More on the acquisition of "cultural assets" by museums

Report from Bloomberg news on the ceding of a collection of antiquities to Leipzig University's Egyptian Museum by the Jewish Claims Conference.
The sale of the artifacts by Egyptologist Georg Steindorff to the Museum in 1937 had been ruled earlier this year as being made under duress. Steindorff, who was of Jewish descent, escaped from Germany in 1939.

Cambridge Histories Online: new online resource

SOAS Library now has access to the complete Cambridge Histories Online containing over 270 volumes published since 1960, covering over 15 different academic subjects. Users can search and browse content, personalise the interface including, saved & most recent searches, workspaces and bookmarks and export citations.

Includes: The Cambridge History of Music, The Cambridge History of Islam & The New Cambridge History of Islam, The Cambridge History of Judaism, The Cambridge History of Political Thought, The Cambridge History of Africa, The Cambridge History of Ancient China, The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia, The Cambridge History of Egypt, The Cambridge History of Iran, The Cambridge History of Japan, The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, The New Cambridge History of India and many more...

http://histories.cambridge.org/ [On-campus]
http://bit.ly/CHOnline [Off-campus]

Orientalia Suecana: new open-access content

Orientalia Suecana

This international journal of Indological, Iranian, Semitic, Sinological and Turkic studies (founded in 1952 and published by Uppsala University in Sweden) is now making recent content available online through open-access.

The open-access content begins with Vol.58 (2009). 

The Library has print copies also from Vol.1 to Vol.59 at Per 5 / 79769

You have to download each volume individually via the links on the journal homepage in order to view the full-text.

Excavations at Swahili trading town in East Africa

Archaeology website "Past Horizons" reports on the excavations at Songo Mnara in Tanzania. The town was occupied between the 14th and 16th centuries AD, when the town was part of "the indigenous and cosmopolitan  form of urbanism that linked Africa with the Indian Ocean world system from AD 700 - 1500"

"Before silk: unsolved mysteries of the Silk Road" : video

Professor Colin Renfrew of the MacDonald Institute of Archaeological Research (Cambridge) delivers a lecture on the early contacts between China and Western Asia and Europe from the neolithic to the 8th century AD

This video of his lecture is uploaded onto YouTube.
Please note it runs for an hour and was recorded live

School of Museology to be established in Egypt: online article

Egypt's museums have been in the news following the looting that took place in major institutions and at archaeological sites during the country's recent political upheavals.

"The lack of trained museum personnel is indeed the overarching problem in Egypt's path towards the creation of a new effective museum system" says Ramadan Badri Hussein, supervisor of the office of the MSA's Minister for Archaeological Affairs.

As part of an ongoing programme of initiatives, a School of Museology is shortly to be established at the Casdagli Palace in Cairo.

Read more in Nevine El-Aref's report for the al-Ahram Weekly Online

Museums and ethics

The Smithsonian Institution in Washington is facing calls to cancel a planned exhibition of Chinese artifacts salvaged from a Tang-era shipwreck as they were recovered by a commercial treasure-hunter rather than by academic, archaeological methods.
Read more in this article from the online New York Times