine and cypress, China fir and apricot trees, Xinhua reported.
She says the forest will help scientists better understand the formation of the earth, prehistoric climate and vegetation.
The Petrified Forest was buried in silica until recently when rains washed away the top soil and exposed the remains of the trees.

The 3,000-year-old mummy of a high priest to the god Amun in the southern city of Luxor have been discovered, antiquities supreme Zahi Hawass told the official MENA news agency.
The 18th Dynasty mummy of Sennefer was unearthed in a tomb in the Valley of the Kings--one of the most famous archeological sites in the world--by a team from Britain’s Cambridge University.
“The mummy was found in tomb 99 in the Valley of the Kings on the west bank of Luxor,“ Hawass said.
A high priest was considered to be the most important man after the king, performing duties, religious rituals and offerings on his behalf.
Other mummies were found during the excavation, including one with a brain tumor, a fetus, a female mummy wrapped in plaster and others which appeared to have suffered from arthritis, Hawass said.
The Valley of the Kings was used as a burial site for royalty and nobles to the west of present day Luxor, some 700 kilometers (450 miles) south of Cairo.
Millions of foreign tourists come to see Egypt’s pharaonic treasures each year, including hundreds of thousands making the long journey south from the capital to the Valley of the Kings.
Hawass said a report on the findings would be presented to Culture Minister Faruq Hosni, in order to allocate resources for continued excavations in the area.

Museum Garden of Iranian Arts in Tehran

Nebra Disc

Archeologists have revived the debate over whether a spectacular Bronze Age disc from Germany is one of the earliest known calendars.
The Nebra disc is emblazoned with symbols of the Sun, Moon and stars and said by some to be 3,600 years old.
Writing in the journal Antiquity, a team casts doubt on the idea the disc was used by ancient astronomers as a precision tool for observing the sky, BBC reported.
They instead argue that the disc was used for shamanistic rituals.
But other archeologists, who have studied the Himmelsscheibe von Nebra (Nebra sky disc) point to features which, they say, helped Bronze Age people to track four key dates during the year.
The Nebra disc is considered one of the most sensational--and controversial--discoveries in archeology in the past 10 years.
The artifact was allegedly found by two treasure hunters near the town of Nebra, Germany, in 1999.
Police in the Swiss city of Basel arrested the treasure hunters in a sting, and they were eventually convicted.
While many scholars support its status as an object from the Bronze Age, it is claimed to be a fake by others, notably the German researcher Peter Schauer from the University of Regensburg.
“German archeologists don’t say clearly that this is a fake. They hide, thinking that the thunderstorm will blow over,“ Dr Schauer said.
In the latest study of the artifact, Emilia Pasztor of the Matrica Museum in Hungary and Curt Roslund of Gothenburg University in Sweden, worked from the basis that the artefact dates to about 1,800 BC--the Bronze Age.
They examined the possibility that the 32cm-wide disc could have been used as a precise calendrical device.
Two golden arcs on the outside of the disc may show how far the sunrise and sunset move along the horizon between winter and summer solstices.
The arcs are 82.5 degrees long, which is the angle the Sun is seen to travel between the high mid-summer sunset and the low mid-winter sunset.
The precise angle varies from place to place. But Professor Wolfhard Schlosser, from the University of Bochum, in Germany, has pointed out that 82 degrees corresponds to the journey of the sun at the specific latitude in Nebra.
As such, it could have been used as a calendrical tool by Bronze Age Europeans.
“It’s a difficult question to answer, but I do not think it was used as an instrument used for observing objects in the sky,“ Curt Roslund said.

Eleventh-century Viking longship that has been reconstructed to its original condition will soon depart on a seven-week voyage from Denmark across the North Sea to her home port of Dublin, powered only by her sails.
The Havhingsten fra Glendalough (The Sea Stallion from Glendalough) is the largest Viking warship ever rebuilt.
On July 1 the vessel will leave the Danish port of Roskilde, which served as the Vikings’ flourishing political and commercial center from the 9th to the 12th century, wrote AFP.
After a 44-day and 900-nautical-mile crossing using only its huge square sail, the longship and its 65 crew will reach Ireland, where it was originally built in 1040 in the Glendalough forest.
The longship took part in clashes between the Anglo-Saxons and Normans in 1050-1060, when many Danish Vikings lived in Ireland.
The boat was sunk in the Roskilde fjord with four other ships at the end of the 11th century to defend the Danish coast from invading Vikings from Norway.
The hull of the oak ship was found in 1962, and reconstruction began in 2000 at the dockyards of Roskilde’s Viking Ship Museum--a task that was to take four years.
After 84 days of tests in nearby waters, the ship is now ready to retrace its route home.
The ship is 30 meters (98 feet) long, 3.8 meters (12.5 feet) wide and has a draught of 0.9 meters (2.95 feet). It weighs 25 tones, and has 120 square meters (1,291 square feet) of sail on its 14.5-meter (48-foot) mast.
During tests, the Havhingsten fra Glendalough has reached top speeds of 10 knots. It has no engine and the oars will only be used in ports for delicate maneuvers.
Unlike the Vikings, the crew will however have a radar, a satellite antenna and other navigation equipment.