Late last month, it was reported that Mozart’s A major piano sonata K331 has been discovered in Budapest’s National Szechenyi Library. The priceless manuscript that had lain in the musty depths of the Library was rediscovered by a Haydn scholar.

The musicologist Balazs Mikusi found a substantive part of one of Mozart’s most famous instrumental pieces, the A major piano sonata K331, which was composed in 1783. The finale which is one of Wolfgang’s most instantly recognizable tunes, and whose opening movement, is a set of brilliantly fascinating variations he ever composed. The final page of the original manuscript has long been known to Mozart scholars, and is part of the legacy in Mozart’s hometown, Salzburg, but no original manuscript of the rest of the piece had ever been seen in modern times.

However, it is not known how the missing pages ended up in Hungary or at the Budapest’s National Szechenyi Library. Zoltan Kocsis’s actually performed the sonata at the Szechenyi Library but the library has not allowed anyone to see the actual discovered pages yet.

Austria-Hungary, also known as the Austro-Hungarian Empire and by other names, was a constitutional union of the Empire of Austria and the Apostolic Kingdom of Hungary that existed from 1867 to 1918, when it collapsed as a result of defeat in World War I. The union was a result of the Compromise of 1867. 

Egyptian media and other news outlets reported last month that the Djoser pyramid had been damaged during restoration work. The 4,600 year old monument which dominates necropolis of Saqqara, south-west of Cairo, is now the subject of investigation and request for answers by the UNESCO. In fact, after the media outlets published the report, the UNESCO sent a letter to the ministry of antiquities requesting a detailed report on the restoration work.

The UNESCO will wait for the report as well as the plans for future work at the site. Several Egyptian experts have already criticized the work and experts also have expressed concerns about the company that was hired to do the restoration work saying that the company does not have the necessary experience. However, the Egyptian officials have rejected the concern. The project which started in 2006 was interrupted in February 2013 due to lack of funding.

Djoser step pyramid was finished in 2611BC and was considered the largest building of its time. The pyramid reportedly was the burial place of pharaoh Djoser, the third king of Eqypt’s third dynasty and also it has been reported that the tomb was plundered in ancient times, leaving only Djoser’s mummified left foot. The pyramid’s architect, Imhotep, was deified 1,400 years after his lifetime. The tomb originally stood 62 meters tall and is considered the oldest building in the world built entirely of stone.

According to a recent report by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), five out of six of Syria’s Unesco World Heritage sites have been significantly damaged by the country’s civil war. Based on analysis of satellite images by the researchers historic structures across the country, including ancient mosques, government buildings and castles show signs of destruction with some reduced to rubble. According to the report the only site that appears to remain relatively unscathed is the ancient city of Damascus.

The city of Allepo is perhaps one of the worst sites of destruction. The northern Syrian city, which dates back to 2,000BC, has seen some of the heaviest fighting of the civil war. By analysis of images captured in 2011 and then again in 2014, reveal damage to the city’s Great Mosque – one of Aleppo’s most famous cultural sites, researchers have reported the major destruction.The Masque’s 50m-tall Seljuk minaret, dating from 1095 which was considered one of the most important monuments of medieval Syria, collapsed as a result of shelling in March. There are also two large craters along the mosque’s eastern wall. In addition, there is also significant damage to the south of Aleppo’s citadel, the location of many historical government buildings. Between December 2011 and August 2014, the city’s Khusriwiye Mosque was demolished and the Grand Serail – the former seat of the Aleppo governor – was heavily damaged as reported by AAAS and BBC.

Other sites which have been destroyed include the dome of the 15th Century Hammam Yalbougha an-Nasry which was one of Syria’s finest bathhouses, as well as the the ancient city of Bosra, located in the southern Daara governorate which contains ruined buildings from the Roman, Byzantine, and early Islamic periods.

