History, Heritage and Memory:
how did the Parthenon Sculptures become the spoils of empire?
"The past exercises a profound fascination over us and the continuing museum phenomenon and the charisma of objects are a
testament to this. Cultural treasures are a part of our dreaming and
memory and spiritual landscape.”[1]
The
Parthenon Marbles, comprising the sculptured pediments, metopes and frieze
removed by Lord Elgin and his men from the Parthenon in Athens in the early part of the nineteenth century
and placed in the British
Museum in 1816, symbolise
the “entire body of unrepatriated cultural property in the world’s museum” and
constitute an “essential part of our common past”.[2] In the two hundred years since their
removal, the Parthenon Marbles have become a paradigm for forcibly-removed
cultural treasures and invariably the debate about their return raises issues
such as ‘who owns the past’, how historians have recorded the removal of
cultural property in the past and what are the implications of the different
ways of representing the past.
When
the classicist, Mary Beard, inquires, “Can a simple monument act as a symbol of
nationhood and of world culture?”[3]
she underlines the contradictions surrounding the contemporary life of the
Marbles and prompts reflection of the wider historical issues of cultural
politics, collecting ethics and the responsibility for curating of a past
common to all those who regard themselves as westerners. The material remains of the past take on
particular importance within nationalist discourses, serving to legitimise and
authenticate particular national traditions. Archaeological monuments are
conserved, managed and presented in their original settings. Portable antiquities, however, are often
acquired, housed and represented in institutions such as museums which
developed between the mid-eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries for the
purposes of celebrating and dramatising the unity of the nation through
representations of national culture. The acquisition of material culture by the
state for the nation and their display in museums is articulated through the
notion of national patrimony or heritage.
In
The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of
History, David Lowenthal distinguishes between history and heritage. Unlike history, heritage is not an inquiry
into the past but a celebration of it, not an effort to know what actually
happened but a profession of faith in a past tailored to present-day purposes”.[4] According to Lowenthal, that heritage
mandates misreadings of the past in order to reshape the past so as to preserve
it. The word “history” means both the
past and accounts about the past which are two different concepts: the past
that was and the past as chronicled. In turn, who interprets and presents the
past? Historiography involves re-interpreting, re-membering, re-arranging and
transforming perceptions about the past.
Our relationship to the past is inevitably a constructed one involving
the historian as narrator for history is not just about the pursuit of the
irretrievably lost past but is also about its reconstruction or representation
in varying forms and for varying purposes in the present. [5]
The
post-modernist approach to historiography contends that the past has occurred:
it has gone and can only be brought back again or re-presented by historians in
very different media and not as actual events.[6] In this respect, Lowenthal is in agreement
with Jenkins. No history can achieve a
wholly faithful and final account of the past.
No historical account can recover the totality of any past events
because their content is virtually infinite.[7] This approach is in contrast to the
empiricist paradigm of so-called objective history writing and the nineteenth
century concept of the metanarrative – the idea that there is one great story
or that the past is reported ‘as it actually was’ and the historian is able to
find the historical truth.
When
the Parthenon Marbles arrived in the British
Museum in 1816, it was at
a time when great empires needed great museums.
Their reception was an example of the “essential resocialisation of
objects in the modern period – the creation of the ‘history of things’”.[8] Donald Horne in The Great Museum
notes the trend that developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries to establish a museum of antiquities.
