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TREASURES

WORLD ART

Phoenician Hunting Scene

Processions of plants, animals and human figures are portrayed

in this detail (above) of a 2,700-year-old Phoenician silver dish

(right). Papyri, lions, gazelles, stags, archers and horsemen areembossed and engraved in these scenes from the hunt. The Phoe¬

nicians traded with all the peoples of the Mediterranean basin

and were brilliantly skilful craftsmen in gold and silver whose

works have been found in Greece, Italy, Carthage and even Iraq.Their civilization flourished on the eastern shores of the Medi¬

terranean in present-day Lebanon and Syria, as well as Carthage.

1«* Wl

"mCouri e rAPRIL 1974

27TH YEAR

PUBLISHED IN 15 LANGUAGES

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Page

WORLD

POPULATION

YEAR 1974

Published monthly by UNESCO

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24

27

29

30

32

37

38

ILLYRIA OF YESTERDAYALBANIA OF TODAY

By Muzafer Korkuti

ONUFRI

MASTER PAINTER OF FANTASY AND REALISM

By Theophan Popa

THE WORLD'S OLDEST PAINTING ON SILK

Found in a 2,000-year-old Chinese tomb

By Wen Pien

FOUR PAGES IN FULL COLOUR

THE ENIGMA OF ECUADOR'SANCIENT POTTERY

By Jorge Enrique Adoum

VENUS OF VALDIVIA

Photo report

PREHISTORIC SURREALISM

Photo report

SOFIA'S 35 STEPS TO ANTIQUITY

By Magdalina Stancheva

PASSAGE TO SERDICA

Photo report

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

UNESCO NEWSROOM

TREASURES OF WORLD ART

Phoenician hunting scene

ouesc3«v

^Í«CHIV$^

Cover

Head of Saint Helena, a detailin full colour from an icon bythe great 16th-century Albanianpainter, Onufri. Left, the com¬plete work. It depicts, on eitherside of the Holy Cross, the Ro¬man emperor Constantine andhis mother, Saint Helena (rectan¬gle on right). Saint Helena wasbom about 250 A.D. and died in

Rome in 327. She was an ardent

propagator of Christianity, andwhile on a pilgrimage to Jeru¬salem was responsible for theexcavation of many sites, includ¬ing the palace of Pontius Pilate,Roman procurator of Judea.

Photo Nikoline Baba, Tirana, Albania

Illyria of yesterdayAlbania of todayArchaeological excavations over the past 30 years

at hundreds of ancient sites have thrown new light

on the earliest ancestors of the Albanian people

by Muzafer KorkutiI

MUZAFER KORKUTI, Albanian historian endarchaeologist, Is a leading authority and theauthor of many studies on Albanian antiquity.The article we publish here is based on aspecial study by the author entitled in Alba¬nian. "Shqiperia Arkeologiike' (Archaeolo¬gical Albania), recently published in a tri¬lingual {Albanian. French and English) editionby the Archaeological Section of the Instituteof History and Languages at the NationalUniversity of Tirana (Albania).

|N 1948, workers drainingthe Maliq marshes in southeast Albaniadiscovered potsherds, horn tools andsmall flint knives embedded in themud of a drainage channel. Quite bychance they had stumbled across animportant prehistoric site.

To appreciate the significance oftheir find it is essential to under¬

stand the existing state of Albanianarchaeology and current theories onthe history and civilization of thelllyrians and their direct descendants,the Albanians.

At the beginning of this century, thearchaeological map of Albania wasvirtually blank. The limited amount of

research that went on was the work offoreign scholars who were mainlyinterested in Greek and Roman civi¬lization and hence confined theirattention to the Albanian coastal townswhich the Greeks and Romans hadcolonized. Even those whose interests

ranged wider did not go into the fun¬damental questions of lllyrian history.

Yet Albania is a country of ancientculture and its soil has been inhabited

since prehistoric times. The lllyrianswere formidable warriors, as we knowfrom their stiff resistance to theRomans between 6 and 9 A.D. Theywere also skilful metal-workers and

potters.

Archaeological researchin recent years has shownthat Albania can boast

a continued period ofinhabitation going backto prehistoric times. Left,an early Iron Age burialmound after its excavation

in the region of Kënetain north east Albania.

Above right, a strikingsphinx-like creature witha woman's head and

bust, a bird's wing andthe talons of a bird or a

lion. It was discovered

in the ruins of Antigonea,in southern Albania.

:>**"

+*>y.

Photos Mehmet Kallfa. Tirana

Nevertheless, the culture and civi¬lization of the indigenous populationof Albania continued to be largelyignored until the end of the SecondWorld War, which saw the birth ofAlbanian archaeology as a scientificdiscipline.

Albanian archaeologists began todelve into the history of their country.Some of their finds have been

sensational, and today they can lookback on nearly twenty-eight years ofsystematic work which has illuminated

many previously obscure aspects oflllyrian history.

They have excavated a large numberof settlements, fortresses and necro¬polises from various periods, and thefruits of their work can be seen in theancient castles which tower over the

city suburbs of modern Albania, infortified settlements deep in the heartof the countryside, and in a host ofmuseums scattered about the country.Albania currently boasts over 170archaeological sites and new onesopen each year.

It had long been believed that thelllyrians brought Iron Age civilization

to the Balkans, which they reached as .part of a great wave of migrations fromCentral Europe durino the second halfof the second millenium B.C. The

excavations at Maliq and elsewherewere to disprove this.

For six years archaeologists workedat Maliq. They discovered that thesite consisted of several layers, andthat it had been inhabited from the late

Neolithic Age (the first half of thethird millenium B.C.) until the lateBronze Age (the end of the secondmillenium B.C.).

The late Neolithic layer revealed theremains of rectangular huts with wattleand daub walls and clay floors. Eachhut had a space set aside for an oven.Containers and potsherds of variousshapes and decoration were alsounearthed from this layer.

During the Aeneolithic Age (thetransitional period between the Neo¬lithic Age and the Bronze Age), theinhabitants of Maliq lived in l£\'<edwellings built on piles,- hundreds ofwhich were dug out during the exca¬vations. Aeneolithic copper axes alsocame to light, along with a rich

collection of pottery decorated withgeometric patterns on black and greyglazes.

The Maliq site was inhabited rightthrough the Bronze Age, but by thistime the water level had dropped andthe huts were being built on the ground.Most of the Bronze Age specimens atMaliq were pots which had severalfeatures in common with those from

the previous period, although somenew forms and designs had also beendeveloped.

Meanwhile, archaeologists werelearning more about the Bronze Agepopulation of present-day Albania fromexcavations of tumuli on the Pazhok

plain near the city of Elbasan. Tumuliearth and stone burial mounds

standing anything up to four metreshigh have revealed a great deal ofinformation about lllyrian civilization,for the lllyrians believed in a life afterdeath and were buried with objectssuch as weapons, jewellery, pottery _.and tools which would help them in **the after-life. *>

After meticulous examination, it wasdiscovered that the Bronze Age tumuli

CONTINUED NEXT PAGE

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6

FROM ILLYRIA TO ALBANIA (Continued)

on the Pazhok plain bore a remarkableresemblance to later, lllyrian Iron Agetumuli at Kruma and Këneta in northernAlbania and at Vodhina and elsewherein the south. Both Bronze and Iron

Age tumuli had been built in the sameway and identical funeral rites hadbeen performed in each period.Furthermore, there was a close simi¬larity between the contents of theBronze and Iron Age graves. All thisindicated that the people buried in thetumuli at each period belonged to thesame tribe.

Some extremely important middleand late Bronze Age objects wereunearthed at Pazhok: bronze swords,

spears, daggers, oold and bronzeornaments, and earthenware. Thepottery revealed several features ofthe earlier Aeneolithic tradition and

suggested that the people who livedthere during the Bronze Age wereindigenous.

The experts' observations and con¬clusions from their discoveries at

Pazhok and Maliq may be summed upas follows.

First of all, the late Neolithic civi¬lization discovered at Maliq (and atanother prehistoric site at Kamnik inthe Kolonja region) is in many wayssimilar to contemporary cultures in thenearby south and must be seen aspart of the great Balkan-Anatoliancultural complex. This means that theMaliq Neolithic civilization originatedin the southeast.

Secondly, the Aeneolithic popu¬lation of Maliq also came from thesoutheast. Thirdly, the Bronze Ageinhabitants of the region were thedirect descendants of the Aeneolithic

Age population, and the distinguishingfeature of their culture, their pottery,inherited many characteristics fromthat of the previous era.

Finally, this pottery has many newfeatures which have been found on

other Bronze Age sites in Albania andwhich are also characteristic of lllyrianIron Age pottery.

All this evidence supports thehypothesis that the Bronze Age civi¬lization discovered in Albania is lllyrian,and that the lllyrians were formed inthe Balkans and already existed as apeople by the beginning of the BronzeAge. In other words lllyrian civilizationin Albania is much older than had been

thought.

One of the main fields in which

Albanian archaeologists have beenactive has been research into lllyriancivilization during the Iron Age, whenit reached its apogee. They haveconcentrated mainly on excavatingnecropolises and fortified settlementsand have made particularly importantdiscoveries in tumuli on a site in the

DEER HUNT

MOUNTAIN ROCK

Albania's oldest rock painting (left,- circled) dating backto the beginning of the Iron Age was recentlydiscovered on the face of "Spile Rock" in the courseof archaeological work which unearthed a prehistoricsettlement near the village of Tren in eastern Albania.Below, enlarged detail of rock painting depictingmounted hunters and dogs in pursuit of a deer.

Photos Mehmet Kallfa, Tirana

Mati river valley, at Vajza in the Vloradistrict and at Upper Dropull near toGjirokastra.

In the Mati valley archaeologistsexcavated thirty-five tumuli while adam was being built for a hydro¬electric power station. Most of thetumuli dated from early in the lastmillenium B.C., although others weremore recent and some were even putup during the Roman Empire.

The necropolis belonged to anlllyrian tribe known to history as thePirusts. They were renowned astough fighters, and the excavationsproduced evidence that they wereequally proficient as metalworkers.

For the Mati valley tumuli yielded asurprisingly large number of bronzeand iron objects: spearheads ofvarious sizes, swords, daggers, helmetsand other weapons, as well as

CONTINUED NEXT PAGE

Terracotta figurine of a womancarrying a water pitcher. It wasunearthed close to the monumental

fountain of Apollonia (4th-3rdcentury B.C.), one of the greatcities of ancient Albania, on theAdriatic coast

The ancient inhabitants of

Albania (the lllyrians) showedgreat skill and imagination in

the fashioning of their potteryand particularly in the shapes

and sizes of their earthenware

handles. Right, large-earedurn found in a burial mound in

the valley of the Mati river innorthern Albania.

