Month: August 2009

The renewed Parthenon (Elgin) Marbles debate

Ancient, Looting, Modern(ish), Museums, Treasures

The debate over whether the British Museum should return the Parthenon Marbles to Greece is picking up steam in the wake of recent successful antiquities repatriation campaigns, and the opening of the new, state of the art Acropolis Museum.

The new museum eliminates one of the British Museum’s primary excuses for keeping the frieze sculptures removed by Lord Elgin in the first decade of the 19th century, ie, that they can preserve them better in London than the Greeks can in Athens.

Not that that contention was particularly valid even before the new museum opened, mind you.

The British Museum has a lot to answer for in terms of damage done to the marbles in various disastrous “cleanings” using tools like brass brushes and industrial abrasives which scoured off the precious traces of original paint and removed an estimated 1/8 of an inch of the marble surface.

The frieze sculptures that remained on the Parthenon, on the other hand, may have been caked in soot and pollution for thousands of years, but when they were taken down and restored in 1993, the careful double laser treatment revealed details like veins on the horses’ bellies and original chisel marks long gone from Elgin’s poor butchered ones.

So anyway, the new museum isn’t just a hint. The Greeks are out-and-out demanding that the frieze sculptures in England be returned to Athens to join their brothers and sisters.

An animated short directed by famed Greek-born auteur Costa-Gavras showing the damage done to the Parthenon over the centuries plays in the museum, making its return agenda very clear indeed.

The film caused some controversy because of a few seconds of footage in which figures in black are seen knocking chunks of marble off the frieze and replacing them with a cross. Although it’s a known fact that Christians used Parthenon marble for construction and destroyed pagan imagery to convert the structure into a church, the Greek Orthodox Church got mad and those 12 seconds of the film were cut.

Then everyone else got mad, including Costa-Gavras, so the footage was put back in after “clarifying” that the figures in black weren’t meant to be actual priests but just representatives of the people whodunit. (Pretty much all the figures in the short are black shadowy looking things anyway, so it was an obvious point, imo. Guilty conscience much?)

Now the entire short is on YouTube, and it’s astonishing to me that anyone could give a rat’s ass about the Christian destruction aspect given the rousing Elgin-and-Britain-bashing finale. The whole video is compelling, but the focus is definitely on Elgin’s removal of the frieze.

The only voice-over begins at the 4:30 mark, and it’s a recitation of excerpts from Lord Byron’s “The Curse of Minerva,” which he wrote in Athens in 1811, while Elgin was almost but not quite finished despoiling the place. (He removed the last of his marbles in 1812.)

Watch the whole thing because it’s awesome:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/1rFgq7MsRe8&w=430]

HARDCORE, RIGHT?! Here’s the full text from the video:

“Mortal!”—’twas thus [Athena] spake — “that blush of shame
Proclaims thee Briton, once a noble name;
First of the mighty, foremost of the free,
Now honoured ‘less’ by all, and ‘least’ by me:
Chief of thy foes shall Pallas still be found.
Seek’st thou the cause of loathing!—look around.
Lo! here, despite of war and wasting fire,
I saw successive Tyrannies expire;
‘Scaped from the ravage of the Turk and Goth,
Thy country sends a spoiler worse than both.
Survey this vacant, violated fane;
Recount the relics torn that yet remain:
‘These’ Cecrops placed, ‘this’ Pericles adorned,
[…]
What more I owe let Gratitude attest—
Know, Alaric and Elgin did the rest.
That all may learn from whence the plunderer came,
The insulted wall sustains his hated name:
[…]
Be ever hailed with equal honour here
The Gothic monarch and the Pictish peer:
Arms gave the first his right, the last had none,
But basely stole what less barbarians won.
So when the Lion quits his fell repast,
Next prowls the Wolf, the filthy Jackal last:
[…]

Some calm spectator, as he takes his view,
In silent indignation mixed with grief,
Admires the plunder, but abhors the thief.

That’s playing in the museum, y’all, and even with all the press over the religion controversy, nobody once mentioned this dramatic fuck you to Britain. Color my mind blown.

For a handy and entertaining presentation of the issues in the Elgin debate, see James Cuno (director of the Art Institute of Chicago and proponent of “universal museums” getting to keep all the stuff they stole/conquered/bought from thieves) and Christopher Hitchens (journalist and long-time advocate for the return of the Parthenon marbles) go at it on PBS.

Computers to help decipher Indus Valley script

Ancient, Multimedia

We have all kinds of artifacts engraved with the hieroglyphic script of the Indus Valley civilization, but so far nobody has been able to decipher the language.

Researchers from the University of Washington and the Institute of Fundamental Research and Centre for Excellence in Basic Sciences in Mumbai are using computers to find patterns in the placement and order of the hieroglyphics. The patterns can then be extrapolated into a statistical model that reveal the grammatical underpinnings of the language.

“The statistical model provides insights into the underlying grammatical structure of the Indus script,” said lead author Rajesh Rao, a UW associate professor of computer science. “Such a model can be valuable for decipherment, because any meaning ascribed to a symbol must make sense in the context of other symbols that precede or follow it.”

The new study looks for mathematical patterns in the sequence of symbols. Calculations show that the order of symbols is meaningful; taking one symbol from a sequence found on an artifact and changing its position produces a new sequence that has a much lower probability of belonging to the hypothetical language. The authors said the presence of such distinct rules for sequencing symbols provides further support for the group’s previous findings, reported earlier this year in the journal Science, that the unknown script might represent a language.