In addition to art museums the “new European desire to order the
universe” saw the evolution of other museums, including ethnology and
historical museums “stocked with either the loot of empire or the relics of Europe ’s suddenly vanquished peasant cultures”.[9] To him, structures such as the British Museum which transform objects into
monuments, merely affirm the “legitimitacy of imperial domination”.[10] Julian Spalding in The Poetic Museum contends that museums are not just packed with
things from the past; they are “riddled with past thoughts”.[11] In the case of the British Museum ,
its task is to illuminate world cultures through artefacts which are “a
depleted product of the Enlightenment”.[12] Andre Malraux in Voices of Silence described the way in which objects of the past
were stripped of their worlds and resettled chronologically in the land of
art. In a sense, museum objects became
“worldless” to the extent that while the museum is about the past, it cannot be
the objects, still obviously present, that are gone, but their worlds. According to Malraux, the “modern gallery not
only isolates the work of art from its context but makes it foregather with
rival or even hostile works.”[13]
The
acquisition of the Parthenon marbles was “arguably the single most important
event in the history of the British
Museum ”.[14] In The
representation of the past museums and heritage in the postmodern world Kevin
Walsh describes the British Museum in its formative years as being little more
accessible than the Renaissance cabinets of curiosity that preceded it. It was the acquisition of the Elgin marbles in 1814 to
1815 that gave the museum its international reputation in the field of
classical antiquities. Its perceived
aims were the ordering and understanding of the world which was obviously
closely tied to Britain 's
perceived role as “imperial master of the universe”.[15] In the British Museum
the viewer’s perception of the Parthenon Marbles has been constructed through
the museum’s possession of the sculptures and its role (through the naming or
identification of the sculptures as the Elgin Collection of Parthenon
Sculptures) in defining the context within which the sculptures are placed. According to Walsh:
“The homogeneous
form of the museum display represents the past as an
undifferentiated path of progress towards the
modern, where our discovery
and acquisition of past material culture
legitimates the modern Western
position as the inheritor of civilisation.”[16]
The
British Museum has been instrumental in
constructing grand narratives of nation and empire. The first definitive account of the
acquisition of the sculptures by the Elgin
was “Lord Elgin and His Collection” by A H Smith on the one hundredth anniversary
of their reception in the British
Museum . The work is in the tradition of empirical
narrative writing and derives from what Herbert Butterfield has termed the Whig
interpretation of history - the theory that we study the past for the sake of the
present and in so doing we can “simplify the study of history by providing an
excuse for leaving things out.”[17] The history of the marbles in England
unfolded from the study of great men and great collectors [18]. Imperial expansion saw the introduction of
artefacts from another culture – trophies which simultaneously express
“victory, ownership, control and dominion.” [19] Smith reviewed the available records,
including the testimony of Elgin
before the House of Commons Select Committee which was convened to consider the
purchase of the sculptures from Elgin . After reviewing the ‘facts’ Smith concluded
that Elgin had
acted honourably and with a “a single-minded enthusiasm for the promotion of
knowledge and art”.[20]
This “Whig” view of historiography
permeates the early literature on the Parthenon Marbles. It was said that the modern day Greeks were
“incapable of admiring the genius of their predecessors” and that the British
were now more deserving of inheriting those works as they were more
appreciative of the value of the sculptures and what they represented.[21] In a guidebook published by the British Museum in 1886 it was simply stated that
the sculptures were removed by Elgin
who obtained a firman for that object.[22] By 1900 with the publication by Smith of The
Sculptures of the Parthenon, it was claimed that Elgin , alarmed at the “rapid destruction of
the Athenian monuments”, obtained from the Porte “extended powers under which
he was permitted to remove the original sculptures.”[23] This was perpetuated with the publication in
1921 of A Short Guide to the Sculptures of the Parthenon in the British Museum in which it is
claimed that the sculptures of Athens "were rapidly perishing from
neglect and mutilation" and that much was lost by the time Lord Elgin had
arrived in Athens before completing the rescue of a valuable collection of
sculptures".[24] In a later publication, An Historical
Guide to the Sculptures of the Parthenon, the Museum contends that the
remaining sculptures of the Parthenon were "continually exposed to the
vandalism of stone robbers, line burners, curio hunters and religious
iconoclasts" and that but for Elgin 's
intervention it is probable that many of the remaining sculptures would have
been damaged beyond recognition. [25]
These works are conspicuously
silent as to the manner in which Elgin
and his men proceeded to remove the various sculptures from the structure. In Haynes, The Parthenon Frieze [26] the author asserts that
Lord Elgin in 1799 obtained the Sultan's permission to take away "whatever
sculpture he wished". In a
subsequent publication by Robertson and Frantz, The Parthenon Frieze [27] the authors write that
both the fabric and sculpture of the Parthenon had begun to deteriorate rapidly
through the ravages of nature and man and that this had caused Lord Elgin, who
had come in 1799 intending only to draw and take casts of the sculpture, to
change his plans and he thereafter contrived to purchase a large part of the
carvings and remove them to London.
Progressively, Elgin
is portrayed as the saviour of the marbles.