Photo Albanian Embassy, Paris

FROM ILLYRIA TO ALBANIA

(Continued)

ornamental objects clasps, necklaces,buttons, bracelets and diadems.

The earliest fortified settlements in

Albania date from the transitional

period between the Bronze Age andthe Iron Age. Their ruins can be seenscattered throughout southern Albania.

These early fortresses are usuallyfound in strategic positions on highground, dominating fertile plains andriver valleys and surrounded by goodpasture land. They conform to nostandard layout since they were skil¬fully adapted to local topographicalconditions so that building was reducedto a minimum. Remains of wattle and

daub huts have been discovered

within walls made of huge blocks ofrough stone put together withoutmortar, and in some places more thanten feet thick.

Detailed study has revealed conclus¬ively that the early Iron Age forts atGajtan, Tren and Rosuja were usedby lllyrian tribes for defensive pur¬poses. There is no evidence of anyeconomic activity worth speaking of;

they were simply strongholds wherethe people and their flocks could takerefuge in time of war.

The second half of the Iron Age inAlbania saw the birth of a group oflllyrian kingdoms and the developmentof a system of economic productionbased on slave ownership. A numberof castles and fortified settlements in.

southern lllyria date from this period.

Many of these settlements have nowbeen discovered and studied. Some

of them were added onto existingforts; others were entirely new. Thewalls of these late Iron Age forts werebuilt with remarkable technical sophis¬tication of rectangular blocks of skil¬fully hewn stone laid perfectly flushwithout mortar.

A major discovery was a rectangularstadium dating from the 3rd-2nd cen¬turies B.C. It was found in the ruins

of the ancient lllyrian city of Amantia,which is mentioned by fourth-centuryGreek geographers and stood on thesite of the present-day village of Ploça.Seventeen tiers of stone seats have

been uncovered on one side of this

well-preserved stadium, eight on theother.

In the ruins of the ancient lllyriancity of Dimale (present-day Krotina),a portico with seven entrances hasbeen excavated, and at Byllis, onceso powerful that it minted its owncoinage, the remains of a theatre havebeen found.

For several years now work hasalso been going on in the imposingruins of Antigonea in the Drino valleyin southern Albania, near the moderntown of Gjiroka'stër. Visitors to theexcavations can stroll along thestraight streets and walk into thehouses of this once-great lllyrian city.

In Lower Selenica four monumental

graves hewn into the rock have beendiscovered among the remains of anlllyrian settlement whose name is stillunknown. The burial vault of one of

the graves contained dozens ofweapons, bronze and earthenwarevases, and many gold and silverornaments, including a remarkable belt

made of a thin strip of silver carvedwith three horsemen and a warrior.

In the same grave was a pair of ironshackles attached to the legs of askeleton a slave who had been putthere to serve his master in the nextworld.

Although there is relatively littlemonumental building in lllyrian cities,they have yielded an abundance ofobjects which have given historiansa profound insight into the economic,social and cultural development oflllyria.

Numerically, pottery such as con¬tainers large and small for storing andtransporting wine, oil and grain takespride of place among the findings,along with metal tools and buildingmaterials. There are fewer weapons,ornamental jewellery and other decor¬ative objects.

An interesting feature is that somepithoi, or wine-jar's, bear their makers'seals, and we can still read on them

lllyrian names like Trito, Bato, Pito,Genthios and Plator. Metal picks,

CONTINUED NEXT PAGE

MYTHOLOGY

AND PREHISTOR

Excavations in Albania have produced awealth of artifacts that throw new lighton its mythology and ancient cultures The5,000-year-old Neolithic earthenware figu¬rine (1) found at Kamnik, in south-eastAlbania, is a symbol of the earth-mothercult. In burial mounds at Kuçi Zi, in thesame region, many bronze objects havebeen found In the form of birds (2) andhuman figures (3) as well as bracelets andclasps. They are believed to have beenused as amulets and ornaments. Theyreveal the skill of Albania's metal crafts¬

men in the 8th century B.C. The smallbronze figurine (4) portrays Poseidon,Greek god of the sea. It dates from the2nd century B.C. and was unearthed at ftAntigonea, in southern Albania. Jj

Photos Mehmet Kallfa. Tirana

MARBLE CITY OF ANCIENT ILLYRIA. Right, colonnade of white marblestatues discovered at Apollonia, western Albania, a coastal city inhabitedduring the 4th century B.C. by lllyrians and by Greek settlers fromCorinth and Corfu.

5,000-YEAR-OLD LAKE-DWELLING COMMUNITY. Workers draining aswamp In south-east Albania several years ago discovered a five-thousand-year-old lake-dwelling community. Five years of excavationbrought to light a culture extending from the late Neolithic era up tothe end of the Bronze Age. Below, remains of the dwelling site,showing the piles on which were built rectangular-shaped huts withwalls of wattle and daub. FROM ILLYRIA TO ALBANIA

(Continued)

sickles, scythes, pruning knives andploughs have also been discovered inthese late Iron Age fortified towns,along with tiles and bricks in suchenormous quantities that given thetransport difficulties obtaining at thattime we can conclude that they weremanufactured locally.

The rise of lllyrian cities during the4th century B.C. was followed by aperiod of prosperity which lastedroughly from the 3rd to the middle ofthe 2nd century B.C. This was a timeof intense political, economic andcultural activity in lllyria. Severalsettlements which had hitherto been

little more than villages now expandedand became in a real sense cities.

The great coastal cities of Dyr-rhachion, Apollonia and Bouthrotonbecame the main centres of Hellenistic

culture in southern lllyria and as suchthey boosted the region's economicand cultural development. Commercialand other contacts between the

lllyrian tribal aristocracy and theseGreek cities further accentuated

the economic inequalities and socialdifferences in lllyria. But at the sametime, trade expanded and the newsociety based on slave-ownershipbegan to forge ahead.

The great age of lllyria stretchedfrom the 4th to the 2nd centuries B.C.,

and during this period she made asizeable contribution to the life of the

Greek cities on the coast.

The sequel to the dynamic expansionof lllyrian society between the 4th and2nd centuries B.C. came with its

vigorous resistance to the impact ofthe Roman world. After a bitter

struggle, the Southern lllyrians manag¬ed to maintain their individuality as apeople virtually intact, although fromthis time their culture begins to bearthe marks of Roman influence. The

Northern lllyrians were less fortunate:they lost their ethnic identity and wereassimilated by the foreign invaders.

The course of lllyrian history cannotbe properly understood without detailedknowledge of the Greek and Romancivilization of Albania's coastal cities,

a subject on which Albanian archae¬ologists are currently concentrating.

It is a mistake to consider the

Hellenistic civilization of the slave-

owning cities of Apollonia, Dyrrha-chion, Bouthroton and Orichon inisolation from the lllyrian territorywhich surrounded them. As time

Photo Albanian Embassy, Parle

went by, more and more lllyrians wentto live in these cities and made a

distinctive contribution to their life.

The architecture of Apollonia is thatof a typical slave-owning city. Thearistocracy led a life of ease andluxury, as we can see from thesophisticated 1st-century B.C. housesexcavated in the northwest of the cityopposite the modern village of Pojan.There are floors of brightly-colouredmosaics, some of which are decoratedwith geometric and floral motifs, whileothers depict mythological scenes,such as Achilles fighting the Amazons.

One of Apollonia's most magnificentand best-preserved monuments wasunearthed during systematic exca¬vations carried out north of the citybetween 1964 and 1968. This is thenympheum, or monumental fountain,which was put up during the city's mostprosperous period, around the end ofthe 4th century B.C.

Recent work in Dyrrhachion hasalso brought to light a number ofimportant buildings, including the city's

amphitheatre, which is comparable instyle and size to the biggest Romanamphitheatres found elsewhere in theMediterranean world. Excavations atBouthroton and Orichon have like¬

wise provided information about Alba¬nia's ancient history and lllyrian in¬volvement in the life of the Greekcities on the Coast.

During the last 28 years, Albanianarchaeologists have also made adetailed study of early medieval Alba¬nia and have drawn particular attentionto two points. Firstly, they stress thatalthough Albanian civilization extendedover a wide area, it had a pronounceddegree of cultural unity. Secondly,they point to the persistence of lllyrianinfluences, particularly as reflected inmetal ornaments of the period.

The lllyrian tradition mainly survivedwhere mining and metal-working contin¬ued without a break, and in fact tracesof the lllyrian cultural heritage stillexist today in those parts of Albaniawhere there are rich mineral depositsand where metals are mined and

worked on the spot. But ¡t is hardlysurprising that the medieval Albaniansshould have Inherited this and othertraditions. They were after all thedirect descendants of the lllyrians.

This is not to say that early medievalAlbanian civilization was Immune tooutside influences. It was not. Alba¬nians learned much from their contact

with the Roman and Byzantine worlds.

Yet the crucial fact remains that themedieval Albanians were the direct

descendants of the ancient lllyrians.They even owed their name to theirlllyrian ancestry, for Byzantine chroni¬clers used the name of one small llly¬rian tribe, the Albanoi, to describe thewhole lllyrian people.'

During the early Middle Ages thisterm and its derivatives such as

Alban, Arban and Arber gradually cameto denote the whole area occupiedby the old Indigenous lllyrian popu¬lation. It is just one more proof toadd to the multitude unearthed byarcheologists, of the ancient roots ofthe Albanian people.

11

Photos Albanian Embassy, Paris

Left, "King David", a fresco paintingby Onufri, adorning the church atShpat in central Albania.

ONUFRI

MASTER OF FANTASY

AND REALISM

A 16th-century Albanian painterof icons and frescoes

virtually unknown outside his country

by Theophan Popa

WrHEN Michelangelo, Titianand Tintoretto were producing worksof art in Italy which became famousin their day, another great artist, onlya few hundred kilometres away on theother side of the Adriatic, was paintingmasterpieces. which are still practicallyunknown today outside his country.The artist, an Albanian priest, whoseonly name known to us is "Onufri",produced a large number of frescoesand icons of rare quality and powerfuloriginality. It is only now that he isbeginning to find his place in the worldof art as one of the great painters ofhis age.

