I feel as though the British Museum could have been a more enjoyable experience if being there didn’t feel so rushed. There was no reason for Monique and me to be rushing– we had several hours we could spend there– but there were just so many people in the museum. It felt as though we had to keep moving and moving so we wouldn’t be in anybody’s way. Compared to Camden Market, it felt like there were more people, though I don’t think that is actually true, but, because it made the museum space feel smaller, it felt that way.
Still, there were many interesting things to see there. The museum is largely historical, with exhibits dating back from ancient times to closer to modern day, organized largely by region of origin. We probably spent more time in the Ancient Greece section than any other because that is a personal favorite of mine. I had expected a bit more as far as Greek god sculptures because I had seen images online, but I realized afterward that the photos I was thinking of were from the Louvre, not the British Museum. We went through the European section and found many different exhibits, one particular one I enjoyed being a pendant of Thor’s hammer in the Nordic part. In the Arabic section, there were several garments, which I thoroughly enjoyed and found to be quite beautiful.
I think the problem I had with the British Museum is a problem I felt like was present in a lot of the trip, especially when we left the smaller cities for activities in places like London and Paris. While many of the sites we saw were interesting, the sheer amount of people often also there made it difficult to truly enjoy and appreciate what we were seeing. Of course, this is the way of things with touristic sites and not something that unfortunately is very changeable, but still, it made some of the experiences we had here a bit less enjoyable.
“The entire British museum is an active crime scene” - John Oliver
[image description: two pictures, one above the other. The first image shows a statue originally from the Acropolis in Athens, now in the British Museum. The statue is a column shaped like a woman. It is labelled London. The bottom image is from the Acropolis Museum in Athens, showing the other five matching column/statues, with a space for the missing statue pointedly left open. This picture is shot from above and is labelled Athens.
image in savvysergeant’s reblog: screencap of tags from two people. Feeblekazoo’s tags read: the degree to which the Acropolis museum is designed to shame the British Museum is spectactular. butherlipsarenotmoving’s tags read: the acropolis museum is the most passive aggressive museum i’ve ever been to and i love it
/end id]
For those of you who don’t know museum drama, one of the largest and most famous parts of the British Museum’s collection is the so-called Elgin Marbles, which were looted from the Acropolis by Lord Elgin in the 18th Century. (The Acropolis is the hill in Athens, Greece which has some of the most amazing Greek ruins anywhere, the most famous of which is the Parthenon.) Elgin had (or at least claims to have had) permission from the Ottoman Empire to take stuff home with him, but a) this is one empire asking another empire if they can loot stuff from the other empire’s subjugated people, so, not exactly any moral high ground there Elgin, and b) he took a lot more stuff than the Ottomans said he could have.
Greece has been asking for those statues and sculptures to be returned since they won independence in 1832. That’s right, 1832, 190 years ago. The British Museum has had a number of excuses over the years, one of the biggies of the late 20th Century being “we couldn’t possibly give them back because Athens doesn’t have a nice enough museum to display them” and ignoring Greece’s response of “we will BUILD a museum just for them if you will just give us our damn stuff back!“
Finally, Greece said “fuck you” and built a museum at the bottom of the Acropolis called the Acropolis museum. It is huge, it is gorgeous, the collection of objects is amazing and the educational bits (“this is what it is and why it matters”) are really well done. It’s probably one of the best archaeological museums in the world; it definitely is the best collection of ancient Greek artifacts in the world, both for the size of the collection and the way it’s displayed.
Oh. And it is amazingly passive-aggressive. Every single piece of the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum has an empty spot on display waiting for the piece to be returned to Greece. For example, there are a lot of pieces where Elgin took, say, the nicest (or easiest to remove) one of a set. The column/statue in the OP’s image is one of these. Friezes from the roof of the Parthenon are another example. The Acropolis Museum displays each one of these sets with space for the stolen pieces, along with a picture of what the stolen piece looks like and where it is. It is a giant middle finger at the British Museum, disguised as helpful information.