The circumstances in which Elgin used his
ambassadorial influence to obtain a firman or edict from the Ottoman
authorities to remove the sculptures, let alone the doubts that remain as to
whether that authority actually conferred power on Elgin’s men to saw off and
take away large amounts of statuary from the Parthenon, are also largely
ignored in the official histories of the British Museum.[28] Indeed, as far as Ian Jenkins, a former
assistant keeper in the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities in the British Museum , is concerned, Elgin ’s men set about gathering together the
battered remains of the freeze, pediment and metope sculptures for transport to
England ".
[29]
Keith
Thomson in his polemic, Treasures on
Earth, comments that museums, at best, are magical places, repositories for
the wonders of the world, dynamic participants in our interpretations of the
past, and places for launching dreams of the future. At their worst, museums are perceived as
places where the past is stored but rarely consulted. In the case of the Elgin Marbles all the British Museum could do is essentially to
establish a series of “reconstructions of reality”.[30] Chris Healy in From the Ruins of Colonialism: History as Social Memory refers to
the historical embeddedness of the museum as a cultural institution, as a
collection machine and as an exhibitionary apparatus. The British Museum
is an institution in which the “stratified layers of its own past persist in
the present”[31]
This
interpretation of who owns the past and where the past lies in the British Museum is not confined to historical
discourses in the past. In the face of
calls for the restitution of the sculptures the British Museum
has resorted to novel interpretations of the past and the role of the museum in
history. The British Museum
is an “instrument of memory … allied to the functioning of collective memory …
a place of memory”[32]
following in the tradition of “theatres
of memory”.[33] It was established as a “museum of universal
knowledge in the spirit of the European Enlightenment”.[34] According to Jenkins, the story of the
Parthenon sculptures is inextricably bound up with the museum to which they
belong.” The (former) Elgin room of the British Museum
is still the inner sanctum of Bloomsbury and
remains one of the “one of the central places on earth”.[35] The Whig interpretation of British imperial
and colonial history is nowhere more apparent than in the claim that the Parthenon
Marbles, as a great icon of western art because of the fact of their
removal, have been transformed because of that repositioning and now constitute
the "pictorial representation of England as a free society and the
liberator of other peoples".[36] Whilst museums can be
interpreters of the past, as Spalding reminds us, “they can enhance and explain
the past but they are not its only resting place.”[37]
Our admiration and appreciation of
the Parthenon Marbles as a beacon from the past recall what Lowenthal has
written in the context of the misappropriation of history as heritage:
“The past is
everywhere. All around us lie features
which, like ourselves
and out thoughts, have more or less
recognisable antecedents. Relics,
histories, memories suffuse human experience
… Whether it is celebrated
[1] Greenfield ,
J. The Return of Cultural Treasures
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, 2nd ed) page 312
[2] Merryman, J H “Thinking about the Elgin Marbles” (1985) 83 Michigan Law
Review, page 1985
[3] Beard, M. The Parthenon (Profile
Books, London ,
2002)
[4]Lowenthal, D. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998) page x. Lowenthal proceeds to define “heritage” as a
reflection of “nostalgia for imperial self-esteem” (at page 6) – a definition
that assumes significance in the context of our consideration of the British Museum .
[5] Jenkins, K. Re-thinking
History (Routledge, London and New York, 1991) page 15. Jenkins argues that
there is a difference between the ‘past’ (“all that has gone on before
everywhere”) and ‘history’ (“that which has been written/recorded about the
past”). We cannot know the past when we
cannot presently experience or access it.
[6] Ibid. page 8.
[7] Lowenthal, D. The Past is
a Foreign Country (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985) pages
214-215
[8] Fisher, P. “The Future’s Past”, New Literary History page 588
[9] Horne, D. The Great
Museum : The
Re-Presentation of History (Pluto Press, London and Sydney, 1984) page
15. It is perhaps no co-incidence that
the cover of the paperback edition of this work features a photograph of the
Elgin Marbles in the Duveen Gallery of the British Museum .
[10] Ibid. page 31
[11] Spalding, J. The Poetic
Museum : Reviving Historic
Collections (Prestel, Munich ,
2002) page 13
[12] Ibid. page 7
[13] Malraux, A. Voices of Silence Paladin, St
Albans , 1974) page s 13-14
[14] Jenkins, K. Archaeologists
and Aesthetes in the Sculpture Galleries of the British Museum
1800-1939
[15] Walsh, The Representation of the Past: Museums and heritage in
the post-modern world (Routledge, London and New York, 1992) page 30
[16] Ibid. page 36. Walsh
comments that this is nowhere more evident than in the acquisition or looting
(depending on the position of the responder) of classical material culture and
its subsequent display in museums.
