The family of Riven Flamenbaum, a Holocaust survivor, has been ordered to return an Assyrian gold tablet to the Vorderaistches Museum in Berlin by a state appellate court in Brooklyn. The 3,200-year-old tablet had been looted from the museum at the end of World War II, although it is not clear how Flamenbaum obtained it after his release from Auschwitz in 1945. “The principle that property taken unlawfully should be returned is consistent with the rights of Holocaust victims,” said Raymond J. Dowd, a lawyer for the Vorderasiatisches Museum.

One hundred people have graduated from the Veterans Curation Program, a six-month-long education in maintaining the archaeological collection of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The program helps veterans make the transition from military to civilian life, and teaches them job skills such as managing a data base and running an office computer. “A lot of these guys are young guys who thought [the military] was going to be their career and they didn’t know what to do next,” said Susan Malin-Boyce, director of the program.

An inscription at the UNESCO World Heritage site Qusayr ‘Amra was revealed during a conservation and cleaning project conducted by the Department of Antiquities of Jordan. The small building was constructed and decorated with frescoes in the eighth century. The inscription is still being translated.

A British Museum conservator has been cleaning coins discovered in a hoard near England’s Roman settlement of Bath. One of them dates to 32 B.C., making it 200 years older than most of the other 20,000 silver coins. “The whole hoard must be at least five years younger than we thought,” said Stephen Clews, manager of the Roman Baths. The hoard had been divided into six smaller collections of coins placed in bags.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Friday, June 1, 2012. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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