“These results give us confidence that there is a clear underlying logic in Indus writing,” Vahia said.

The examples of the script we have are just 5 or 6 symbols long, so there’s been some question as to whether it’s a language system at all. The fact that researchers have found syntactical patterns indicates that it is indeed a language and not just a collection of religious or political pictograms.

Greek statue donates its body to science

Ancient, Multimedia, Treasures

A 1st c. BC Green statue found off the coast of Croatia in 1998 may provide scientists with new ways to combat biofouling, the accumulation of barnacles and other hull encrustations that damage ships.

The statue of an athlete (serendipitously posed scraping himself with a strigil) was found covered with biomineralizing organisms, creatures like barnacles that create their own shells from ingesting whatever they’re stuck on.

Croatian scientists restoring the statue said that the once crusty athlete can offer clues to how marine organisms absorb metals to form minerals for their shells.

Even creatures not in direct contact with the figure’s surface took up some of its metals, Medakovic’s team noted in their study.

What’s more, the study has shown the huge impact and disruption that this metal uptake had on the organisms’ metabolic pathways, and that caused the distressed organisms to produce untypical minerals in their shells, Medakovic said.

Living on a steady diet of copper and tin, the organisms on the statue had digested the metals to produce shells with unusual ratios of magnesium calcite and aragonite, for example, as well as traces of feldspar and quartz.

Scientists are hoping that by finding out exactly which metals caused which reactions in the beasties, they can develop metals that are more resistant to biofouling.

And now, the moment we’ve all been waiting for, the before and after pics:

On the left is Apoxyomenos’ head after the crusties were removed, on the right is his encrusted head.

His lips are that beautiful shade of red because they were made out of pure tin which turns red when oxidized, just like bronze oxidizes green because of its high copper content.

Cuneiform tablets may illuminate a dark age

Ancient, Treasures

A University of Toronto archaeological team excavating a 2,700-year old Turkish temple near the border with Syria have uncovered thousands of artifacts, including a cache of cuneiform tablets dating to between 1200 and 600 BC, suggesting that a period considered to be a “dark age” between Bronze and Iron may not have been quite as dark as we thought.

“We think that these tablets actually have significant historical information in them that we don’t have available anywhere else,” [University of Toronto archeologist Timothy] Harrison said in an interview from the dig site at Reyhanli, Turkey.

“We may begin to fill in political history, some of the local kingdoms, maybe more understanding about how the Assyrians were administrating and ruling and controlling their empire.”

The professor of near eastern archeology said little is known about the “dark age,” a 300-year transitional time period between the collapse of the Bronze Age and the rise of the Iron Age, but it was thought to be a violent period when little writing was done. But the tablets he and his team have found may challenge that assumption, he suggested.

The tablets haven’t been deciphered yet, so archaeologists don’t know what information they’ll eventually glean. Since it was a temple, Harrison suspects the tablets are archives or documents pertaining to the local rituals.

Many are fragile, some falling apart. They’ll need careful conservation before the transcription and translation can even begin. Other tablets are still in fairly sturdy shape. We can expect translations of those tablets within just a few weeks.

The UoT team actually discovered the temple building last year, but the dig went on hiatus before they could get inside of it. This summer they made it through to the inner sanctum and found a huge treasure trove of ceramics, jewelry, gold foil, chalices, lamps, silver and bronze objects as well as the cuneiform tablets.

They estimate they’ve found something in the neighborhood of 100,000 artifacts in that one room.

Vespasian’s summer villa/birthplace found (maybe)

Ancient, Roma, Caput Mundi, Treasures

No “Vespasian Wuz Here” inscriptions have been found to confirm its ownership, but a magnificent 2000-year-old villa next to the insignificant village where Vespasian was born is most likely his.

“We’ve found a monumental villa with elaborate floors made of marble brought from quarries in Greece and North Africa,” said Dr Helen Patterson, of the British School at Rome, the archaeological institute involved in the excavation.

“There’s also a very extensive bath complex which is just beginning to emerge. It’s the only large villa in the area, and the size and dating fits in perfectly with Vespasian.

“Until we find a stone or marble inscription saying ‘Vespasian lived here’, we can’t be 100 per cent certain, but it seems very likely. It’s in a perfect position, overlooking a river and the old Via Salaria trade route.”

So was it the summer house in which Vespasian died, or was it his wealthy banker father’s house in which the future emperor was born? The Italian newspaper La Stampa says the former, Agence France-Press the latter.

Suetonius mentions he had a summer villa outside Rieti (then Reate) and that that’s where he died.

I’m rooting for the summer villa theory just because the stories about his death are so cool.

He did not cease his jokes even when in apprehension of death and in extreme danger; for when among other portents the Mausoleum [of Augustus] opened on a sudden and a comet appeared in the heavens, he declared that the former applied to Junia Calvina of the family of Augustus, and the latter to the king of the Parthians, who wore his hair long; and as death drew near, he said: “Woe’s me. Methinks I’m turning into a god.”

That’s an awesome little dig at the Imperial cult that had started with the deification of Julius Caesar in 42 BC, 2 years after Caesar’s assassination. Even on his deathbed Vespasian was a joker.

Not to mention a tough old bird:

[…]Taken on a sudden with such an attack of diarrhoea that he all but swooned, he said: “An emperor ought to die standing,” and while he was struggling to get on his feet, he died in the arms of those who tried to help him, on the ninth day before the Kalends of July, at the age of sixty-nine years, seven months and seven days