Onufri, most of whose works

fortunately remain intact, workedchiefly at Elbasan, a small town in

central Albania. He injected new lifeinto the Byzantine pictorial art of histime which was until then shackled

to medieval tradition. His influence

led to a search for realistic human

expression and movement, and to an

THEOPHAN POPA, Albanian art historian, hasdevoted numerous studies to the work ofOnufri.

attention to life-like detail which had

never before appeared in Albanianpainting.

Albania was for many centuries partof the Byzantine empire. During theMiddle Ages the Albanian Churchobserved Greek Orthodox rites, Greekbecame the country's literary language,while Byzantine art and architecture,spreading from Constantinople, tookroot and flourished there.

In the 13th and 14th centuries, underthe Byzantine Paleologus dynasty,Albania enjoyed a period of remarkableeconomic and social progress. Thefeudal chiefs formed principalitieswhich became independent of theByzantine empire and less subjected tothe political, religious and culturalauthority of Constantinople. Artisticexpression began to assume certaindistinct characteristics of its own.

One of these was a search for true-

to-life art, but the movement was

arrested at an early stage by theOttoman conquest in the second halfof the 15th century.

A period of turbulence ensued

during which the length and breadthof the land were torn asunder byinsurrections against the invader.Struggling to defend their languageand culture against the arbitrary ruleof the Ottomans, the Albanians joinedforces with their neighbours, Greeks,Serbs, Bulgarians, Macedonians andMontenegrans who were all trying torid themselves of the common yoke.It was during these sorely trying timesthat Onufri appeared.

We have very little information aboutthe artist's life neither the date of his

birth nor that of his death are known.

He worked during the first half of the16th century, and a few autographicinscriptions appear on some of his

frescoes covering the walls of thechurches of Elbasan, Shelcan andValsh. Some of these inscriptions aresimple prayers, and one of them datesthe fresco as 1554. His son Nicola,who was also a painter, left someclues on a fresco painted in '1578scraps of information indicating thatOnufri married, had children, wasordained and became archpriest ofElbasan.

Information about his artistic trainingis no more plentiful. He was probablyable to study frescoes and icons atleisure, for at the time there were in¬

numerable and very fine examples ofboth. Some can still be seen today,but a great many have been lost. It isalmost certain that Onufri must have

begun work in Berat, a lively centreon the river Osum. He presumablystudied in the studio of a master-

painter who, according to the customof the times, passed on to his pupilthe secrets of his art.

The life-like expressions of Onufri'scharacters were a distinct departurefrom traditional Byzantine painting, andlead to the supposition that the paintervisited Italy and gained inspiration from

the various Renaissance schools which | Qin the early 16th century were at the **height of their brilliance. However,Onufri restricted his art to large-scale

CONTINUED PAGE 16

ONUFRI (Continued)

Away from the traditionalTowards a fresh realism

A painter who deserves to be better known outside hiscountry is the Albanian 16th-century artist, Onufri, whoproduced some of the most astonishing icons and frescoesof the late Middle Ages. Onufri, who had a keen eye forcolour and form, often broke away from traditional Byzantine

painting and took delight in enriching his works with realisticand shrewdly observed details of the landscapes, architec¬ture, clothing and other everyday objects of different partsof Albania. On this double page we present Onufri'smagnificent icon painting, "The Nativity" (1) and four detailsfrom the same work: (2) a shepherd; the drinking gourdat his belt is exactly the same as those used today by

Albanian shepherds. (3) One of the Three Kings. (4) Thebathing of the Infant. (5) The archangel announcing thebirth of Jesus; the shepherd's bonnet and musical instrumentare still seen in Albania.

Photos Albanian Embassy, Paris

14

15

ONUFRI (Continued from page 13)

mural paintings and tofor icons.

easel work

THE PRESENTATION IN THE TEMPLE, another icon painting by Onufri.Note how skilfully the artist manages to incorporate vaulted ceilings,pavilion roofs, balconies and other architectural features of his timeinto this work, depicting Mary, mother of Jesus, finding her son amongthe doctors in the temple at Jerusalem. The narrow coloured bands onthe stole worn by the archpriest greeting Mary (detail below) are stilla feature of Albanian folk art weaving.

His admirable frescoes cover the

walls of the churches of St. Nicholas

at Shelcan, St. Venerand at Valsh,near Elbasan, and St. Theodore atBerat. Other churches at Berat are

richly decorated with his icons. Heis known to have worked in Greece

where he painted the fresco of theHoly Apostles' Church in the Mace¬donian town of Kastoria. His com¬

prehensive work embraces hundredsof single figures and scenes of a richvariety of compositions.

Onufri observes the tradition of

pictorial narrative which sought toprovide religious instruction in worksof art, but his compositions are power¬fully original and the expressions ofhis subjects have a strong element ofrealism and imagination. This isparticularly exemplified in an iconof the "Presentation in the Temple",where the Virgin Is met by the arch-priest and a number of women.

Onufri likewise gave a new senseof realism to the treatment of accessory

motifs. His "Entry into Jerusalem" hasan architectural background showingred-tiled house-roofs with two eaves

to drain off rain-water, just as they

were in Elbasan during the painter'slifetime and just as they still are today.Another example is the "Last Supper"at which the Apostles have table-napkins decorated with narrow redbands. These motifs are still used

today on table napkins in Albania.

Again in the "Nativity" (both frescoand icon), Onufri paints a shepherdwith a gourd attached to his belt justlike the drinking gourds used today byAlbanian shepherds.

Right up to the 19th century allAlbanian religious painting bore thestamp of Onufri's influence: hisplasticity of form, transparency andcontrast of colour, dynamic compo¬sition and intense spirituality in facialexpression all played a decisive rolein the subsequent trends followed byAlbanian art.

Besides Onufri's son, Nicola, a whole

line of anonymous 17th century paintersfollowed in the master's fotsteps, butnone of them grew to his stature. The18th century produced another Alba¬nian master, David of Selenica, whoreached a remarkable degree of per¬fection, but creative originality inreligious painting died with him.

Onufri is now not only recognized

as a great master of Albanian painting,but his name is beginning to take adeservedly prominent place amongthose artists who throughout theages have enriched the cultural heri¬tage of humanity as a whole.

Photos Albanian Embassy. Paris

Fantasyand

RealityIn some of his icons,Onufri seems to have let

his imagination run wild,depicting hallucinatingpanoramas and landscapespeopled by strangediabolic or angeliccreatures. "The Baptismof Christ" (right) is aremarkable example offantasy and realismcombined.

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THE WORLD'S

OLDEST PAINTING

ON SILK

Visions of Heaven, Earthand the Underworld

in a 2,000-year-old Chinese tomb

by Wen Pien

18

I|N April 1972 an early Han-dynasty tomb dating from the secondcentury B.C. was discovered at Ma-Wang-T'ui in the eastern suburb ofCh'ang-sha, In Hunan Province. Ma-Wang-T'ui is a mound more than fiftymetres across and more than twentymetres in height. In the tomb beneaththe mound was discovered a woman's

body in an astonishingly good state ofpreservation. The body, swathed withtwenty layers of silk and gauze, washalf immersed in a reddish fluid.

The layout of the tomb is fairlyelaborate. Its burial chamber lay20 metres below the top of the mound.Inside, at the centre of a tripleenclosure of wooden planks was atriple coffin. Funerary objects werefound between the wooden enclosures.

Outside this was a covering of charcoalmore than 30 cm. thick, weighing over10,000 chin (5 tons). This in turn wassealed with white clay 60 to 130 cm.thick. The charcoal and clay pro¬tecting the coffin from damp and themeans of embalmment used no doubt

account for the extraordinary state ofpreservation of the body and burialaccessories.

When the body was removed fromthe coffin, the skin and flesh werefound to be so firm and supple that onecould have believed the woman had

only recently died.All three coffins are remarkable

works of art. The outer casket, lac¬

quered black, has paintings in white,red and yellow of clouds or mist andstrange beasts and birds wrestling,chasing each other and playing musicor dancing. The middle casket, lac¬quered red, is decorated with vigorouspaintings of two dragons and twotigers fighting together. The innermostcasket is- covered with silk havinga "satin-stitch" embroidered border

and ornamented with lozenge-shapeddesigns of golden, black and emeraldfeathers. This is the first discovery ofa silk coffin-covering of this kind.

Between the wooden enclosures

were found over a thousand funeraryobjects, including silken fabrics, lac-querware, wooden, bamboo and pot¬tery utensils, grain and other foodstuffs.

Among the silk objects were morethan forty garments, slippers andstockings, all in good condition, as wellas more than twenty embroidered pil¬lows, aromatic pouches and wrappers.There were also lengths of fabric38.5 cm. to 50 cm. wide which representmost of the varieties of Han-dynastysilk known to us: satin, silk, gauze,embroideries, brocade and damask.

The designs, woven, painted orembroidered, depict animals, clouds,plants, flowers and variously shapedgeometric designs. The gauze is solight that one white inner garment,'128 cm. in length with sleeves measur¬ing 190 cm. from cuff to cuff, weighsonly 49 grammes. No thicker thanthe wings of a cicada, its texture is asfine as modern nylon. A brocade witha thick short pile on one side is anotherexample of the high quality of Han-dynasty weaving.

The colours of these fabrics, derivedfor the most part from vegetable dyes,include brown, crimson, grey, red,fawn, buff, yellow, green, blue andwhite. Discovered for the first time

are some lengths of silk dyed withcinnabar or painted in gold and silverwith printed designs. There are alsolinen fabrics of different textures, thefinest having 36 cross-threads to eachsquare centimetre. This has a smooth

glossy surface and is as strong as newlinen today.

The most precious find, however, isthe painting on silk draping the in¬nermost coffin. Before the invention

of paper it was usual for artists topaint on silk. This silk painting isT-shaped, 205 cm. long, 92 cm. wideat the top and just over half as wideat the bottom, with silk tassels attachedto the corners.

The objects depicted cover a widerange including human figures, the sunand moon, birds, beasts, reptiles and

CONTINUED PAGE 23

COLOUR PAGES

The 4 colour pages that follow are devotedto the oldest example of painting on silkfound so far. The painting was discoveredin China in an early Han Dynasty Tomb(2nd century B.C.) unearthed at Ch'ang-shain Hunan Province. Everything inside thetomb was in an almost perfect state ofconservation including the embalmed bodyof a woman preserved for 2,000 years.The painting on silk, the most preciousfind among over 1,000 objects, covered theinnermost casket of the woman's triplecoffin. The painting comprises threesections representing the universe: Heaven,Earth and the Nether Regions, and is filledwith creatures and representations fromChinese legends and mythology. Thecomplete painting is shown on page 20.

