Bamyan Province also spelled Bamiyan, Bāmīān or Bāmyān is one of the thirty-four provinces of Afghanistan, located in central Afghanistan.
Bamyan or Bamyan Valley ; also spelled Bamiyan or Bamian is the capital of Bamyan Province in central Afghanistan. Its population of approximately 70,000 people makes it the largest city in Hazarajat. Bamyan is at an altitude of about 8,366 feet (2,550 m) above sea level. The Bamyan Airport is located in the middle of the city. The driving distance between Bamyan and Kabul in the southeast is approximately 180 kilometres (110 mi). The Band-e-Amir National Park is to the west, about a half-hour drive from the city of Bamyan.
The Buddhas of Bamiyan were two 6th-century monumental statues carved into the side of a cliff in the Bamyan valley of Hazarajat region in central Afghanistan, 130 kilometres (81 mi) northwest of Kabul at an elevation of 2,500 metres (8,200 ft). Carbon dating of the structural components of the Buddhas has determined that the smaller 38 m (125 ft) "Eastern Buddha" was built around 570 CE, and the larger 55 m (180 ft) "Western Buddha" was built around 618 CE, which would date both to the time when the Hephthalites ruled the region. On orders from Taliban founder Mullah Omar, the statues were destroyed in March 2001, after the Taliban government declared that they were idols. International and local opinion strongly condemned the destruction of the Buddhas.
Mes Aynak, also called Mis Ainak or Mis-e-Ainak, was a major Buddhist settlement 40 km (25 mi) southeast of Kabul, Afghanistan, located in a barren region of Logar Province. The site is also the location of Afghanistan's largest copper deposit.
Archaeological looting in Iraq took place since at least the late 19th century. The chaos following war provided the opportunity to pillage everything that was not nailed down. There were also attempts to protect the sites such as the period between April 8, 2003, when the staff vacated the Iraq Museum and April 16, 2003, when US forces arrived in sufficient numbers to "restore some semblance of order." Some 15,000 cultural artifacts disappeared in that time. Over the years approximately 14,800 were recovered from within and outside Iraq and taken under the protection of the Iraqi government.
The Rabatak Inscription is a stone inscribed with text written in the Bactrian language and Greek script, found in 1993 at Rabatak, near Surkh Kotal in Afghanistan. The inscription relates to the rule of the Kushan emperor Kanishka, and gives remarkable clues on the genealogy of the Kushan dynasty. It dates to the 2nd century CE.
Dr. Zemaryalai Tarzi is an archaeologist from Afghanistan.
The antiquities trade is the exchange of antiquities and archaeological artifacts from around the world. This trade may be illicit or completely legal. The legal antiquities trade abides by national regulations, allowing for extraction of artifacts for scientific study whilst maintaining archaeological and anthropological context. The illicit antiquities trade involves non-scientific extraction that ignores the archaeological and anthropological context from the artifacts.
Donny George Youkhanna was an Iraqi-Assyrian archaeologist, anthropologist, author, curator, and scholar, and a visiting professor at Stony Brook University in New York.
Located on the strategic crossroads of Iran, India, China and Central Asia, Afghanistan boasts a diverse cultural and religious history. The soil is rich with archaeological treasures and art that have for decades come under threat of destruction and damage. Archaeology of Afghanistan, mainly conducted by British and French antiquarians, has had a heavy focus on the treasure filled Buddhist monasteries that lined the silk road from the 1st c. BCE – 6th c. AD. Particularly the ancient civilizations in the region during the Hellenistic period and the Kushan Empire. The world's oldest-known oil paintings, dating to the 7th c. AD, were found in caves in Afghanistan's Bamiyan Valley. The valley is also home to the famous Buddhas of Bamiyan.
Tourism in Afghanistan is regulated by the Ministry of Information and Culture. There are at least 350 tourism companies operating in Afghanistan. Tourism was at its peak before the 1978 Saur Revolution, which was followed by the decades of war. Between 2013 and 2016, Afghan embassies issued between 15,000 and 20,000 tourist visas annually.