There’s no chance that the British Museum will return any of this in the next generation. It’s not up to the curators at the British Museum; they don’t get any say in this. The board of governors of the British Museum is made up of old posh English people who genuinely believe that the Empire was awesome and England has a perfect right to everything in the British Museum. They have set policies about what can and can’t be removed from the collection, and according to those policies nothing of any historical or monetary value can be given away or sold. And they actively promote the idea that their predecessors had a perfect right to loot the cultural heritage of the world, and that the museum has a perfect right to keep it forever. The only way to get anything out of the British Museum and back to its rightful place would be to completely replace the entire board of the museum with new people who think completely differently. And that’s not happening any time soon, alas.
By the way, the British argument that Greeks wouldn’t know how to care for the antiquities……. Greece has 206 archaeological museums. It’s not only incredibly demeaning as an argument, it’s also straight out false and misleading.
Return our shit now. Put up and look at tea bags and pots from the 15th century or something Idaf.
I realise the above comment is a joke, but I want to push back against it because one of the frequent arguments against returning items to their homelands is the misconception that nothing will be left behind. This is completely untrue.
Below are some of the exhibits from my very small local museum. This is just items from our county.
Having been to both this and the British Museum I think the displays here are much stronger BECAUSE there are less items. Each item is given its own space. Particularly notable items are emphasised and the displays are eye-catching and informative.
This is not true of the British Museum, which frankly has a lot less thought behind many of its displays, and -in my opinion- often feels confusing and overcrowded. Items are displayed in a way that emphasises their size or appearance but not their historical and cultural context.
The British Museum has so many items that it can only display a tiny fraction (1% in fact). The storage costs for this are in the millions per year - money which could be going towards research or museum employees.
A collection or single item being housed in one museum does not mean that people in other places will never get the chance to see it. There are many ways for museums to share items. Some objects are borrowed or go on tour (funnily enough the Coppergate helmet pictured above has just come back to York after being loaned to the British Museum). Some museums genuinely don’t want their stuff back - another museum near us called up a museum in Egypt to ask if they wanted a mummy from the area returned to them and were basically told ‘nah, we’ve got a bunch of those. You keep it’.
If you’re interested in this subject it’s worth reading about the Benin Bronzes
These are a group of sculptures which were looted from Benin (in Nigeria) in the C19th century and are now in museums and private collections all over the world. The Nigerian government has made a formal request to the British museum for them to return these items. The British Museum answered this request with and offer to “loan” the items to Nigeria. They made the same offer to Acropolis Museum, who refused on the basis that agreeing to “borrow” the items would be an acknowledgement of the British Museum’s ownership of them.
In the last few weeks both the Smithsonian in the States and Oxford and Cambridge Universities in the UK have both agreed to return the Benin bronzes in their collection, adding further pressure for the British Museum to follow suit.
The beginnings of archaeology; “imperialist plunder”
The Younger Memnon -in the British museum- is a colossal granite statue from the ancient Egyptian mortuary temple, the RamesseumatThebes. It depicts the pharaoh Ramesses II, “the Great” (ruled 1279-1213 BC). The statue lost its body and lower legs and it is one of a pair which originally flanked the doorway of the Ramesseum. The head of its pair is still at the Ramesseum (picture n. 3) -its body is restored. The statue was cut from a single block of two-coloured granite.
The Younger Memnon was retrieved from the Ramesseum by the italian explorer Giovanni Belzoni in 1816. He removed the bust and then shipped it to England. It took him 17 days and 130 men to tow it to the river. He used levers to lift it onto rollers. Then he had his men distributed equally with 4 ropes drag it on the rollers.
The hole on the right of the torso is said to have been made by members of Napoleon Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt at the end of the 18th century, in an unsuccessful attempt to remove the statue. The 18th century would see Britain rise to be the world’s dominant colonial power, and France becoming its main rival. Both countries wanted to outdo each other, from empire to archaeology. They strived to build the very best collections in the entire world. This was about national pride.
When the Younger Memnon arrived to England they had nowhere to put it. It sat out in the rain and in the pollution of London. It was later acquired in 1821 by the British Museum and was at first displayed in the old Townley Galleries (now demolished) for several years, then installed in 1834 in the new Egyptian Sculpture Gallery. It was the first public collection of Egyptian antiquities and it had a massive impact on the public. People looked at these objects not as antiquities, but as symbols of British victory. One of the obelisks indeed had engraved down the side “Captured by the British Army”.