Opposite

Detail of the upper section showing eightsmall suns in the heavens and a large sunwith a crow inside it. The ancient Chinese

placed a toad and hare in the moon(symbols of immortality) and a crowthe sun (symbol of filial piety).

Centre pages

Page 20

The complete painting. A rich kaleidoscopeof colour and images, it depicts with itscosmic sweep the universe imagined bythe Chinese 2.000 years ago.

Page 21

Top: This part of the lower section isdominated by a huge jade pendant throughwhich the scaly bodies of dragons areentwined. Birds with human heads perchon strings of beads fanning out from thependant.

Bottom: Detail of the middle section,

portraying a dignified old lady (probablythe noblewoman buried in the tomb)walking with the aid of a stick and attendedby maidservants.

Photos House of Culture Publishers. Peking

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OLDEST PAINTING ON SILK (Continued irom page 18)

legendary monsters, as well as sacri¬ficial vessels and musical instruments.

The whole painting is divided into threesections, representing the Heavens,the Earth, and the Nether Regions.

The upper section depicts a scenein heaven. In the upper right-handcorner is a round sun, inside it a crowand under it eight smaller suns withspreading foliage between them.According to an ancient Chinese myththere were once ten suns and ten

golden crows on a huge tree known asfusang in a place called T'ang-Ku.These ten suns circled the sky in turn.When one sun came out, carried onthe back of its crow, the other ninewould rest under the boughs of thetree. A sun being carried by a crowmay have symbolized the cycle of dayand night.

Once all ten suns came out at the

same time, so that plants and cropsb.egan to shrivel. Then the sage kingYao ordered a famous archer, Yi, toshoot them down, and Yi shot downnine suns and nine crows. This

painting shows eight small suns only.Perhaps the artist deliberately con¬cealed the ninth behind the leaves.

II N the upper left-handcorner is a crescent moon with a toad

and a white hare in it, while a womanon a winged dragon is ascendingtowards it. This is a scene from

another ancient myth which relates howthe woman, Ch'ang Ngo, wife of thearcher Yi, stole the elixir of immortalitywhich her husband had obtained from

the Queen Mother of the West andfled to the moon.

Between the sun and the moon

hovers Ch'u lung, a deity with a man'shead and a serpent's body, who hasauthority over heaven and earth. Fivestork-like birds are flying towards him.Further down in the middle hangs abell. The two capped and robed figu¬res with folded hands below it areeither the musicians who sound the

bell or guardians of the gate of heaven.

Flanking them are two horizontalbeams each supporting a verticalboard, and on these boards are twoleopards spotted red. The woodenstructures probably represent the gateof heaven which the leopards areguarding. On either side of the bellare monsters riding on horses towardsthe sun and the moon, beneath whichwinged dragons with claws and fangsare breathing out red flames.

In the middle section, the main part

Colour page opposite

Atop this celestial scene hovers Ch'u-lung,a deity with human head and serpent'sbody, who has authority over heaven andearth. The two capped and robed figuresat the bottom are either musicians who

sound the bell hanging above them orguardians of the gates of heaven (heredepicted as twin pillars surmountedby leopards).

Photo Mouse of Culture Publishers. Peking

of the painting, is a dignified andelegant old lady with elaboratelydressed hair who is walking slowlywith the help of a stick. Two kneelingfigures in front are welcoming her withtrays of food in their hands, whilebehind are three maidservants.

This old lady, the central figure inthe painting, is a noblewoman. Thecurtain above her may represent somehangings in the sacrificial hall, whilethe horizontal line with coloured

lozenge designs below the figurespresumably stands for the ground.

The lower section of the paintingappears to represent the earth and theocean. Under the horizontal earth-line

is a jade pendant, a symbol of nobility,from which two dragons are issuingand rearing upwards. Strings of beadssuspended from the pendant fan outon either side above a jade chime, andon them perch winged birds withhuman heads.

Below these are two short tables

beside which, facing each other, sittwo rows of seven neatly dressedfigures with folded hands. The tripods,boxes, pots, bowls and other utensilson the tables may be the sacrifice forthe dead lady.

Underneath, supporting the tableswith both hands, a mighty monster, halfman and half bear, stands astride twofish-like monsters. Beside it are two

tortoises with two owls on their backs.

Since owls come out only at night,shunning the light of day, they areusually depicted as creatures of theNether Regions.

At the very bottom are the two seamonsters with protruding mouths, fishtails and spotted intertwined bodies.These may be the creature called Aowhich, according to early Chinesemythology, could support the heaviestweights. That would explain why theyform the base of the whole compo¬sition.

Thus the striking scenes painted onthe silk were inspired by myths andlegends or represented the life of thatperiod. Whether imaginary or basedon life, they have been arranged bythis unknown artist into one perfectwhole, a gem of ancient pictorial artreflecting the high level reached by theChinese painters of old.

The composition, though so rich incontent, is no mere jumble of objectsbut pleasingly presented. The chiefsubject, the dead lady, has the centralposition to give prominence to themain theme, while the sun and moonand other accessories form an integralpart of the whole.

The lines are fluid and vigorous andthe objects depicted are remarkablylifelike. The garments of the deadlady, for example, are painted withexquisite delicacy of touch whichconveys the texture of silk, while wecan see that the monster supportingthe earth is flexing its powerfulmuscles. The sun and moon, thedragons, leopards, tortoises, birds andsea monsters appear thoroughly vividand lifelike.

The use of such mineral dyes ascinnabar, azurite and malachite hasproduced glowing and resplendentcolours, while the perfect symmetry ofthe composition induces a sense oforder and harmony.

The tomb has also yielded more than180 pieces of lacquerware retainingtheir original lustre. Some of the lineson the surface designs are as fine assilken threads. Most of these waresare inscribed inside or outside with the

name of the owner or with the purposeand capacity of the utensils. Whenfirst unearthed some of them contained

lotus-root, or food made of rice andflour. On some lacquer plates wereox-bones, chicken-bones and fish.

HE objects made ofbamboo and wood include 162 wooden

figurines, 312 bamboo slips and 48bamboo vessels. The wooden fi¬

gurines are dressed in coloured gar¬ments or have clothing painted onthem. Twenty-three of them are givinga performance of music and dancing;opposite them are lacquer stands,screens, a walking-stick, a scentedpouch, a powder-box and lacquer traysheaped with food. This evidentlyrepresents a feast during the deadlady's lifetime.

Slips of bamboo were used forwriting on before the invention ofpaper. Those found in the tomb wereinscribed in elegant calligraphy withthe number, size and name of differentobjects in the tomb. These ink in¬scriptions are still clear and unblurred.The woven bamboo vessels with covers

contained silk, pendants, meat, veg¬etables, eggs, fruit and medicinal herbs.

Among the musical instruments area 25-stringed zither 1.16 metres longwith four pegs; a pipe-organ 90 cm.long with 22 pipes in two rows; andtwelve bamboo pitch-pipes. Thesewell-preserved musical instruments

provide valuable material for the studyof ancient Chinese music.

There were 50 pottery objects in thetomb including tripods, food containerswith lids and wine-pots, some witha yellow glaze or painted surface.These contained cereals, pickles andfruit.

Inscriptions in ink or clay seals onthe funerary ware indicate that theseobjects belonged to the family of theMarquis of T'ai. According to Han-dynasty histories, the hereditary titleof Marquis of Tai was created in193 B.C. and the title remained in the

family for four generations. Thewoman in the tomb was probably thewife of the first marquis. Thisnobleman, who was chancellor of the

Prince of Ch'ang-sha, ranked relativelylow in the Han aristocracy.

The unearthing of the Ma-Wang-T'uitomb is a significant discovery in ft|»contemporary Chinese archaeology, a yXfind of considerable value for the study ^^of the culture and history of the earlyHan Dynasty.

This imposing head forms the spout of an oval-shapedterracotta vessel. It was moulded by a potter of theTuncahuan culture which flowered on the plateaus of northernEcuador between 500 B.C. and 500 A.D. About one metre

high and possibly representing a sarcophagus, the amphorais embellished with black and red geometric patternssuggestive of the texture and design of a fabric.

THE ENIGMA

OF ECUADOR'S

ANCIENT POTTERYDid it receive the imprint

of an Asian people 4,500 years ago ?

by Jorge Enrique Adoum

24

LDDRESSING the RoyalGeological Society in London justover a century ago, Sir Roderick Mur-chison, a well-known British geologistdeclared: "There was human civiliz¬

ation... in South America at the time

of the older Stone Age in WesternEurope."

Sir Roderick based his statement

on the discovery of some ceramicvessels and gold figurines that JamesS. Wilson had unearthed two yearsearlier, in 1860, at an archaeologicalsite on the coast of Ecuador.

The site of the discoveries was the

scene of the first known "geologicaltragedy" in that part of the SouthAmerican continent which was destin¬

ed to become Ecuador. It consisted

of a stratum of vegetal loam coveredover with a thick layer of marinedeposits, indicating that the Ecuadoriancoast was once inhabited but then sank

into the sea, only to rise againthousands of years later.

We do not know exactly what theobjects were that Wilson discoveredor where they are today. What we doknow is that the "biography" of theEcuadorian people goes back to theValdivia culture which dates from 3200

to 1800 B.C. A number of ceramic

pieces of this period are to be seen in

JORGE ENRIQUE ADOUM, Ecuadorian poetand writer, was formerly National Directorof Culture in Ecuador. Among his worksare a 4-volume poetic cycle, "Los Cuadernosde la Tierra' (Notebooks on my Country,1952-1962), and a play on the fall of the IncaEmpire following the Spanish Conquestentitled "El Sol Bajo las Patas de losCaballos' (The Sun Trampled by Horses'Hooves). He is now a member of theeditorial staff of the 'Unesco Courier'.

a magnificent exhibition of pre-Colum¬bian art from Ecuador that has been

travelling through Europe since 1973.How Ecuador was given its name it

mean "equator" in Spanish makes aninteresting story. It was originally aconfederation of tribes which 16th

century chroniclers baptized the King¬dom of Quito. In the Spanish colonialperiod it was known as the RealAudiencia de Quito (the Judicial Dis¬trict of Quito under the authority ofthe Spanish Crown), and afterwardsthe Presidencia (Presidential District)of Quito.

