Word: persianism
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...Persian Emperor Cambyses dispatched 50,000 of his soldiers to lay waste to an oasis temple in the Sahara because its oracle had spoken ill of his plans for world domination. The punitive expedition proved to be one of antiquity's most dramatic episodes of imperial overreach. One morning, while the army was having breakfast, writes the ancient historian Herodotus in The Histories, it was set upon by "a violent southern wind, bringing with it piles of sand, which buried them." The Greek continues, "Thus it was that they utterly disappeared...
...they claim is the first physical evidence of the army's remains. More than a decade of digs and explorations have turned up earthenware pots, fragments of weaponry dating to the 6th century B.C. and hundreds of human bones. A earring seen as similar to equivalent ancient Achaemenid, or Persian, jewelry has also been recovered. "We are talking of small items," said Alfredo Castiglioni to reporters this week. "But they are extremely important as they are the first Achaemenid objects ... dating to Cambyses' time, which have emerged from the desert sands...
...finding ancient glories thought lost. In 1989, they uncovered the ruins of the legendary Egyptian city of Berenike Panchrysos, a desert town once allegedly paved with gold. The first breakthrough in the hunt for Cambyses' army came in 1996, when the Castiglioni brothers ran across a cache of Persian arrow tips and dagger blades beneath a rock outcrop not far from the oasis of Siwa - near the modern-day Egyptian border with Libya and the site of the sacred Amon temple, whose oracle was worshipped by Greeks and Egyptians alike. Cambyses' army had set out from the city of Thebes...
...installation on view until December 2, and “Stranger Fruit,” a performance piece which will be shown only once on November 18—was influenced by a combination of Chinese calligraphic painting, Japanese cherry blossom festivals, the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi, Negro spirituals, and cosmology. This creation was commissioned by the Public Art Program, a sector of the Harvard Office for the Arts...
...renovations will be done according to the rule book." But art historian Didier Rykner believes that France's "political and diplomatic" objectives may have come into play. Since last year, President Nicolas Sarkozy has been trying to win multibillion-dollar energy deals with Qatar and new investment from the Persian Gulf. (See pictures of the Eiffel Tower...