Pictures n. 4, 5: Belzoni’s drawings: The Younger Memnon being hauled from Thebes
When I was twenty years old, I became a kind of apprentice to a man named Andrew Lytle, whom pretty much no one apart from his negligibly less ancient sister, Polly, had addressed except as Mister Lytle in at least a decade. She called him Brother. Or Brutha—I don’t suppose either of them had ever voiced a terminal r. His two grown daughters did call him Daddy. Certainly I never felt even the most obscure impulse to call him Andrew, or “old man,” or any other familiarism, though he frequently gave me to know it would be all right if I were to call him mon vieux. He, for his part, called me boy, and beloved, and once, in a letter, “Breath of My Nostrils.” He was about to turn ninety-two when I moved into his basement, and he had not yet quite reached ninety-three when they buried him the next winter, in a coffin I had helped to make—a cedar coffin, because it would smell good, he said. I wasn’t that helpful. I sat up a couple of nights in a freezing, starkly lit workshop rubbing beeswax into the boards. The other, older men—we were four altogether—absorbedly sawed and planed. They chiseled dovetail joints. My experience in woodworking hadn’t gone past feeding planks through a band saw for shop class, and there’d be no time to redo anything I might botch, so I followed instructions and with rags cut from an undershirt worked coats of wax into the cedar until its ashen whorls glowed purple, as if with remembered life.
Annos viginti natus homini Andrew Lytle nomine addictus sum, qui certe decem annos Dominus ab omnibus apellatus erat praeter sororem, quae nomine Polly, minus paulum vetus, eum Fratrem appellebat, vel potius littera R ultima numquam sonata, Frateh, filiasque, quae eum Tatam appellebant. Cum haud dubie numquam volebam eum Andrew, vel senecem, vel nomen alium familiarem appellare, me tamen hortatus est ut se appellerem τὸν ἐμὸν γέροντα. Ille me quidem appellebat puerum, amatumque, et semel per litteras “Animam Narium Mearum.” Cum annos prope nonaginta duo natus erat carpisculum eius habitaveram; cum annos prope nonaginta tres natus est proxima hieme sepultus est in arca quam suave odore, ut opinabatur, de cedro structam cum aliis fabricatus sum, quamvis non multum facere possem. Nonnullas noctes in officina sine multa luce algidus tabulas cera terebam cum alii, viri me peritiores, qui toti in re serram ducebant tabulasque runcinabant, qui scalpro perplexa coagmenta fingere potuerunt. Imperitus eram ligni fingendi, quod a puero tabulas in serram non duxeram, et erat non tempus vitiosa corrigere, ut quae essent facienda eruditus cedrum cera in pannis ex tunica laniatis tererem dum nodi cineris colore videntur purpurei, velut vita in memoria.
-
At twenty years old I was adjoined to the man named Andrew Little, who certainly for ten years had been called Master by everyone except his sister, who, named Polly, a little less old, called him Frater, or rather, since the final letter R was never sounded, Frateh, and his daughters, who called him Tata. Although without a doubt I never wanted to call him Andrew, or old man, or another familiar name, he nevertheless urged me to call him τὸν ἐμὸν γέροντα. He even called me boy, beloved, or once, in a letter, “Breath of My Nostrils.” When he had been ninety-two years old I had lived in his basement; when he was ninety-three the next winter he was buried in a coffin that, constructed from cedar with its sweet smell, as he thought, i built with others, although I wasn’t able to do much. For not just a few nights, cold, in the workshop without much light, I was rubbing the boards with wax alongside the others, men more skilled than me, who guided the saw, fully absorbed in the affair, and planed the boards, who were able to form complicated joints with a chisel. I was unskilled in crafting wood, because I hadn’t led boards under a saw since boyhood, and there wasn’t time to correct faults, so that having been taught what things needed to be done, I rubbed the cedar with wax on cloths torn from a shirt until the knots, the color of ash, seemed purple, like life in memory.
ALT
