As the American forces out of Iraq, Dick Skellington reflects on what has been lost of the cultural heritage of Babylon, and how a remarkable new virtual museum civilisation opens a window on a civilisation dating back to the 6th millennium BC. 

In any war there are other casualties, apart from flesh and blood. Truth of course is an everyday victim, but often what is also lost is something immeasurably valuable, a country's cultural heritage. So it was with Iraq, in 2003, when American neglect allowed looters to rampage and rape the treasures of its National Museum. 

Now a remarkable website invites you and me, any one with online access, to tour the wonders of the ancient Mesopotamian empire. 

The Virtual Museum of Iraq is a true internet masterpiece, a site of immense value which attempts to reconstruct those lost relics and treasures, and allows the visitor to access the rich artefacts and beautiful art of antiquity.  The history of Iraq is also part of our history. Gazing at this site one realises one's place in humanity.

The National Museum of Iraq was founded by the British Arabist and traveller Gertude Bell in 1926 and was home to one of the world’s finest archaeological collections. During Saddam's reign, the Museum was funded to connect the Baathist leader with Iraq’s earlier days of glory. 

'a site of huge educational importance and potential. I can not recommend it highly enough'

It was closed in 1991 because of the Gulf War and was not reopened until calmer times in 2000, but the American invasion changed all that. There were no 'weapons of mass destruction' in Iraq, that we now know, though many said as much at the time of the invasion. But the war destroyed a significant part of Iraq's cultural heritage. Currently only a third of the halls of the original National Museum still stand.

On February 23, 2009, at the behest of Iraqi prime minister Maliki, to demonstrate that things were returning to normal, the National Museum reopened. In a ceremony to mark the occasion Iraq's tourism and antiquities minister said that only 6,000 of the 15,000 items looted in 2003 had been returned. 

In a book published in 2009, it was estimated that 600,000 archaeological pieces were looted by Kurdish and Shia militias allied with the United States since 2003. Many of these treasures are still lost, some are over 10,000 years old, but at least the Virtual Museum allows us to see some of them once more, and provides us with access to some of the remaining treasures of the National Museum, and some of those returned items. 

Experts believe many items have been smuggled out of the country and are in the possession of private collectors. According to the United Nations cultural body, UNESCO, about 40 to 50 of the lost items are considered to be of great historical importance.

The Virtual Museum is a virtuoso tour de force. It is available in English, Arabic and Italian and is the result of a cultural collaboration with Italy.  At a cost of over one million euros. this magnificent website brings to life the treasures of antiquity. Italy helped repair and recover many stolen artefacts after the bricks-and-mortar museum was ransacked. The Virtual Museum reflects the priceless cultural of from Mesopotamia from prehistoric times to the late Islamic.

After a flash video introduction, the site delivers the user to the "Museum" itself, a Main Entrance with eight different doors leading to various "halls:" Prehistoric, Sumerian, Akkadian and Neo-Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Achaemenid and Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian, and Islamic. Each hall looks like a museum space, with about eight objects in a room and a map on a wall (or in one case, a ceiling). Clicking on any linked item will zoom the viewer closer to the object and offer some options for further examination. 

The virtual exhibit does not seek to reproduce the Baghdad museum but rather give a broad look at the art and history of a land that hosted some of mankind's earliest civilizations and later became the scientific and literary hub of the Medieval Arab world. It is a site of huge educational importance and potential. I can not recommend it highly enough.
Dick Skellington 9 December 2011

More information

The Virtual Musuem of Iraq 

Photo: The National Museum of Iraq

Beyond the Frame: India in Britain 1858-1950 began a tour of India on November 25 which will continue into 2012.

It is led by The Open University with its Project Director, OU Professor Susheila Nasta MBE.

The tour is the follow-on to the larger project Beyond the Frame: Indian British Connections.

Both celebrate the often overlooked history of the Indian presence in Britain.

India in Britain spans almost ten decades from the beginning of the Raj to post-WW2 migration from south Asia to the UK.

Drawing on archival research from the three-year project, Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad, 1870-1950, the touring exhibition examines the impact individuals, communities and political activity had on British life and their relevance in India.

As well as the well-known visit by Ghandi to Britain in 1931 there are hundreds of other lives celebrated, providing a fresh perspective on the impact on both nations of a shared heritage. 

Dadabhai Naoroji the first Indian elected to parliament in Britain – elected Liberal MP in North London in 1892

Sophia Duleep Singh (pictured right) an Indian princess and Suffragette who marched alongside Emmeline Pankhurst in 1910

Abdul Karim (pictured below) a servant who taught Hindustani to Queen Victoria and was said to be closer to her than John Brown

Indra Lal Roy DFC a WW1 fighter ace with 10 ‘kills’ to his credit in a fortnight and killed on July 22, 1918

Using contemporary accounts, posters, pamphlets, diaries, newspapers, political reports and illustrations, Beyond the Frame: India in Britain, was launched in Delhi on November 25 at the British Council India.