By 1736 it was well known that theearth was round and measurements

had been made of the terrestrial

meridians in the polar regions. Thatyear the French Royal Academy ofScience sent a mission of geodesiststo Quito to ascertain whether, as aresult of its rotation, the earth wasflattened at the equator as GiovanniDomenico Cassini, director of theParis observatory, had claimed, insteadof at the poles as Newton had main¬tained.

The surveyors found the equinoctialline to be twenty kilometres north ofthe capital, Quito. This is -probablythe only place where the line is notjust an imaginary one: it has beendrawn on the concrete base of a

commemorative pyramid. The countrythen began to be called the "Land ofthe Equator" and subsequently thisname was officially adopted, though itwas somewhat ambiguous and couldsuggest that the country lay in Africaor some other place through whichthe earth's longest parallel passes.

The relative isolation of South

America from the rest of the world

was originally a geological phenomenondating back some two hundred millionyears. According to the theory of theGerman geophysicist, Alfred Wegener,South America was once a part of asingle land mass that also includedwhat are now the territories of

Antarctica, Africa, India and Australia.This mass had in turn broken off from

the primeval land mass that furthercomprised present-day Europe, NorthAmerica, Greenland and Asia.

The future continents separated andmoved westward, and as they did sothey left behind telltale traces of theirbreakaway. The Red Sea, for example,is a vestige of the sundering of Africafrom Asia, and North America seemsto have left Greenland behind as it

migrated ever farther to the west.Meanwhile South America had worked

itself loose from the vast continent that

Wegener called Gondwana, and form¬ed an immense island drifting awayfrom the rest of the world.

If we look closely at a map of theworld, we see that the eastern coast

of South America fits perfectly intothe western coast of Africa, like apiece in a jigsaw puzzle about to beset in place. (For an earlier treatmentof Wegener's theory of continentaldrift, which he formulated in 1912,see the "Unesco Courier", October1963, p. 7.)

Science, however, is not content,to rely on such superficial evidence.It has dug deeper and found convinc¬ing proof of Wegener's thesis in thegeological links between South Amer¬ica, Africa, India and Australia, inthe continuity of the Mid-Ocean Ridgewith its branches, and in a certain"family connexion" to be found bet-

CONTINUED PAGE 26

ECUADOR'S ANCIENT POTTERY

(Continued)

ween animal species that are nowextinct on the New Continent such as

the woolly mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger and those, past andpresent, of the African continent.

Here let us note that the oral

history of peoples always begins witha legend. Throughout South Americathere is a legend, first recorded by theSpanish Chroniclers of the Indies,about an invasion of giants who camefrom the sea, destroyed the indigenoustowns and raised megalithic monu¬ments along the Pacific coast.

This legend may have its origin inthe discovery of large-sized boneswhich, according to Alexander Hum¬boldt, the German scientist andexplorer (1769-1859), must havebeen "the remains of enormous un¬

known cetaceans"; according to somemore imaginative archaeologists, theywere the bones of the Andes masto¬

don or "carnivorous elephant".

But anthropologists are also per¬plexed by the enigma of America.They are not so much concerned withgiants as with knowing how man firstcame to South America. The mon¬

goloid features that are still apparentin the New World Indians seem to

point to an Asian origin.

Professor Juan Comas, a leadingauthority on Latin American anthropo¬logy, asserts and it is now consider¬ed an established factthat 40,000

years ago wanderers from Asia cross¬ed the Bering Strait on an ice bridgeabout fifty miles wide that then linkedthe two continents (See article byProf. Comas, in the "Unesco Courier",August-September 1972, p. 46). Bythat time the land bridge of CentralAmerica had emerged from the oceanand thus enabled the nomads from

the north to travel as far south as

Tierra del Fuego.

Other theorists, such as ProfessorPaul Rivet, former director of theParis Musée de l'Homme, who carriedout research in Ecuador, claim thatthere was a twofold current of mi¬

gration, a northern one made up ofMongolians and Eskimos who cameby way of the Bering Strait, and asouthern one consisting of Malayan-Polynesians who crossed the PacificOcean in fragile open sailing-craft.

Characteristics of the australoid

race of Lagoa Santa in Brazil arealso exhibited by the first-known"Ecuadorian", Punin man, whose skullwas unearthed some 50 years ago incentral Ecuador. Punin man is 6,000years old according to carbon-14 tests.

DOUBLE-CONE CERAMIC JAR

Bartholomé Ruiz, the first Spanishnavigator to reach the coast ofEcuador in 1526, described withwonder a sea-going craft used bythe Mantas Indians (a raft with alateen sail) and the objects it carried.Dating from 500 B.C., the Mantenaculture on the central coast of Ecuador

was noted for its outstandingcraftsmanship in metal and stone.Its pottery, usually coloured black,featured superb animal and humanfigures, realistically depicted orstylized in shapes as unexpectedas this double-cone vessel toppedwith a human head.

Pre-Columbian remains found alongthe coast of Ecuador have been seen

by some as evidence that Asianscame to Ecuador 2,500 years beforethe Christian Era, blown off theircourse by a storm, and exerted astrong influence on the aboriginalcultures.

Dolico-cephalic skulls (long narrow)belonging to a fishing people werefound in a lower stratum in Valdivia,whereas a more recent level has

yielded the remains of a brachy-ce-phalic people (round headed) whointroduced agriculture and a techniqueof baking clay so highly developedthat the Valdivia culture may beconsidered the first ceramic centre in

the New World.

Moreover, their ceramic "Venuses"have certain traits in common with

the statuettes of the Jomon culture

in Japan, and both types may possiblybe related to some fertility cultcommon to both sides of the Pacific.

The figurines aiso suggest that anearly matriarchal society existed inEcuador. Some of the coastal tribes

worshipped the goddess Umiña, "god¬dess of the green stone", which maybe a reference to jade.

Additional evidence of links with

Asia comes from the Chorrera culture

of Ecuador (1800 to 500 B.C.) with

VENUS

OF VALDIVIAThese three figurines arebelieved to represent femaledivinities. They are worksof pottery of the Valdiviaculture which developed onthe southern coast of Ecuador

from 3200 to 1800 B.C.

Valdivia potters produced agreat variety of ceramic"Venuses" (rarely over5 cm. high) using finger-nailsto shape eyes and eyebrows,mouths and hair. Certain

scholars have advanced the

hypothesis that pottery wasintroduced to Ecuador by anAsian (Japanese?) peoplewho reached the Ecuadorian

coast by 2500 B.C. and underwhose influence the modellingand baking of clay developed.

its figures displaying typically orientalfeatures and its finely-drawn ceramicwork decorated with an iridescent

metallic paint the technique of whichremains unknown subjected to tem¬peratures of 1,000 degrees in labora¬tory tests, the metallic film still clingsto the underlying pottery.

Other Asian associations are seen

in the Chorrera clay models of build¬ings on truncated or stepped pyramidsthat are reminiscent of pagoda struc¬tures, and, most particularly, in a largenumber of "neck rests", similar to thetype of, oriental pillow made of fineporcelain or willow branches that couldstill be purchased in antique shops inPeking or Shanghai when the authorwas there a few years ago.

The most convincing piece ofevidence, however, for certain advo¬cates of the Asian hypothesis is to befound in the similarity between therudders of rafts still used for navig¬ation in South America, Viet-Nam andTaiwan. Since such rudders existed

in China five centuries before the

Christian Era, it has been assumedthat they could have come from Asiato South America.

But the sea can be crossed in both

directions. In 1947 Thor Heyerdahl,the Norwegian anthropologist andexplorer, built one of these rafts, the

Kon-Tiki, on which he sailed from thePeruvian port of Callao to the atollof Raroia in an attempt to prove thatthe islands of Polynesia were origin¬ally inhabited by aborigines fromSouth America, remote ancestors ofthe mythical "noble savage" imaginedby Montesquieu and discovered laterby the French navigator, Louis deBougainville, and by Captain JamesCook.

Whatever the point of departuremay have been, there is no doubtthat there were trans-Pacific and

inter-American contacts. The giganticsculptures of Chile's Easter Island areparents or children of Polynesianwood sculpture. The cultivation ofmaize spread from Central Americato the southernmost part of the SouthAmerican continent. Utensils indispu¬tably made in Ecuador have beenfound in Panamanian graves. In Ecua¬dor and Peru there are place-namesof Arawakan-Caribbean origin, andthe great variety of human typesfound in the statuettes of the La

Tolita culture in northern Ecuador

either reflect striking ethnic differen¬ces or are the exaggerated, grotesqueor even caricatural rendering of thefeatures of strange invaders wholanded on the coasts.

Some clay models represent houses

on stilts for protection against floodsand wild beasts; others, built likesanctuaries on platforms, seem toimply the existence of a hierarchizedand stratified society where politicaland religious power was in the handsof priest-chiefs and shamans whosedignity was easily recognized by theirpectoral ornaments and nose-rings.

Ocarinas, whistles, rattles and drumsno doubt played an important partin the religious rites performed toappease the gods. From molluscshells they made recipients, orna¬ments, and strings of beads as fineas two millimetres in -diameter which

served as a kind of money for tradewith the Andean peoples who acquir¬ed them in order to compel their owngods to give them rain.

All these cultures had different

languages and different customs,though they had some features incommon. For example, they all equat¬ed art and craftsmanship. The artistwas considered a useful member of

society because he wrought vesselsand utensils for domestic use, andthe artist, feeling the community'sneed for art, produced artifacts that __were aesthetically pleasing to behold jland to live with. **'

The extraordinary number of fig¬urines found in La Tolita lead neces-

CONTINUED NEXT PAGE

28

ECUADOR'S ANCIENT POTTERY

(Continued)

sarily to the conclusion that manypeople, perhaps the entire population,were engaged in making and sellingtheir artistic well-crafted products.

These were cultures whose oral

traditions escape us. Centuries ofimagination, creative effort and spiri¬tual turmoil would be needed in order

to develop systematic religion withmythical concepts of bird-men orleopard-men and idofs which did notmerely represent divinities, but actuallyincarnated them.

No one knows how this ideologicalprocess evolved or how long it wenton. It must have culminated in a

belief in some sort of survival of the

soul, otherwise why would they haveplaced the bodies of their dead in afoetal position and buried them withjewels, pottery, clothing and food, asthough replacing them in the wombof earth to be reborn to another life?