[17] Butterfield quoted by Bentley, M. Modern Historiography: An
Introduction (Routledge, London and New York, 1999) page 64
[18] Elgin
is lauded as a “great collector” by William Treue in Art Plunder: The fate
of works of art in war, revolution and peace (Methuen & Co., London,
1960) page 133.
[19] Jordanaova, L. “Objects of Knowledge: A Historical Perspective on
Museums” in Vergo, P. (ed.) The New Museology (Reaktion Books, London,
1989) page 32
[20] Smith, A H. “Lord Elgin
and his Collection” Journal of Hellenic Studies Vol. 36 (1916) page 348.
[21] Lowenthal, D. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998) page 243
[22] A Guide to the Sculptures of the Parthenon (British Museum,
3rd ed. 1886) page 3
[23] Smith, A H. A Catalogue of the Sculptures of the Parthenon in
the British Museum (British Museum, 1900) pages
9-10.
[24] Trustees of the British
Museum , A Short Guide
to the Sculptures of the Parthenon in the British Museum (Elgin
Collection) (1921) at page 3.
[25] Trustees of the British
Museum , An Historical
Guide to the Sculptures of the Parthenon (1971) at page 8
[26] Haynes, D. The Parthenon Frieze (Batchwood Press, 1959) at page 3
[27] Robertson , M. & Frantz, A. The Parthenon Frieze (New
York University Press, 1975) at page 13.
[28] The Sultan’s firman was in terms that Elgin ’s men could take moulds of the
sculptures as well as measurements although they were permitted to remove “any
pieces of stone with inscriptions or figures thereon”. Debate has raged as to whether this only
applied to stones already on the ground or discovered during excavation or
whether it authorised the forcible removal of integral pedimental sculptures,
metopes and frieze from the walls of the Parthenon. It is interesting that the document also stated
that the local officials in Athens
should honour the firman given to Lord Elgin “particularly as there is no harm
in the said figures and edifices being thus viewed, contemplated and
designed.” David Rudenstine has argued
that the wording of the firman does not provide the claimed justification for
Elgin’s actions and challenges the implicit rationale of the British Museum
that “acceptance of the past requires accepting Elgin’s dismantling of the
Parthenon”: Rudenstine, D. “The Legality of Elgin’s Taking” (Book Review) International
Journal of Cultural Property Vol. 8 No. 1 1999 page 357.
[29] Jenkins, I. The Parthenon Frieze (University of Texas Press, 1994) at page 16.
[30] Thomson, K S. Treasures on Earth: Museums, Collections and
Paradoxes (Faber and Faber, London ,
2002) page 22
[31] Healy, C. The Ruins of Colonialism: History as Social Memory
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997)
[32] Mack, J. The Museum of the Mind (The British Museum Press, London , 2003) pages 13-14
[33] Ibid. page 15. The current
director of the British
Museum , Neil MacGregor,
in the preface claims that the British
Museum has acquired its
own “cargo of memories” and as such it has become a “place of pilgrimage”.
[34] Wilson ,
D “Return and Restitution: A Museum Perspective” in McBryde, I.
op.cit. page 101. Wilson, a former
director of the British
Museum , writes that it is
difficult to “adjust modern terms to the morality of the past”.
[35] Bernard Ashmole quoted in Jenkins, I.
Archaeologists & Aesthetes in the Sculpture Galleries of the British Museum 1800-1939 (British Museum
Press, London, 1992) page 229.
[36] Daily Telegraph, 29 June 1998 .
[37] Spalding, J. op. cit. page 113
[38] Jusdanis, G. “Farewell to the Classical: Excavations in Modernism” Modernism/modernity
Vol. 11 No. 1 (2004) page 37
[39] Woodward, C. In Ruins (Chatto & Windus, London , 2001) page 2
[40] Shanks, M. Classical Archaeology of Greece : Experiences of the
Discipline (Routledge, London and New York, 1996) page 72
[41] Lowenthal, D. The Past is a Foreign Country op. cit. page xv