As part of the British Council’s Connecting Classrooms programme there is a range of educational activities running alongside the exhibition with teachers’ packs and free worksheets for school children.
  
The exhibition will be at the National Archives of India until December 30 followed by a tour of northern India appearing at British Council libraries and NAI regional archives and from February 2012 in southern India.

The NAI will also be displaying complementary materials from its own collection.

Professor Nasta, in India for the tour said: “In taking the exhibition to India we wanted to swivel the perspective to examine India’s role within Britain rather than Britain’s well-documented imperial influence in India.

“The exhibition will trace Indian-British interactions across the race, class, gender divide and draw public attention to the complex realities of both countries’ intertwined histories.

“We hope this work will capture people’s interest and make them appreciate the huge impact people from India had on British life,” she said.

• Link to online database Making Britain: Indian British Connections:
• And Making Britain: Discover how south Asians shaped the country:
• Link to The British Library website Asians in Britain:

"I thoroughly enjoyed the study day. We attended the rehearsal of John Adams` “Harmonium” and Beathoven`s Symphony No.3, “Eroica”, two contrasting, large orchestral compositions. Harmonium is a `minimalist` piece, using a choir of 150 voices of all ranges, five percussionists, and (it seemed) no two instruments played the same as another for a good deal of the time. The constantly changing tempo was challenging for the conductor, orchestra and choir, with alternating consonnant and disconsonnant sounds.

The magnificant Eroica sounded almost ordinary in comparison, but perhaps Beethoven`s innovative development of connected movements for his Symphony paved the way for such contemporary music as “Harmonium” to be enjoyed today.

A preliminary brief analysis of both pieces of music was extremely helpful, before witnessing how a conductor puts a real orchestra through its paces. Coming at the point where timbre, individual instrument sound, and combination of them is being studied, the experience is particularly valid. A cheap ticket to the evening concert added to a most enjoyable and fruitful day."
 

"Very interesting day, thoroughly enjoyable. I understand the original intention was to seat us in front of the conductor which would have been great. However, with such a large choir we were seated behind him which made it difficult to hear his comments/instructions. Even so, it was a very rewarding day and introduced me to John Adams which I now can’t stop playing!"

"Enjoyed the day. I'm an experienced orchestral player so the rehearsal aspect was familiar but enjoyed the contrasting pieces. Most useful bit was hearing analysis of the two pieces as given me lots of hints on how to do this, something I think we are all struggling with in the early stages."

Find out more:

• A224 Inside Music module
• Interview with Sir Mark Elder in Sesame (p36)

Open University senior lecturer, philosopher and photography critic Nigel Warburton has described the competing interests of people and endangered animals who live in a Kenyan wildlife reserve as a struggle between good and evil.

• See Chris Jordan’s Kenya pictures here. These include images of dead elephants as well as the striking people of Nakuprat-Gotu.
• To buy the book go here
• Read about the Prix Pictet which raises awareness of the social and environmental challenges of the new millennium here

Today (14 November 2011) is Student Finance Day. With student fees and loans high on the agenda for those considering university, Platform caught up with some prospective students via Twitter to find out how fees have influenced their decision making so far...

Name: Mrs Claire Siciliano
Age: 27
Location: Welwyn Garden City

Name: Alexandre L Costa
Age: 34
Location: Luton

Useful links

• Student Finance Day 
• Open University Fees 2012

The Pelagios 2 project, led by Dr Elton Barker, lecturer in Classical Studies, has received a £154,000 grant from JISC, the digital technologies support body, to create an 'ancient world superhighway' for the benefit of scholars and members of the public.

It follows on from the original Pelagios project to bring together data from researchers working on the ancient world. 

The name Pelagios means 'of the sea', because the sea was the networking medium for ancient places.

Dr Barker said: "Our original project, Pelagios, has enjoyed great success in bringing together data from various ancient world projects, so that scholars and members of the public are able to discover different resources that reference an ancient place of interest. 

"With the additional funding, we’ll be able to formalise that process into providing a ‘digital toolkit’ for those people who produce the data."

 Working on Pelagios 2 with The Open University are: the University of Southampton, the Austrian Institute of Technology, the University of Oxford, the University of Cologne, King’s College London, the American Numismatic Society and the University of Reading.

Links

Classical Studies at The Open University 

Try out OU Classics courses: interactive tasters 

Photo: Napoleon Vier

OU graduate Dave Webster completed his BA (honours) in Humanities with Art History in 2006. Since then he has been working hard on various projects including his recent 6 week touring exhibition of his artwork called ‘The Real Meaning of Life, A Question of Evolution’.

Platform caught up with him to find out more about his OU experience, his inspirations and further details about his fascinating artwork. Read his story below.

My idea had always been to create art that could be understood by all. But first I felt I had to fully understand art myself, at a much deeper level than I had previously accepted. Working as a sculptor made full time education impossible. The OU provided the answer. The method of helping me to gain confidence as I progressed through the various levels of study fired me with enthusiasm to learn more.