What intense hope must have goneinto the effort to replace realism bya more abstract representation, andled to the unbridled "baroque" decor¬ation on the vessels known as

"witches' cauldrons", and the overlyornamented costumes still worn

by dancers in solstice celebrationsand on other high days. These co¬incide with the major feasts of theChristian calendar, though their signi¬ficance has been forgotten. Perhaps,like all popular festivities, they are away to cast off all restraints, perhapsnothing more than a manifestation ofthe humble human need to be "kingfor a day".

It is important to remember thatsince the wheel was unknown in these

early cultures, they had no wheel onwhich to mould pottery. But nothinghas ever prevented any people fromdeveloping the noble and all-embrac¬ing art of pottery in which man takesa handful of earth and fashions hisown creations.

Perfectly symmetrical whorls forspindles were made by craftsmen ofthe Guangala culture of Ecuador (500B.C. to 500 A.D.) and its jars havebeen compared to those of Crete.Olaf Holm, the German archaeologist,maintained that the ancient pottersmust have used large disk-shapedplatters which they rotated with onehand while modelling the vessel theywere making with the other.

The road from clay to metal wasalso a long one. No doubt gold wasmore elegantly wrought in other coun¬tries, but it was in La Tolita, from500 B.C. to 500 A.D., that man firstworked with platinum. The Danishscientist, Paul Bergsoe, discoveredthat the secret lay in softening theplatinum by mixing it with moltengold a technique that only began tobe used in Europe in the 18th century.

These cultures lacked the ploughin addition to the wheel. They sur¬vived as some still do on cereals

and potatoes. From one period tothe next, and from one region toanother, they doggedly waged their

dramatic struggle against the environ¬ment, though not always successfully.

Along the coast they were plaguedwith eruptions of now extinct volca¬noes, long periods of drought, andthe formation of saltpetre beds thatmake agriculture impossible.

In the mountains there was the

bleak paramo with its scrubby vege¬tation, its drizzly rain and the mistwhich envelops the two Cordilleras ofthe Andes that double backbone of

the land, made up of volcanoes andsnow-covered peaks rising as high assix thousand metres above sea level,with warm, temperate valleys betweenthem like hollows in the vertebrae of

a continental spinal column.

And on the other side of the moun¬

tain range were the Amazonianjungles, the domain of wild monkeysand jaguars, where snakes laid theireggs on leaves that had been pilingup since primeval times.

The diversity of climates gave riseto a wide variety of products andcultivation techniques, but man wasfirst of all, here as elsewhere, ahunter. The deer was not only afigure in the mythology and art ofprimitive man but also provided hisbasic food and bony material withwhich to manufacture tools.

The tutelary and totemic animal of

the South American Indians was

the llama, a symbol of the silentwastes of the Andes. From time to

time fish crop up as decorative motifson their pottery, but this was the markof other cultures which sooner or

later began to influence them, or aresult of the descent of mountain

tribes to the coast.

The desolation of the brushwood

tablelands, the stillness scarcely bro¬ken by the wind and the mountainouslandscape with its double barrier thatacts like a set of blinkers preventingman from seeing beyond them allthose forced the individual to look

either down at the ground or up atthe stars, both of which prompted himto ask questions about himself.

The plateau-dweller had the sameaesthetic feeling for utensils of currentuse and the same desire to decorate

functional objects as his cousins on thecoast, but the austerity of his environ¬ment caused him to express himselfin more severe art forms.

The Carchi culture had a clear pre¬ference for negative painting. Thehieratic attitude of their sculpturedfigures was emphasized by the useof black, and a dramatic facial

expression was obtained by usingsubstances that made the eyes seemto shed tears of colour.

CONTINUED PAGE 36

PREHISTORIC

SURREALISMThe sculptures found atLa Tolita, an island at thenorthern end of the Ecuadorian

coast, show a highlydeveloped form of art. Theymay represent religious,human-animal figures toconjure' evil spirits. Left,the terracotta figure(21.5 cm. by 25.5 cm.) is afragment of a pottery ofunknown shape. Right,earthenware head, half feline,half human, also found atLa Tolita, strongly suggestslinks between this culture

and those' of Central America.

So many of these objectshave been found in La Tolita

that it would seem that the

whole population of the islandwas engaged in pottery-making.

Photos © Gerard Dufresne. Pan

From 1800 B.C. to 500 A.D. a great culture extended over much of Ecuador.Specialists consider this civilization (known as Chorrera) to have been the cradleof indigenous Ecuadorian culture. Below, two typical pottery figures of Chorrera.The vessel in the shape of a man lying on his back, left, and the bottle, right,are characteristic of Chorrera ceramic art, with such distinctivefeatures as the so-called "coffee-bean" eyes.

35 STEPSTO

ANTIQUITY

Under the central square of Bulgaria'scapital city, a pedestrian subwayleads to the vestigesof an ancient Roman citadel

by Magdalina Stancheva

MAGDALINA STANCHEVA is one oí the leading archaeologists andphilologists of Bulgaria. Head of the Archaeological Department of theHistorical Museum in Sofia for the past twenty years, she has carried outinvestigations at all the major archaeological sites in her country. For herpioneer work on Serdica (the ancient Roman name for Sofia) she wasawarded the Sofia Prize.

Above, model of the ancient Romancitadel of Serdica. Ruins of

Serdica's forum were discovered

in 1971 in the heart of Sofia, capitalof Bulgaria, during the constructionof an underground pedestrian pas¬sageway. Arrowed sign indicatesthe site of the pedestrian subway.Left, an entrance to the passegewayin Sofia's central square.

Photo reportage producedfor the "Unesco Courier"

by Gérard Dufresne

Il t

I < -i

*'r -^

T^r^^TrT m' ^

, Ml

**3WIM«« *.;

* .» !- j*^

> I < I t « « I f

I|T grows but does notgrow old." This motto, displayed onthe arms of Sofia, capital of Bulgaria,is an apt description of the evolutionof that ancient city in the heart of theBalkans which continues to modernize

and look to the future while preserving

its 7,000 years-old links with the past.

The central part of the city, which isstill in the process of change aboveground, extends over the buriedremains of several civilizations, com¬

prising strata of ruined cities to a depthof 10 metres.

From the now scarcely identifiabletraces of an ancient Thracian settle¬

ment to the vestiges of later cultures,the whole of this archaeologicalcomplex records the troubled historyof a city often besieged by invadersand destroyed several times.

Lying at the crossroads of the

Balkans peninsula, set in a fertile well-watered plain surrounded by mountainsand forests filled with game, and famedfor its mineral springs and baths, Sofiahas often paid dearly for its privilegedsituation.

The "heart" of the city is still thesame: it is the Forum of the Roman

town of Serdica, the centre of medieval

Bulgarian Sredets and the mainsquare of the Sofia liberated less thana century ago from foreign domination

a square today named after Lenin.Every epoch built on the ruins of thepast and each layer of ruins left itsmark. Little by little, century aftercentury, reality fused with legend.

An unusual subway has been built inSofia. To cross the busy centralsquare, the pedestrian has to go thirty-five steps down below the ground.Nothing above ground could lead one

Photos Unesco Courier - Gérard Dufresne

to guess the extraordinary surpriseawaiting the passer-by who for the firsttime goes down the granite stepsflanked by marble walls, under thebright lights of a glass and aluminiumceiling.

At the foot of the steps, he entersthe hall of what appears to be amuseum of archaeology. At theentrance he passes through the maineast gate through the wall of theancient fortifications which defended

the city for more than twelve centuries.

The gate, built of great limestoneblocks, now stands hospitably open.

It originally had two metal doors whichwere closed at the onslaught of in¬vaders. Its pentagonal towers oneither side, built of red brick upon a

plinth of large stone blocks, formedpart of the 6th century wall that en¬circled the citadel. When they were

CONTINUED NEXT PAGE

31

32

35 STEPS TO ANTIQUITY (Continued)

built, the towers were about 10 metres

high. Today their ruins reach theceiling of the hall at a height of aboutfour metres.

Behind these fortifications the ruins

of another wall, built in alternatinglayers of stone and brick, were alsounearthed. Fortifications and wall are

both four metres thick. It is not bychance that Serdica's fortress was

claimed to be impregnable and thatonly a long siege could force the city'sdefenders to open its gates.

The second wall dates from the time

of Constantine (4th century) but aninscription cut in a great stone slabdisplayed in the hall indicates thatSerdica also had a defensive wall as

early as the 2nd century, at the time ofthe Emperor Marcus Aurelius. These

fortifications protected the city evenafter its occupation by the Slavs andinclusion in Bulgaria in the 9th century,but were destroyed in 1382 when theTurks besieged and captured Sredets,as it was known by that time.

The outer gate leads to an enclosedspace in which are entrances to the

towers, well preserved up to theirarches. There is an inner gate on the

opposite side of the enclosure. Onthe threshold of both gates traces ofthe ruts left by the passage over manycenturies of innumerable iron-rimmed

wheels of carts and patricians' chariotsare still visible.

The small court between the two

gates is paved with thick stone slabs.

Most of them are parts of the magni¬ficently ornamented cornices andarchitraves, with their sculptured sidesface downwards. They once adornedthe facades of buildings and porticosaround the forum of Serdica.

The Roman city, which grew andprospered in the second to fourthcenturies, was devastated in the fifth

century by the Goths, the Huns andother invaders. In the sixth century,under Justinian, the city regained itsimportance, but during the vicissitudesof the ensuing centuries much of itsmagnificence was to be trampled underfoot and buried. Today men of the20th century are again walking on theoriginal stone slabs.

The finds were not unexpected,because archaeologists had the planof the ancient lay-out of the city, andparts of the old fortifications had

CONTINUED PAGE 34

Passage to SerdicaStepping down one of the four

entrances to the subway (above)pedestrians find themselves

among the amphoras, mosaics

and sculpted reliefs of the world

of antiquity. Going along the

passage, they can follow the

ancient road through RomanSerdica from the citadel gate to

the forum (above right) treadingon the original paving stones,still well preserved. Right, acarved stone slab of the 4th

century A.D., representing circusgames with riders, wild animals

and their keepers. The slab,

which may have once decoratedSerdica's Circus, is now in the

Sofia Archaeological Museum.

34

35 STEPS TO ANTIQUITY (Continued)

already been explored before work onthe subway began.

But as soon as the work of excava¬

tion started, archaeologists realizedthat the old east gate would beunearthed in an exceptionally goodstate, considering that the town hadbeen destroyed and rebuilt so manytimes. So it was decided to modify

the course originally planned for thepassage and to allow more time andmoney for its construction.

