| I’m in London, and dear god is it ever awesome. The internet cafe I'm in is currently playing "Baby got Back". However, my update for the last week is going to take the form of an essay, because, well, I felt like writing and it’s the only form I feel at all competent using. I tried to make it interesting though, and if you read the whole thing I’ll be mighty impressed. So, warning: essay ahead. It’s got a thesis, though not explicitly declared, and support, and everything. Here goes… Yesterday, I saw the British Museum. I walked there from Trafalgar Square. The monument celebrates Horatio Nelson’s victory over a French fleet during the Napoleonic Wars, one of the most pivotal naval battles in world history. A child pointed to Nelson’s column, from which the long-dead admiral surveys the Thames. “Oh, that’s just Napoleon on the end of a big stick” declared the child’s father. National history can be an ambiguous thing. Still, Trafalgar Square is one of the most important public spaces in Britain, where the nation collectively celebrates its past through monumental marble sculpture. It is part of the way the nation collectively remembers itself. I walked onward to the British Museum on Tottenham, the main drag through Soho, passing first through a quiet Bloomsbury square, where solicitors’ offices occupy nineteenth century townhouses flanking a garden. London is an interesting and eclectic city, the streets are full of modern businessmen and Goths alike, passing Indian restaurants and Egyptian obelisks stolen two centuries ago. Bloomsbury is an interesting place for a historian, too. A century ago, Virginia Wolf, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, and other members of the Bloomsbury Group surely walked here, exceedingly intellectual and often decidedly gay. Proceeding onward, I saw the Museum itself, a massive white building occupying an entire city block. It is covered with magnificent columns and guarded by taciturn white lions, the grandest construction the empire could offer. I was quite excited to see the museum; it was probably the one attraction in London I most wanted to see. The moment I entered, I knew I wouldn’t be disappointed. The grand courtyard was covered with a glass ceiling and somehow managed to be more grand and more glowing than the blustery world outside. The center was occupied by a grand reading room, where Marx wrote his Manifesto. The halls were filled with monumental sculptures, staring at the throngs of visitors as they passed by. All told there were over eighty rooms on the first floor alone, filled with Egyptian, Roman, Greek, and Assyrian statues and sarcophagi. I didn’t know where to begin. I entered one of the galleries, where a multitude of people spoke a multitude of languages, all transfixed on a central object: the Rosetta stone. I had seen it in so many photographs, and even a replica at OSU, but it was still somehow striking to see an object so celebrated in person. Even more interesting was hearing French, German, Italian, Greek, Russian, and even more languages beyond my capacity for identification, all speaking in rapid fire pace about the same object. It seemed fitting. The stone itself has an international history; erected by Greek rulers in Egypt, it was contested by both the French and the British over time. To my left, I heard a speaker talking enthusiastically about a pair of Assyrian sculptures. He was a balding septuagenarian with a bow-tie, the consummate image of an old English classicist. He was leading a tour through the Assyrian sculpures. I snuck into the crowd around him; everyone had a pin designating themselves part of the (expensive) tour. I tried to blend in. The speaker pointed toward two massive lions. They were twenty-five feet tall, with the heads of men and the bodies of giant cats, five legs posed with an emphasis on gravitas. They once guarded the entrance to Nineveh, and a photograph showed them in their original location, underneath a grand archway in city walls over three millennia old. “How did they come to be at the British Museum?” Someone asked. It was a good question. “Well,” replied the guide, “they were removed at the beginning of the century by a British officer in Iraq who became quite interested in Archeology. However, they were far too large and heavy to remove in one piece. If one were to look closely, one could see the lines through the bodies where his men sawed them into smaller pieces for transport. It was almost vandalism, really.” I looked more closely. There they were, massive gashes through the torsos and legs of the Assyrian sphinxes. There were several of them; these stately guards had been mutilated. “We’ll be going to Anceint Greece now,” announced the guide. The tour continued onward. I followed, trying to maintain a low profile. The line of people snaked onward, into a magnificent room. The massive chamber, built with the most fantastic neo-roman opulence, held a series of white sculptures. “These are the Elgin Marbles,” said the guide. “They once adorned the Parthenon, the principle temple of the Athenian Acropolis. They were brought here in 1806 by Lord Elgin, the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. He purchased them quite legally from the Turks, who at that time controlled Greece, and then sold them to te Brittish Government. Elgin was a good guy, his actions kept over half of the monuments preserved, as their counterparts in Athens suffered from war and pollution, and are now in considerable disrepair.” Then, he saw me. “Excuse me sir, this is a British Museum tour,” he said in an accusing tone. I apologized, and left for another room. I sat on a bench in front of a massive stone relief. A plaque read that this was Assyrian, a priceless artifact from a throne room, and that the piece originally to the left of it was now in Germany, and that the piece to the right was in France. I set my pack down. Next to me on the bench I saw a brochure entitled “The British Museum’s Stance on the Elgin Marbles.” I flipped though, and saw another series of excuses and justifications, celebrating the BM’s vital role in preserving the historic artifacts. I had always known about the British and the French stealing classical artifacts and bringing them back during the heady days of empire. I always knew it was widespread. But it wasn’t until I visited the British Museum itself that I realized that nearly every item in it was stolen or plundered. The entire first floor, with its eighty grand rooms was a monument to exploitation. The place is called the British museum, but the only explicitly British artifacts are confined to a few small, under-visited rooms on the second floor. The rest of it, however, is still a powerful reminder of British history, an imperial history, a history of theft and plunder. Walking through the rooms and reading the signs by the imposing statues is a telling exercise. Individual statues are often split into multiple parts, imagine Poseidon’s head in London, his body in Paris, his left arm in Wurzburg. This pattern is repeated over and over again. Of course, this all happened a hundred or two hundred years ago; the perpetrators are dead now. What does it matter? Besides, the British Museum offers these artifacts to the world now, free of charge, a global cultural heritage site for the public at large. Why does it matter? It matters because the governments of the countries whose artifacts were stolen have started asking to have them back. It’s a complicated subject, or so the literature put out by the museum tells me. The countries these artifacts were taken from did not even exist in Napoleon's day. Greece was a vassal state of the Turks’, Egypt was at some point the dominion of the Ottomans, the French, or the British, Assyria part of British Iraq. It was only after a bitter war, supported by the Romantics who believed in freedom from Imperial dominion that Greece attained independence, and it was only in the last few generations that Egypt was able to free itself completely. It is only in recent memory that these countries have been able to muster the wherewithal to ask for the return of their own cultural heritage. I study history because I believe that the past matters, that it isn’t just some abstract series of events more or less independent from the world today. I especially believe that the past plays a crucial part in the formation of peoples’ identities. The theft of material objects is not just the theft of artwork and artifacts; it is literally the theft of another person’s past. It is a theft of a material part of their identity. Imagine if history had gone the other way, and if Nelson’s column were taken back to Paris or Moscow or Berlin as a trophy of empire and war. Would the British ask to have their admiral back, after a century or two? What do you think? Do former imperial powers have an obligation to return the stolen goods of the last three centuries? Or are these misdeeds so long in the past that the museums of today, distanced from these transgressions, can continue to display them for the purposes of preservation and education, in order to advance an understanding of a global culture? After all, the Brits are far better at preservation than thier more southern and eastern counterparts. The answer isn't as obvious as it might seem. I’ll leave you with the words of an English poet who died while in Greece, fighting for their independence from the Turks. "Dull is the eye that will not weep to see thy walls defaced, they mouldering shrines removed by British hands"
-Lord Byron, on the Elgin Marbles. |