Palmyra’s Greco-Roman and Persian ruins, located in the middle of the Syrian desert, were one of Syria’s main tourist attractions before the conflict. Satellite image analysis has revealed how the site and its surrounding area including its Roman theatre have suffered from the effects of shelling, activity by snipers as well as the presence of rocket launchers and tanks. There are also persistent reports of looting as BBC reports. The ancient sites of northern Syria, comprising eight parks and a total of 40 villages, have suffered due to their close proximity to a key Turkish border crossing, used as the entry point for supplies.

For satellite images and analysis, visit the American Association for the Advancement of Science report page.

A very urgent and critical report from the experts in Iran has informed WCHV that a group has received permission from the legal authority of the country to build and establish a factory as well as an industrial park on the site adjacent to Pasargade Site. It looks like that Iran’s National Heritage Office has cleared this and is not objecting to building this factory on a site that is so invaluable to the people of Iran and the world as well as a designated World National Heritage site by the UNESCO.

Six years after nine 18^th century paintings were stolen, they were finally returned earlier this month. The paintings by Mexican artist Miguel Cabrera were stolen from Peru and had been smuggled out of the country for trafficking on the international art market.

In 2009, several of the paintings had been discovered at an auction house in Cedar Falls, Iowa. They were reportedly consigned by an unnamed art dealer. One of the paintings, titled “Resurrection of Lazarus” – was discovered for sale at an unidentified auction house in New York City earlier this year. After confirming it was also a stolen Cabrera, the FBI took possession of the painting and returned it with the rest of the paintings. It is still not clear how the art dealer or the person who put the ninth painting up for sale at auction in New York had obtained the works. In both cases, the consignors relinquished all claims to the works after being shown evidence that the paintings were stolen according to released information, however, the investigation is continuing.

The nine paintings were returned earlier this month (Sep 2014) to the government of Peru in a ceremony at the United States Attorney’s Office in lower Manhattan that was attended by Harold Forsyth, Peru’s ambassador to the United States as reported by several media outlets.

CultureAID (“Culture Active in Disasters”) is an innovative organization created by New York City to help arts organizations cope with disasters and emergencies such as the one the city faced during Hurricane Sandy. As announced just yesterday, NYC has created a response and recovery network to reduce redundant communications, pool available resources and share best practices about emergency preparedness.
CultureAID will provide information, technical and financial assistance and other resources to the city’s cultural community before, during and after disasters, as announced by the Office of Emergency Management commissioner in a statement.
The program was developed in direct response to Hurricane Sandy in October 2012 and to the region’s increasing threat of severe weather and climate change. CultureAID will help the artists and cultural groups that are so vital to NYC’s vibrancy and life.

As reported by the Asahi Shimbun, Kanazawa University has started working on a project helping to conserve the world-famous Ifugo Rice Terraces in the Philippines from further degradation. It is believed that the World Heritage site is at risk because few local people understand what is entailed to keep the terraces pristine.

Kanazawa University initiated joint training sessions with the University of the Philippines and Ifugao State University. The spectacular rice terraces in the northern Philippine island of Luzon were created some 2,000 years ago. But an exodus of young people to the cities left the area with few people to preserve the complicated agricultural system, making it difficult to find successors for the older generation who can no longer work in the fields.

The terraces located in remote areas of the Philippine Cordillera mountain range in Ifugao province cover about 20,000 hectares, making them among the world’s largest. The sight of tens of thousands of terraces built on mountain slopes at elevations of between 700 meters and 1,500 meters are so impressive that the site became known as “stairs to heaven.”

The rice terraces were inscribed in 1995 on the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage list as “Rice Terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras.” But soon after that the terraces fell into a state of dilapidation as land development projects expanded in surrounding areas and local people spent less and less time attending to the delicate agricultural ecosystem that makes the site the marvel it is today. As a result, the terraces were included on the List of World Heritage in Danger by the agency in 2001. However, thanks to subsequent conservation activities by the local administrations and universities, the terraces were removed from the danger list in 2012. But there is still more work to be done and more local people are needed in order to continue to take care of terraces.

Kanazawa University has now decided to set up a three-year to train local people interested in learning and acquiring the necessary skills and knowledge on how to sustain the rice terraces.