The finds which came to light arenow preserved in the passage hall.They surpass in their monumental

structure and archaeological signifi¬cance all earlier discoveries, proving

that the effort was well worthwhile.

Special laws for the protection ofcultural property and painstakingefforts by archaeologists workingclosely with architects produced a boldand original solution that reconcilesurban modernization with the needs of

cultural preservation.

The citizens of Sofia have taken the

habit of using the passage. Hurrying.along the ancient way, some heed¬lessly pass between the massive ruinedwalls. Others stop to telephone in

The Roman tower

in the

bargain basementDo you know a department store wherehalf the floor space in the basement istaken by the ruins of an ancient Romantower? The inhabitants of Sofia do.

Above, like the prow of a ship or somehuge whale, the base of one of the triang¬ular towers of the north gate of. thecitadel of ancient Serdica protrudes amongtennis rackets, camping equipment andraincoats in the "Sofia" store sportsdepartment. Left, in the subway, the baseof another tower, which was rebuilt duringthe Middle Ages when Roman Serdicabecame Bulgarian Sredets. Right, hem¬med in by modern buildings, an earlyChristian church, erected on the ruins ofRoman constructions now being excavated.In the foreground, part of an ancient Romanheating system.

the glass and metal booths. Amidsnatches of conversation and laughter,life moves on at a modern pace...

But for the newcomer the subway isa fascinating step backwards intohistory. Blow-up photos of the exca¬vations show interesting details of thearchaeological monuments and help toexplain them. Niches in the wallscontain fragments of sculpture, originalmosaics and even a small altar de¬dicated to Artemis by the priestess,

Rhodope.

From a small room, containing other

exhibits, one can see the inner side

of the fortified wall and the steps upwhich the sentinels climbed. A relief

map shows the layout of ancientSerdica.

There are also on display earth¬enware containers out of which the

defenders of the citadel poured boilingpitch onto the invaders. Nearby areamphoras discovered in the ruins of asmall shop on the ancient way wheretoday souvenirs and post-cards aresold from a small kiosk.

Constantly the visitor notices otherlinks between Sofia past and present.The vestiges of antiquity no longer

seem to be dead. Fittingly, Sofia'scoat of arms with its inscription, "It

grows but does not grow old," in¬scribed between two olive branches,

has been placed on one of the walls.

The four quarters of the coat of armsbear the ancient symbols of the city:the image of Tyche, patron goddess ofcities, copied from a Serdica coin; themagnificent 6th century basilica ofSt. Sophia, which gave its name to thecity in the 14th century; the littletemple of Apollo Medicus incarnatingthe beneficent thermal springs; and theVitosha mountains, their massive peaks

forming an unchanging back-drop tothe city.

Nearby is the great stone at onetime embedded in Serdica's gate abovethe arch, still welcoming the visitorwith the traditional greeting, "Goodluck", inscribed above the names ofancient emperors and governors.

35

ECUADOR'S ANCIENT POTTERY

This curious object is a whistle-bottleof the Bahia culture of Ecuador,

composed of three roundinter-connected vessels of polishedgrey earthenware decorated withhuman-animal heads. The Bahia

culture produced earthenwareheadrests and structures with

pagoda-shaped roofs. These andother objects have been seen by certainspecialists as evidence of directearly contact between Asiaand South America.

Half tortoise, half ¡guana, the vesselimmediately below was produced bythe Bahia culture during Ecuador'sso-called "Period of RegionalDevelopment" (500 B.C. to 500 A.D.).The tripod with human feet belongsto the Carchi culture of northern Ecuador.It is of the so-called "Period of

Integration" (500 to 1500 A.D.).The geometric motif is produced bypainting the background and leavingthe pattern the colour of the originalclay, a technique known as "negativepainting". The two works bring to mindsimilar Chinese objects.

Photos © Gabriel Cruz Nardi. Quito

36

Continued from page 28

Physical anthropologists may sighwhen they come upon skulls that havebeen deformed into the shape of acone (probably for ritualistic reasons),and when figurative representationsdepart from strict realism and do notportray the typical physical traitsthat they are looking for. But thegradual development of art is theresult of changes in man's way oflooking at himself.

The Cashaloma and Tacalshapacultures, the last ones to survive

before the invasion of the greatInca armies, had worked out a theoryof form and colour, mass and line,in harmony with their environment.

Here we find an early manifestationof artistic freedom with a breakawayfrom stylized forms, the use of free,arbitrary shapes, the asymmetricalapplication of colours, and the transferof textile designs onto the nude bodiesof the miniature caryatids that sup¬ported their fruit dishes. Could thisbe the origin of.tatooing in Ecuador?

These cultures possessed no writing.But their masks seem to indicate that

they had developed a rudimentary formof theatre. The features are usuallyvery expressive, contorted, grimacingor wrinkled, and sometimes sardonic.

I wonder whether the masks found

in tombs, on skulls ten or twenty cent¬uries old, are meant to capture thetrue essence of the departed, facelessand unknown. Or were they intendedas a disguise so that the divinitiescould not recognize the person enter¬ing heaven? Or were they simply tofrighten off evil spirits and demons?

True art never really answers ques

tions; on the contrary it gives rise tothem. The axiom that aesthetics has

precedence over logic, or that a senseof form came before speech wasdeveloped, may apply to the Pre-Columbian civilizations in Ecuador.

The examples of Pre-Columbian arttouring Europe are a retrospectiveexhibition of the works of the Ecua¬

dorian artist covering slightly morethan three thousand years. A wholepeople left the sign of its hand onthese, plates, pitchers and statuettes,and thus created a cultural identitythat can be recognized not onlythrough the objects but in the worksof art themselves.

The Incas arrived from the south in

the middle of the 15th century. Theirswas one of the great great civilizationsof history: theocratic (they worshippedthe sun), an absolute hierarchy (theInca was considered the son of God

and his mediator on earth), imperialist(they called their Empire "The FourCorners of the Earth", encompassingthe entire universe).

When they conquered the aboriginaltribes they made Quito their secondcapital. They amazed the Spanishwith their mathematically hierarchizedsocial organization, their dignified andforbidding demeanour, and their giftfor town-planning based, as an Ecua¬dorian archaeologist recently wrote,"upon a respect for ecology and theintroduction of Nature into the urbanenvironment and the architectonic

space." This briefly, is a descriptionof the colossal sacred citadel of

Machu Picchu the mystery of whoseconstruction may never be deciphered.But that is another story.

Jorge Enrique Adoum

All the artifacts illustrated in this

article are preserved in theArchaeological Museum of the

Bank of Ecuador, Quito.

Letters to the Editor

POP OR NO POP?

We thank the many readers who

replied to our query "Want an issueon pop music?" The repliesshow a majority in favour of anissue on pop and other forms ofmodern music. A large percentage

come from young people, but asignificant proportion are from olderreaders who want to know more

about pop, including its origins,meaning and social significance. Anissue on pop is planned for latenext year. Space permits us topublish only a few of the manyletters received.

Sir,An issue on pop and other forms

of modern music would have a

universal appeal. I shall look forwardto its publication.

Mary DewhurstBurlington, Ontario

Canada

Sir,My reply is No I This is not a

suitable subject for a serious magazinesuch as the "Unesco Courier". Pop

music gives a harmful slant to themoulding of young minds and tastes.It also turns young people away fromthe beauties of our folk-music andfrom the classics the finest music ofall.

L. Carrion

Sao Gabriel

Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

Sir,I suggest you include articles dealing

with the origins of pop music and itsdifferent forms and styles. The issuewill help people to understand thiskind of music, which has become soobviously a part of present-day culture,and no form of culture should be

looked down upon.Matti Palomäki

Turku, Finland

Sir,I enjoyed your June 1973 issue devot¬

ed to "Music of the Centuries" and

I would welcome an issue on pop. Iam not an expert on modern pop, butI think that as time goes by it willbe seen as something unique andrevolutionary in the history of music.

Raymond LabergeVilleneuve, Quebec

Canada

Sir.

Bravo for your idea. I teach musicto 300 young people at a technicaleducation centre and believe me, popmakes a far bigger impact on themthan classical music or jazz. Theyoung are seeking a language for the20th century. I try to understand them,but it is not easy for an adult. Solet the specialists enlighten us on thepop craze.

Ch. TrippBelfort, France

Sir,Because I was made to practise the

piano from the age of 5 to the ageof 18, and because I was saturatedwith Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Mendels¬sohn, etc., I found myself, as an adult,addicted to Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky,Messiaen, etc. Now at the age of61, I am a fan of King Crimson, PinkFloyds and other pop stars and collecttheir records. I confess that for me

pop has blotted out all other music.With its violence and despair, itsplanetary use of instruments from everycontinent and played by the teen-agerswho are the world of tomorrow, it is

the real pulse of our times. Thankyou for the June 1973 issue devotedto non-European music.

N. Provins

Paris, France

Sir,Please, Please, NO pop issue. The

British Broadcasting Corporation andall the world's record companies caterfor ALL mankind's needs in this respect.

G. EnglandPorthcawl, United Kingdom

Sir.

Pop is not a subject that shouldconcern Unesco. With so many othermedia, pouring it out, it is practicallyimpossible not to know somethingabout it.

Why not wait another ten years bywhich time the controversy will havedied away if pop still exists. By thenit will have become part of the world'smusical heritage whether one likes itor not.

Robert DaigneaultMontreal, Canada

Sir,A great idea, but please include an

article on "Música Contesta" (ProtestMusic) or "Canción Protesta" (Songsof Protest) now so popular throughoutLatin America.

David Gonzales Gross

Palma Soriano, Cuba

Sir,

Why not take a retrospective lookat young people's music since 1950:rock, twist, pop, folk-songs, etc.

Alain Charmillot

Besançon, France

Sir.

By all means devote an issue to popmusic as well as to modern music in

general. As a music teacher in asecondary school, I had been intend¬ing to prepare a course on the originof pop music and on how electronicmusic is "made".

M. Trancart

Chartres, France

PAKISTAN 5.000 YEARS

OF CIVILIZATION

Sir,In your December 1973 issue the

history of civilization in Pakistan hasbeen captivatingly presented in 40

pages of informative articles andphotographs on ancient sites, antiquitiesand historic monuments.

I am sure this commendable effort

will go a long way in giving the worlda distinct glimpse into the culturalheritage of Pakistan and the treasuresof art and culture in this ancient landof the Indus.

