November 2010 - National Museum Volunteers

ence, England’s Ian Glover, a face
much familiar in Bangkok, moderated
some of the panels, but did not
L to R Charles F.W. Higham, Ian Glover
and Bérénice Bellina-Pryce at book
launch to celebrate Glover’s 50 years in
the field
present this year. Instead, this year
he was fêted with a festschrift publication
50 Years of Archaeology in
Southeast Asia: Essays in Honour of
Ian Glover (River Books), celebrating
his lifetime of work in the field,
which was launched the first evening
of the conference.
I felt much reinforcement for the evidence
of a Sassanian textile connection
in my own presentation, after I
heard the young German Dr. Nils
Ritter’s presentation in which he
traced Sassanian motifs to SEA in
his “From Euphrates to Mekong-
Maritime Contacts Between pre-Islamic
Persia and Southeast Asia”;
and it was my pleasure during the
discussion to help him identify the
Dvaravati terra cotta trader figures to
Thailand (in the Bangkok National
Museum) as Sogdians by their boots
and caps, which Pierre Baptiste of
the Musée Guimet backed me up
on. I had already shown material
evidence of the presence of
Sassanian/Sogdian traders in the
south of Thailand in the Dvaravati
period during my presentation. On
the weekend after the conference,
Dr. Ritter would guide us through the
spectacular Pergammon Museum on
Berlin’s Museums Insel, including its
famed collection of ancient Persian
arts, as well as the fabulous Hellenistic
Pergammon Altar, where I also
found an important floor mosaic of a
parrot, reinforcing my contention that
the parrot motif of the sema stone
pre-dates even the Sassanians and
hearkens back to Graeco-Roman
motifs.
Young German Archaelogist Dr. Nils
Ritter guiding at the Ishtar Gate
(Photo by Charlotte Pham, Vietnam EFEO)
. November 2010 . Newsletter National Museum Volunteers . 19