As reported recently by AllAfrica website, in a ceremony attended by government officials as well as UNESCO World Heritage official for the Africa region, the registration was announced.

As stated by the secretary of State for Culture, Cornélio Caley, that the project to register the capital city of the northern Zaire province with UNESCO’s World Heritage list aims, among other purposes, at the rescue of Angola’s African-ness and cultural identity.

The secretary headed a delegation comprising national experts and UNESCO officials for the Africa region stressing that the project “Mbanza Congo” intends to disclose the historical past of this ancient capital of the Congo Kingdom. Secretary Caley spoke at the end of the ceremony of handover by the Government of a facility to serve as an office for the drafting of the application for Mbanza Congo as a World Heritage to be submitted to UNESCO in January 2015.

He added that once the phase of archaeological excavations are completed, the next step will be to gather the elements for all specialists involved like historians, archaeologists, anthropologists and architects, to contribute with ideas to the drafting of the application. At the same time, the foreign experts were asked to help with the discovery of documents related to the history of Mbanza Congo.

As reported recently by China TV, Chinese archeologists in Northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygyr Autonomous Region have discovered wooden braziers in excavated graves, leading them to believe that the people practiced Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrians buried a burning brazier with the dead to show their worship of fire. Archeologists also found polished stoneware in the mounds as well as eyebrow pencils used most probably by women.

These newly discovered artifacts in this sparsely populated part of Pamir Plateau of China, shows that people lived, battled and created marvelous civilizations according to the researchers. However, the archeologists are also presenting a new hypothesis which remains to be proven. The mounds that are being excavated, they believe point to a civilization that practiced Zoroastrianism which could date back to more than 2500 years ago. Therefore, according to the Chinese researchers’ hypothesis, Zoroastrianism could have also originated in China and not in ancient Persia.

In 2010, as reported by several news outlets, a horse bone bearing cuneiform inscriptions apparently derived from Cyrus Cylinder was also discovered in China along with a second bone inscribed with an as yet unknown text. The bones were acquired by the Beijing Palace Museum in 1985. Their origin is unclear, but Dr. Irving Finkel of British Museum Department of the Middle East has hypothesized that they may reflect a text inscribed or written in another format (perhaps leather or clay), derived from the Cyrus Cylinder’s text, though for some reason only one twenty of the original cuneiform symbols were copied. Finkel suggested that this may indicate that the text (or even the original cylinder itself) was sent around the Persian Empire and was copied to make the bone’s inscription at some point.

If the hypothesis presented by the Chinese archeologists is true, further research is needed to find out why Zoroastrianism prospered in Persia and not in China, as evidenced by extensive monuments, artifacts, history and propagation of the religion in ancient Persia. In addition, further excavations and research in China are essential to show if they find just more than a few buried braziers which could support the new presented hypothesis by the Chinese.

Zoroastrianism and their beliefs could have indeed been transferred from ancient Persia to other parts of the world and borders of the Persian Empire as they did with inscribed cuneiforms.

As published and reported by some media outlets and in the September issue of the Smithsonian Magazine, archaeologists have discovered 15 previously unknown monuments buried around Stonehenge. This new finding has added more mystery surrounding Stonehenge. These monuments were found in the first-of-its-kind study and they suggest that other monuments could be hidden underneath the current monuments.

Technology definitely played a major role in the project. Researchers used a variety of techniques including ground-penetrating radar and 3D laser scanning which helped them to create a highly detailed subsurface map of the entire area. According to a release from the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology, one of the partners in the study, the technologies are notable for being much less destructive than traditional, digging-based exploratory techniques.

The project has been known as “The Stonehenge Hidden Landscape Project” and it took over four years. One of the new finds is an ancient trough that bisects an East-West ditch known as a “Cursus”. Archeologists believe that the Cursus monument aligns with the sunrise on the Spring and Fall equinoxes, and that the newly discovered trough could have been a means for people to ceremonially process toward the center of Stonehenge to the south.

The new research builds on findings from last October indicating that the area around Stonehenge is the oldest continually occupied region in Britain, going back to as early as 8820 B.C.