The courses starting with A103 were a challenge to my preconceived ideas. The work was structured and understandable to a student who had left school at fifteen years of age and not formally studied at all in the intervening thirty five years. I had decided to work my way through various courses starting with the Renaissance to Modernism and Conceptual art. During the years previous to this I had read as much as I could on the first known forms of art such as the sculptures of the Venus figures found all over Europe. This first awareness into the workings of the human mind combined with the open shelter and cave paintings in Africa, France and Spain all helped to create a hunger for knowledge of these past cultures. I went on to read about the art of Egyptian, West Asia and Crete followed by Greek, Roman and the art of the Dark ages. These studies in tandem with reading about Palaeo-anthropology and the Fossil record have been instrumental in my art works in which I try to show how we evolved and how art and religion have played such a major part in forming our societies and cultures and the present human condition.

The experience of working towards a degree was both rewarding and frustrating as time was in short supply to complete the study and TMAs. The summer schools were both hard work and fun. Meeting fellow students with the same problems was rewarding and the philosophical debates and the ensuing arguments with various tutors were a challenge yet stimulating. All these experiences added to visits to galleries ensured a most memorable time. The OU experience is one of the best achievements of my life. It helped form the ideas to create my recent exhibition ‘The Real Meaning of Life’ The object of creating the exhibition was to provide an experience of art which provokes questions regarding our past and present civilizations, cultures and societies, and most of all our future.” 

Visit ‘The Real Meaning of Life, A Question of Evolution’ virtual exhibition for the result of Dave’s OU journey. He welcomes questions and comments below.

If you want to share your story, please add this in the comments box below (please note that you'll need to be logged in to Platform with your OU username and password or guest account in order to post comments) or email: platformeditor@open.ac.uk

Useful links

• Arts and Humanities
• Study with the OU
• BA (Hons) Humanities

The two images, on a piece of pottery dating from around 600 BC, show the head and shoulders of a baby emerging from a crouching mother. 

They were found in Italy's Mugello Valley,  where the OU is conducting excavations at an ancient Etruscan settlement, in collaboration with the Southern Methodist University in Dallas;  the University of Texas at Austin; Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania; and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. 

The identification was made by Phil Perkins, Professor of Archaeology at the OU, who is an expert on ancient Etruscan civilisation. 

"We were as­tounded to see this in­ti­mate scene. It must be the ear­li­est rep­re­senta­t­ion of child­birth in West­ern art,” he said.

“Etr­uscan wom­en are usu­ally rep­re­sented feast­ing or par­ti­ci­pat­ing in rit­u­als, or they are god­desses. Now we have to solve the mys­tery of who she is and who her child is.”

Scholars believe that the archaelogical site, known as Poggia Colla, included a religious sanctuary, and the images may be connected to Etruscan goddess-worship.

The mysterious Etruscan civilisation flourished in Tuscany from 800 BC, until it was absorbed by the Roman Empire. The Etruscans are believed to have had a profound influence on Roman culture, and to have given us our alphabet, but our knowledge of Etruscan civilisation still has many gaps.

The pottery fragment bearing the images was found by William Nutt, a graduate student at the University of Texas, who is legally blind and was on his first ever dig. 'It was quite dirty, and we weren't sure what it was until it was cleaned at the on-site lab and identified, " he said. 'It was thrilling to find out that it was so significant."

Useful Links 

Etruscan civilisation on Radio Four's In our Time. Discussion with Phil Perkins.

Phil Perkins talks about his research into Etruscan origins. 

The book (featured on thebookseller.com) advises dentists to manage their practices according to the leadership techniques of a legendary Mongolian warlord. Read the full story.

Michael's book joins an list of former winners including Living with Crazy Buttocks, Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers, How to Avoid Huge Ships, and Highlights in the History of Concrete.

A former dentist, Michael had to retire after developing osteo arthritis in his hands and wrists. He say "I had several articles published in the dental press, but my ambition had always been to write a book about practice management. As a scientist by training, my writing lacked a certain depth and 'flare'."

To help his writing Michael studied with the OU in Latin, Ancient Greek, Myths in the Greek and Roman worlds, and 5th Century Athens; He also studied archaeology and the philosophy of history at Leeds uni.  "All of these courses helped to sharpen up my writing in a way that had I not done the courses, it would never have been. Latin is such a grammatically precise language, and having to write clearly and concisely, and adhere to word limits, were all valuable lessons."

Managing a Dental Practice the Genghis Khan Way is the go-to guide of how to build an empire within your place of dentistry. Young, a former dentist and teacher of clinical dentistry, argues that despite the West viewing the legendary despot Khan in negative terms, his warmongering tenacity is required to build a successful business.

Find out more:

• Buy Managing a Dental Practice the Genghis Khan Way 
• Creative Writing courses at the OU