Dr. Mohammad AjmalPakistan Ministry of Education,

Islamabad, Pakistan

Sir,

In your issue dedicated to Pakistan,I must congratulate your for highlightingthe salient features of Pakistan'sancient art and culture in a most

appealing manner.

Taswir Hussain Hamidi

Superintendent,National Museum of Pakistan,

Karachi, Pakistan

THE ICELAND SAGA

Sir,

Congratulations on giving yourreaders those excellent articles on thelife and culture of the Icelanders(February 1974). As Jónas Kristjánssonrightly says, in the sagas "are to befound answers to all the problems ofhuman life".

To the sagas and Eddas of Icelandwe are indebted for the preservationof the faith that guided the actions ofall northern Europe until the comingof Christianity. I hope readers of the"Unesco Courier" will have been

encouraged by your articles to discoverfor themselves the magic of the sagas.They will not regret itl

Paul Vavasour

Secretary,The Odinist Committee

London, U.K.

WHEN CHILDREN

CAN TEACH ADULTS

Sir,

I would like to endorse what Rosa

Maria Pérez Mirabent had to say inthe letters column of your January 1974issue. I really enjoy your publicationbut I hate to feel that people youngerthan myself (I am in college) are beingdeprived of a good resource becausethey cannot understand the material.

Many children and young people arevery concerned about their world andI think publications like yours shouldencourage this. I suggest that youregularly publish a supplement that canbe used in the classroom. As a beginn¬ing, I would like to see a supplementdealing with World Population Year,the problems, the solutions, and espe¬cially some ideas for younger folks onhow they can help to solve the problem.You would be suprised to see howoften children can educate adults.

Anne Fullerton

Nashville, Tennessee, U.S.A.

BOOKSHELF

UNESCO'S TRANSLATIONS SERIES

HUNGARY

Attila József Selected Poems

and Texts

Translated by John Bátki. Edited byGeorge Gomori and James Atlas.Carcanet Press, Cheadle Hulme,

England, 103 pp.

JAPAN

The Factory Ship and The Absen¬tee Landlord. Two novels by TakijiKobayashi. Translated by FrankMotofuji. University of Tokyo Press.185 pp.

Three Contemporary JapanesePoets: Anzai Hitoshi. Shiraishi Ka-

zuko. Tanikawa Shuntaro. Translat¬

ed and Introduced by GraemeWilson & Atsumi Ikuko. London

Magazine Editions. 80 pp.

ROMANIA

The Last Romantic: Mihail Emi-

nescu

English versions of his poetic workswith an introduction by Roy MacGregor-Hastie. University of IowaPress, Iowa City. 129 pp.

INDIA

Speaking of Siva

Collection of free-verse religiouslyrics. Translated with an introduc¬tion by A.K. Ramanujan. PenguinClassics. 199 pp.

Padma River Boatman

A novel by Manik Bandopadhyaya.Translated from the Bengali byBarbara Painter and Yann Lovelock.

University of Queensland Press'sAsian and Pacific Writing Series.Santa Lucia, Queensland, Australia.142 pp.

ISRAEL

The Mishnah

Oral Teachings of Judaism: Select¬ed and Translated by Eugene J. Lip-man. The Viking Press. New York.318 pp.

OTHER BOOKS

Tyre Through the Ages

By Nina Jidejian. Dar el-MashreqPublishers, Beirut, Lebanon, 1969.

264 pp.

Urbanisation and Urban Centres

under the Great MughalsBy H.K. Naqvi, Indian Institute ofAdvanced Study, Simla, India, 1971.210 pp. ($8, £2.25)

Can Man Change the Climate?By. P. Borisov. Progress Publishers.Moscow, 1973. 175 pp.

The Work of the Science FilmMaker

By Alex Strasser. Focal Press Ltd.,London and New York, 1972.308 pp. (£4)

Treasures of Ireland: Irish Paganand Early Christian ArtBy AT. Lucas. Gill and Macmillan,Dublin. Published in agreement withUnesco. 200 pp, 175 illustrations.

mmAfrican science

and technologyBy 1980 African states should each havebetween 1,000 and 2,000 scientists permillion inhabitants and should be spendingat least one per cent of their gross nationalproduct on research and development.These targets were set by 38 countries atthe recent CASTAFRICA Conference in

Dakar (Senegal) on African science andtechnology. Commenting on Africa'sprogress in this field, Unesco's DirectorGeneral, René Maheu, told the conferencethat 24 out of Unesco's 38 African member

states today have ministries of scienceor other bodies to direct national science

policies.

Universal Postal Union

centenary

1974 marks the 100th anniversary of theUniversal Postal Union. In this connexion,Unesco's Director-General, René Maheu,has suggested ways for Unesco memberstates to promote the international flow ofinformation through postal communications.These cover cheaper postal services (bysuppressing or reducing taxes, extendingrates for printed matter, etc.) for books,newspapers, and a wide range of edu¬cational, scientific and cultural materials.

The Icelanders and the Sea

The Editors wish to draw readers' atten¬

tion to the following observations withregard to the article "The Icelanders andthe Sea" by Dr. Unnstein Stefánsson ofthe Marine Research Institute in Reykjavik,which appeared in the February 1974 issueof the "Unesco Courier".

1. The last paragraph of Dr. Stefánsson'sarticle referred to the decision taken on

September 1, 1972 by the Icelandic Gov¬ernment and the Althing (Parliament) toextend the Icelandic fisheries jurisdictionto 50 miles. The final sentence of the

article originally read: "Behind this decisionthe entire nation stands united." In the

published text on page 30, this sentencewas inadvertently omitted, when, for

B rn

complementary clarification purposes thefollowing sentence was added by theeditors: "This decision has not been

accepted by all nations and has been thecause of some tensions and disputes withcertain European fishing nations."

2. The sentence on page 30 "No singlenation relies as heavily on the sea forits economic prosperity as do the Iceland¬ers" originally read : "No independentnation relies as heavily on the sea, etc."The author had in mind certain nations that

have not gained full independence.The Editors regret these discrepancies.

Architecture, sportsand popular culture

Unesco's new international quarterly,Cultures, devotes its second issue, justpublished, to a series of themes: "Aspectsof Popular Culture", "Architecture" and"Sports and Culture". Cultures, (annualsubscription 75 Fr F; single copy 22 Fr F)can be ordered from Unesco national

distributors (see next page).

Flashes...

The following information is taken fromthe latest edition of Unesco's Statistical

Yearbook, just published:

Leading book producers in 1971 wereU.S.S.R. (85,487 titles), U.S.A. (80,569) andthe Fed. Rep. of Germany (40,354).

Da/7y newspapers increased from 7,860in 1969 to 8,050 in 1970, but at the latestcount 44 countries and territories still had

no daily.

(n J 970 radio transmitters numbered

22,000 and radio receivers 728 million;there were over 17,000 TV transmitters and261 million TV sets.

Industrially-developed countries have25 times more scientists and engineersthan developing countries and spendbetween 30 and 120 dollars per head onresearch and development compared, forinstance, with only one to two dollars perhead spent by Africa.

frisen RETO

ESPACIO

:l '.ii:: ill mi:',hi i Ii s

'UNESCO COURIER' PAPERBACKS

We are pleased to announce the lauching of a new collection of paperback booksbased on material from the "Unesco Courier". Entitled "Libros de Bolsillo-EI

Correo de la Unesco" (Paperback Books-"Unesco Courier") the series ispublished in Spanish by Promoción Cultural Publishers, Barcelona. Four volumeshave already appeared dealing with The Origins of Man, Challenge to the Cosmos,World Art, and Science and Myth. Each volume is made up of material fromvarious issues. The "Unesco Courier" hopes that this initiative will lead tosimilar paperback collections in other languages.

u

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I

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oUJ

Unesco, Paris, 1972

44 F (paperbound)60 F (clothbound)

198 illustrations

A UNESCO BEST-SELLER

A highly readable and exciting book on the new world

of underwater archaeology. Designed to appeal to both

the general reader and the specialist, this volume has

become one of Unesco's "best-sellers". The entire May

1972 issue of the "Unesco Courier" gave a preview ofthis book.

n Focusses on the major achievements in underwater

archaeology and the sites and wrecks excavated.

Examines the main problems facing underwater

archaeologists today and the new techniques used.

A few titles from the 27 chapters in this 306-page book:

Ancient Wrecks (Frédéric Dumas). The Salvage of the

Swedish Warship "Wasa" (Anders Franzen). Wrecks as

Ancient Monuments (G.D. van der Heide). History of

Underwater Photography (Dimitri Rebikoff). The Uses of

Sonar (Donald M. Rosencrantz, M. Klein, Harold E. Edger-ton). Submersibles in Underwater Search and Photo-grammetric Mapping (George F. Bass, Donald M. Rosen-crantz). The Submerged Remains of Port Royal, Jamaica(Robert Marx). Wrecks in the North Sea and the Baltic(Ole Crumlin-Pedersen). The Sacred Well of Chichén-Itzá and Other Sites in Mexico (Pablo Bush Romero).

Where to renew your subscriptionand order other Unesco publications

Order from any bookseller or write direct tothe National Distributor in your country. (See listbelow ; names of distributors in countries notlisted, along with subscription rates in localcurrency, will be supplied on request.)

AUSTRALIA. Publications : Educational SuppliesPty. Ltd., P.O. Box 33, Brookvale, 2100. NSW; Perio¬dicals: Dominie Pty. Limited, Box 33, Post Office,Brookvale 2100, NSW. Sub-agent: United NationsAssociation of Australia, Victorian Division 5th floor,134/136 Flinders St., Melbourne (Victoria), 3000.

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narodnaia Kniga, Moscow, G-200. YUGOSLAVIA.Jugosloven5ita Knjiga, Terazije, 27, Belgrade; DrzavnaZalozba Slovenije Mestni Trg. 26, Ljubljana.

Photo © Savio, Rome

ECUADORIAN TWO-HEADED PITCHER

The double-spouted pitcher was a popular form of ancient Ecuadorian craft. The one shown here is a highlyoriginal example of Andean pottery of the 5th century A.D. The heads of different sizes forming its spoutsprobably represent those of an Indian mother and the child she carries on her back. Discovered in Ecuador'ssouthern province of Cañar, it was modelled by a craftsman of the Tacalshapa culture which flourished onthe Andes at that period. (See article on the Pre-Columbian cultures of Ecuador, page 24.)