Nancy Hatch Dupree was an American-Afghan historian whose work primarily focused on the history of modern Afghanistan. She was the director of the Afghanistan Center at Kabul University and author of five books that she compiled while studying the history of Afghanistan from 1962 until the late 1970s, writing about tourism and history of Bamyan, Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif and so on. She was fondly called the "grandmother of Afghanistan", having spent more of her life there or with Afghans abroad.
The Mosul Museum is the second largest museum in Iraq after the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad. It was heavily looted during the 2003 Iraq War. Founded in 1952, the museum consisted of a small hall until a new building was opened in 1972, containing ancient Assyrian artifacts. The museums net worth and content value are around 50 to 80 to 250 million according to museum specialists during 2013 at least. Dr. Hikmat Al-Aswad was the director from 2004 to 2011. The current director is Zaid Ghazi Saadallah.
Afghanistan is uniquely situated as a throughway of cultures throughout its history due to it geographic placement in South Asia. Afghanistan's location lends porous borders to trade routes between the East and West, while the Silk Road providing a vector for Buddhism and Hellenistic culture and even Egyptian influences from the west, renders an amalgamation of culture and art. Perpetual invasion and conflict has rendered a cyclic continuum of renaissance and destruction of art and culture in Afghanistan.
Shahr-e Gholghola or Gholghola City is an archaeological site located near the town of Bamyan, Afghanistan.
Shahr-e Zuhak or Zuhak City, also known as The Red City, is a historic city ruins in Bamyan, Afghanistan which was once home to 3,000 people. The fortress is believed to have been founded between 500-600 AD by the Hephthalites, around the same time as the Buddhas of Bayman were created. The city lies at the easternmost point of the Bayman valley, above the confluence of the Kunduz and Kalu Ganga rivers. The valley used to be a part of a route connecting Europe to India and China.
Deliberate destruction and theft of cultural heritage has been conducted by the Islamic State since 2014 in Iraq, Syria, and to a lesser extent in Libya. The destruction targets various places of worship under ISIL control and ancient historical artifacts. In Iraq, between the fall of Mosul in June 2014 and February 2015, IS had plundered and destroyed at least 28 historical religious buildings. Valuable items from some buildings were looted in order to smuggle and sell them to foreigners to finance the running of the Islamic State.
The conservation and restoration of archaeological sites is the collaborative effort between archaeologists, conservators, and visitors to preserve an archaeological site, and if deemed appropriate, to restore it to its previous state. Considerations about aesthetic, historic, scientific, religious, symbolic, educational, economic, and ecological values all need to be assessed prior to deciding the methods of conservation or needs for restoration. The process of archaeology is essentially destructive, as excavation permanently changes the nature and context of the site and the associated information. Therefore, archaeologists and conservators have an ethical responsibility to care for and conserve the sites they put at risk.
Archaeological looting is the illicit removal of artifacts from an archaeological site. Such looting is the major source of artifacts for the antiquities market. Looting typically involves either the illegal exportation of artifacts from their country of origin or the domestic distribution of looted goods. Looting has been linked to the economic and political stability of the possessing nation, with levels of looting increasing during times of crisis, but it has been known to occur during peacetimes and some looters take part in the practice as a means of income, referred to as subsistence looting. However, looting is also endemic in so-called "archaeological countries" like Italy, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus and other areas of the Mediterranean Basin, as well as many areas of Africa, South East Asia and Central and South America, which have a rich heritage of archaeological sites, a large proportion of which are still unknown to formal archaeological science. Many countries have antique looting laws which state that the removal of the cultural object without formal permission is illegal and considered theft. Looting is not only illegal; the practice may also threaten access to cultural heritage. Cultural heritage is knowledge about a heritage that is passed down from generation to generation.
The State of Florida, the United States Federal government, local governments, and indigenous tribal governments have particular interests in the protection and preservation of Native American cultural, historic, and sacred sites in Florida. Florida has faced threats to its indigenous sites from looting, a lack of protection, citizen or amateur archaeologists, development, and other factors. Only in recent years has the protection of indigenous sites become a focus in Florida, where a long history of site destruction and looting is now being challenged.
