Friday, 28 September 2012
Priceless Tibetan Buddha Statue Looted By Nazis Was Carved From Meteorite
A thousand-year-old Buddhist statue taken from Tibet in 1938 by an SS
team seeking the roots of Hitler's Aryan doctrine was carved from a
meteorite, scientists reported on Wednesday. In a paper published
in an academic journal, German and Austrian researchers recount an
extraordinary tale where archaeology, the Third Reich and cosmic
treasure are intertwined like an Indiana Jones movie. Called the
"Iron Man" because of the high content of iron in its rock, the
24-centimetre (10-inch) -high statue was brought to Germany by an
expedition led by Ernst Schaefer, a zoologist and ethnologist. Backed
by SS chief Heinrich Himmler and heading a team whose members are all
believed to have been SS, Schaefer roamed Tibet in 1938-9 to search for
the origins of Aryanism, the notion of racial superiority that
underpinned Nazism. Weighing 10.6 kilos (23.3 pounds), the statue
features the Buddhist god Vaisravana seated, with the palm of his right
hand outstretched and pointing downwards. Chemical analysis shows that the rock from which it was carved came from a meteorite. The
rock survived a long trip through the Solar System and the destructive
friction with the atmosphere when it collided with Earth. It is a
particularly rare kind of meteorite called an ataxite, which has iron
and high contents of nickel, according to the study, published in the
journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science. "The statue was
chiseled from an iron meteorite, from a fragment of the Chinga meteorite
which crashed into the border areas between Mongolia and Siberia about
15,000 years ago," said investigator Elmar Buchner of Stuttgart
University. "While the first debris was officially discovered in
1913 by gold prospectors, we believe that this individual meteorite
fragment was collected many centuries before." The exact dating of
the carving cannot be established accurately, but its style links it to
the pre-Buddhist Bon culture of the 11th century. Vaisravana was the Buddhist god-king of the North, also known as Jambhala in Tibet. How
Schaefer came across the statue is unclear, but the big appeal is
likely to have been a large swastika, symbolising good fortune in
Buddhism, carved on its chest. Once the statue arrived in Munich,
it became part of a private collection and only became available for
study by Buchner following an auction in 2009. Other meteorites
have become incorporated into religious worship. The holy Black Stone in
the Kaaba in Mecca is believed to be a stony meteorite. "The Iron
Man statue is the only known illustration of a human figure to be
carved into a meteorite, which means we have nothing to compare it to
when assessing value," said Buchner. "Its origins alone may value
it at $20,000 (15,500 euros). However, if our estimation of its age is
correct and it is nearly a thousand years old it could be invaluable." (AFP)
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