Rebuilding the Buddhas

They were two giant (174 ft. & 125 ft.) statues of The Buddha, chiseled into the mountainside more than 1,500 years ago in the Bamiyan Valley on the ancient Silk Route linking Europe and Central Asia. Afghanistan's fundamentalist Taliban rulers considered them "idolatrous" and against the tenets of Islam, and destroyed them in March 2001. They would soon move on to bigger game.

Now some engineers are using the most advanced software tools to build 3-dimensional models of the Buddhas from old records, photographs, etc. They think they've succeeded with one of the statues, and are working on the second. The Buddhas can probably be restored exactly, they say, for about $30 million each.

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