Berlin’s Pergamon Museum is finally displaying Max von Oppenheim’s spectacular 3,000-year-old finds from Syria — which they just painstakingly reassembled, over the course of the last decade, to partially undo the damage of Allied bombing in World War II:
In 1943, Allied phosphorus bombs rained down on the statues from the Middle East, setting off a 900-degree Celsius (1,650 degrees Fahrenheit) inferno. As the fire was being extinguished, the sculptures shattered, leaving behind 27,000 pieces of basalt, some no bigger than a human thumb, which spent the Cold War stored in a basement.
Like Heinrich Schliemann, who discovered Troy, Max von Oppenheim (1860-1946) was a self-taught archeologist:
In 1886, he traveled through Morocco, where conditions were practically medieval at the time. Wearing a disguise, he entered a mosque in Fez, despite the threat of being put to death if discovered. Later, he bought a Berber girl at a slave auction and was served the pickled heads of the local clan’s enemies in a remote village.
His subsequent journeys took him as far as Iraq. In 1896, Oppenheim moved to Cairo, where he lived in a villa surrounded by palm trees, together with his gardener, Soliman, six servants and a French chef.
Oppenheim, who spoke fluent Arabic by now, stayed in tents with sheiks and, wearing turbans and robes, chatted with Druze princes.
Given his colonial ambitions, Kaiser Wilhelm II needed people like Oppenheim, so he hired him to work at the German consulate in Egypt.
In addition to performing his diplomatic duties, the colorful banker’s son collected 42,000 books and studied the customs of the Orient. His groundbreaking work on the history of the Bedouins was just recently rediscovered in Saudi Arabia.
Drawing on his father’s deep pockets, the scholar hosted lavish “dancing festivals” in Cairo, where he received British ambassadors, Polish princesses and the American hotel tycoon John Jacob Astor (who later drowned when the Titanic sank). When Agatha Christie toured the Orient, it was still filled with legends of the fabulous wealth of “El Baron.”
In 1911, Oppenheim set out into the desert with 1,000 camels carrying 21 tons of expedition gear, including wagons and 800 meters of rail track. It had been an unusually harsh winter in northern Mesopotamia, and the stinking cadavers of animals littered the sand.
His excavation team included up to 500 Bedouins, as well as a doctor, cooks, a photographer and several skilled excavation experts.
Just beneath the surface, the excavators found stone sphinxes, lions and dark basalt panels bearing reliefs of ships, camels and club-wielding dignitaries. The reliefs had once adorned the “Western Palace” built long ago by a mysterious King Kapara.
No mention of the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail.