“There’s something about arriving in new cities, wandering empty streets with no destination. I will never lose the love for the arriving, but I’m born to leave.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles; in search for The Great Perhaps
Sites/Topics covered in this post:
• British Museum
Go-Date: Day 161, Tuesday, July 2
Lesson Learned: The first time I saw the British Museum back in 1995 I was awe-struck at all the Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek, and Roman artifacts. Now that we’ve traveled through Greece, Italy and Egypt and seen so many other treasures first hand, the antiquities held here in London are not so amazing as before, especially when you’ve read the stories of most of them were acquired.
Morality, like art, means drawing a line somewhere
So, what should you do on a Tuesday? Nothing special? Well, then that means we should go to the British Museum. We’ve been before, but like the various Smithosonians, you need to visit from time to time because they are full of really cool stuff.
The British Museum, is the public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture. Its permanent collection of some eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in the world, having been widely stocked by antiquity usurping from conquered lands during the era of the British Empire. It documents the story of human culture from its beginnings to the present. It was the first public national museum in the world.
The British Museum was established in 1753, and opened to the public in 1759. Its expansion over the following 250 years was largely a result of expanding British colonization and has resulted in the creation of several branch institutions, the first being the Natural History Museum in 1881.
As with all national museums in the UK it charges no admission fee, except for loan exhibitions. This is pretty amazing. Only the museums in Washington, DC do the same. You can’t imagine how much exhibit fees soak up of your travel budget. In Greece and Egypt alone, I’m sure we spent over $500.
Its ownership of some of its most famous objects from other countries is disputed and remains the subject of international controversy, most notably regarding the Parthenon Marbles (Elgin Marbles), which we saw the history of the art taken from Athens when we were there, which is very upsetting. (more on that below)
The British Museum was founded as a “universal museum”. Its foundations lie in the will of the Irish physician and naturalist Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753), a London-based doctor and scientist from Ulster. During the course of his lifetime, and particularly after he married the widow of a wealthy Jamaican planter, Sloane gathered a large collection of curiosities and, not wishing to see his collection broken up after death, he bequeathed it to King George II, for the nation, for a sum of £20,000.
At that time, Sloane’s collection consisted of around 71,000 objects of all kinds including some 40,000 printed books, 7,000 manuscripts, extensive natural history specimens including 337 volumes of dried plants, prints and drawings and antiquities from Sudan, Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Ancient Near and Far East and the Americas. Its good to be rich, I would think. The British Museum was the first of a new kind of museum – national, belonging to neither church nor king, freely open to the public and aiming to collect everything.
From 1778, a display of objects from the South Seas brought back from the round-the-world voyages of Captain James Cook and the travels of other explorers fascinated visitors with a glimpse of previously unknown lands. Montagu House, which first housed the museum, became increasingly crowded and decrepit and it was apparent that it would be unable to cope with further expansion.
In the early 19th century the foundations for the extensive collection of sculpture began to be laid and Greek, Roman and Egyptian artifacts dominated the antiquities displays. After the defeat of the French in the Battle of the Nile, in 1801, the British Museum acquired more Egyptian sculptures and in 1802 King George III presented the Rosetta Stone – key to the deciphering of hieroglyphs to the museum (and I think one of the most impressive historical items found here).
The Rosetta Stone
The Rosetta Stone is a granodiorite stele (which is just a is a slab, generally taller than it is wide made out of a material kind of like granite), found in 1799, inscribed with three versions of a decree issued at Memphis, Egypt, in 196 BC during the Ptolemaic dynasty on behalf of King Ptolemy V. The top and middle texts are in Ancient Egyptian using hieroglyphic script and demotic scripts, respectively, while the bottom is in Ancient Greek. As the decree has only minor differences between the three versions, the Rosetta Stone proved to be the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs, thereby opening a window into ancient Egyptian history.
The stone, carved during the Hellenistic period, is believed to have originally been displayed within a temple, possibly at nearby Sais (a town close to ancient Alexandria). It was probably moved in Late Antiquity and was eventually used as building material in the construction of Fort Julien near the town of Rashid (Rosetta) in the Nile Delta. It was rediscovered there in July 1799 by a French soldier, Pierre-François Bouchard, during the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt. It was the first Ancient Egyptian bilingual text recovered in modern times, and it aroused widespread public interest with its potential to decipher this previously untranslated hieroglyphic script.
British troops having meanwhile defeated the French in 1801 took the stone, as the British of this period did, and transported it to London. It has been on public display at the British Museum almost continuously since 1802 and is the most-visited object there. It was the most difficult object in the museum to get up close to, somewhat like the Mona Lisa in the Louvre.
Gifts and purchases from Henry Salt, British consul general in Egypt, beginning with the Colossal bust of Ramesses II in 1818, laid the foundations of the collection of Egyptian Monumental Sculptures. Many Greek sculptures, Roman sculptures were added in 1805 and 1806. Things were pretty ugly once you know how these sculptures were obtained.
The Elgin Marbles
Sir Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1799 to 1803 (during the time when Turkey (the Ottomans) had conquered Greece) removed the large collection of marble sculptures from the Parthenon, on the Acropolis in Athens and transferred them to the UK. In 1816 these masterpieces of western art, were acquired by The British Museum by Act of Parliament and deposited in the museum thereafter.
Bruce removed whole boatloads of ancient sculptures from Greece’s capital city of Athens. The pride of this collection was a large amount of fifth-century BC sculpture taken from the Parthenon, the temple to the goddess Athena, which is where Athens takes its name, on the Acropolis hill in the center of the city.
The Parthenon sculptures included about a half (some 75 meters) of the sculpted frieze that once ran all around the building, plus 17 life-sized marble figures from its gable ends (or pediments) and 15 of the 92 metopes, or sculpted panels, originally displayed high up above its columns. The Elgin Marbles collection consists of roughly half of what now survives of the Parthenon. It also includes objects from other buildings on the Acropolis: the Erechtheion, the Propylaia, and the Temple of Athena Nike.
These actions were controversial from the very beginning. But, that never stopped the Brits. Even before all the sculptures – soon known as the Elgin Marbles – went on display in London, Lord Byron attacked Elgin in stinging verses, lamenting (in ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’) how the antiquities of Greece had been ‘defac’d by British hands’.
Others enthusiastically welcomed the arrival of the sculpture in London. John Keats penned a sonnet to celebrate ‘Seeing the Elgin Marbles’ in the British Museum, and from Germany, JW Goethe hailed their acquisition as ‘the beginning of a new age for Great Art’.
Sir Bruce, to facilitate transport, the columns’ capitals and many metopes and frieze slabs were either hacked off the main structure or sawn and sliced into smaller sections, causing irreparable damage to the Parthenon itself. He literally had workmen saw large sculptures off the Parthenon, lowered or just toppled them from the top, stored them in a warehouse, had paperwork drawn up to show them as gifts or purchases and shipped them off to Alexandria, Egypt. One shipload of marbles on board the British brig Mentor was caught in a storm off Cape Matapan in southern Greece and sank near Kythera, but was salvaged at the Earl’s personal expense; it took two years to bring them to the surface.
There is no doubt that Greece, and the Parthenon have been treated harshly throughout history (they were kind of harsh to other countries as well over time). Built in the ancient era, the Parthenon was extensively damaged during the Great Turkish War (1683–1699) against the Republic of Venice. The defending Turks fortified the Acropolis and used the Parthenon as a gunpowder magazine. Such a sound strategy, since you can only see the Acropolis from everywhere in Athens. On 26 September 1687, a Venetian artillery round, fired from the Hill of Philopappus, blew up the magazine, and the building was partly destroyed. The explosion blew out the building’s central portion and caused the cella’s walls to crumble into rubble. Three of the four walls collapsed, or nearly so, and about three-fifths of the sculptures from the frieze fell. About three hundred people were killed in the explosion, which showered marble fragments over a significant area. For the next century and a half, portions of the remaining structure were scavenged for building material and looted of any remaining objects of value.
Legend says that Elgin had originally intended to donate his collection to the nation, but his plan was scuppered when, on his return to England, he suffered financial problems. It is believed that many of the relics were for years stored in the grounds of Elgin’s Park Lane house while he tried to find a buyer. In 1810 Elgin began formal negotiations with the British Government for the sale of the objects.
Elgin had hoped to raise £73,600, but agreed to accept the value determined by a select committee of the House of Commons, which held the collection to be worth £35,000. That amount would be worth about £3,208,230 (about $4M dollars). The collection was in 1816 vested in the trustees of the British Museum in perpetuity under the terms of the Local and Personal Acts 56 George III. The Trustees now hold the Elgin collection under the terms of The British Museum Act (1963). I’m sure in today’s market, those works would be on the high side of $500,000,000 if not more. That’s inflation for you.
In August 2013, at the request of the Greek Government, the Assistant Director-General for Culture at UNESCO wrote a letter to the Director of the British Museum (as well as the UK foreign secretary and the minister for culture, media and sport) proposing a process of mediation on the subject of the Parthenon Sculptures in the British Museum. But “the UK Government and the Trustees of the British Museum replied separately in 2015, each respectfully declining this proposal”.
In August 1939, due to the imminence of war and the likelihood of air-raids, the Parthenon Sculptures, along with the museum’s most valued collections, were dispersed to secure basements, and country houses. The evacuation was timely, for in 1940 part of the museum was severely damaged by bombing. After the war, the museum continued to collect from all countries and all centuries. The immediate post-war years were taken up with the return of the collections from protection and the restoration of the museum after the Blitz.
Today the museum no longer houses collections of natural history, and the books and manuscripts it once held now form part of the independent British Library (including the Magna Carta). The museum nevertheless preserves its universality in its collections of artifacts representing the cultures of the world, ancient and modern. The original 1753 collection has grown to over 13 million objects at the British Museum, 70 million at the Natural History Museum and 150 million at the British Library. There are many things about the British Museum I disagree with, but you can’t dispute the magnificence of the objects contained under its roof.