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Was This Real-Life Indiana Jones a Savior or a Thief?
The era around the turn of the twentieth century saw a remarkable age of archaeological discoveries. Americans and Europeans’ imaginations were excited by the images of intrepid scholars in exotic places discovering lost civilizations, and in many cases these archaeologists uncovered priceless treasures of the ancient past. But these discoveries, as valuable as they were, often went hand-in-hand with the brazen looting of artifacts from civilizations around the world. Sir Marc Aurel Stein, a Hungarian-British archaeologist whose expeditions to remote areas of Central Asia brought awareness of the Silk Road to the West, embodied this contradiction as well as anybody. He both enlightened the world about a little-understood part of the world and its history and took hundreds of priceless artifacts from China to India, many of which have yet to be returned to their rightful owners.
Why was Stein (or anybody else) interested in areas like the Taklamakan Desert, which had understandably been seen by most of the world as a barren, unimportant place? Stein became fascinated by Asian history as a young man. He studied Persian and Sanskrit, working with British scholars at colleges in British India during the 1880s and 1890s. In 1899, he began to focus on the subject that would define much of the rest of his life — Central Asia. He became convinced that a lot of…
