Posted on 12/29/2004 10:27:39 PM PST by Straight Vermonter
PARIS, December 30 (Online): An international mission has successfully secured and catalogued what remains of the site of the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan, blown up in 2001 by the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, said the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
Conservation experts and representatives of the Afghan and Japanese governments met in Tokyo Dec. 18-20 to discuss the progress of the project to rescue what is left of the largely destroyed World Heritage site.
Conference participants heard that less than 20 per cent of the wall paintings on the site had survived the 22 years of Afghan civil war that finally came to an end after the American invasion that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
Moreover, the walls holding up the niches in the cliff that once contained the statues, where invaluable murals and other works of art still survive, continued to be in danger of collapse, the conference was told.
But teams from Japan and Italy had made some progress over the last two years in collecting and cataloguing the fragments of the destroyed statues and frescoes, as well as controlling visitor and other access to the site, and in the training of Afghan personnel.
Carbon dating of fragments of the two statues showed that the two Buddhas were carved into the sandstone cliff in central Afghanistan's Bamiyan Valley some time during the sixth century AD.
The tests, which have a 15-year margin of error, date the smaller, 38-metre statue to about 507 AD, and the larger, 53-metre Buddha to about 551, said Unesco. They had previously been believed to be as old as 1,800 years.
The former Taliban government of Afghanistan laid waste to the two unique statues in March of 2001 as the world looked on in outrage and protested in vain. The Taliban objected to the statues as being representations of false gods, and ordered the destruction of all pre-Islamic monuments in Afghanistan.
In 2003, Paris-based UNESCO added the location to its list of World Heritage sites. At the time, international experts set themselves the task of surveying and taking inventory of the niches that once held the Buddhas, conserving the remaining bits of the statues, and protecting the surviving frescoes that adorn the walls in the niches.
Having completed the first, emergency phase of the project, the Tokyo meeting agreed more needed to be done urgently to preserve the site for the longer term.
The project's biggest single source of funding is Japan. Other countries giving financial assistance include Germany.
The Bamiyan Valley site testifies to the artistic and religious developments of the region of ancient Bakhtria in the first to 13th centuries. That period saw the flowering in the area of the Gandhara school of Buddhist art. The area contains numerous Buddhist monastic ensembles and sanctuaries, as well as fortified buildings from the Islamic period.
There was no word from UNESCO on any efforts to restore the statues themselves. Swiss scientists in 2003 developed three-dimensional computer models they said could function as blueprints for the Buddhas' reconstruction.
Ping
So the UN finally fullfills its mission in Afganistan, rescuing a pile of rocks.
Sounds like a good job for the UN. Put them in charge of rubble. Bet they still screw it up.
How can carbon dating determine when a carving was made? Carbon dating determines when once-living organic material was created. It wouldn't seem to apply here.
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