The Elgin Marbles receive their name from the British lord who craftily spirited them away from Greece. Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin and ambassador to the Ottoman Empire — occupiers of Greece in the early 20th century — grew to admire the Parthenon's extensive collection of ancient marble sculptures and began extracting and expatriating them to Britain in 1901. Lord Elgin claimed his imprimatur from an Ottoman sultan, who said he could remove anything from the Parthenon that did not interfere with the ancient citadel's walls. Despite objections that Lord Elgin had "ruined Athens" by the time his work was done in 1905, the British Government purchased the marbles from him in 1816. They've been housed at the British Museum ever since.
Who Owns History?
Today it's the source nations that have the whip hand. Nearly all of them have so-called cultural-property laws that lay claim to any ancient objects found in the ground on their territory after a particular year--the cutoff year varies from one nation to the next--and make it a crime to export such material without a permit. A 1970 UNESCO convention has given those laws force in the courts of other nations, like the U.S., that have accepted it. Cultural-property claims by foreign nations are also enforceable in the U.S. under the ordinary law governing stolen property.
Museum professionals have counterarguments. Some places--think of the Met, the Louvre or the National Gallery in London--are "universal museums," worth cherishing precisely because they permanently display the works of many cultures side by side. Neil MacGregor is the director of the British Museum, founded in 1753 as the first and now one of the greatest of those. "The idea," he says, "of having in one building things from the whole world, there for free, is just as important now as it was 250 years ago."
Dimitrios Pandermalis knows all about the idea of the universal museum. He doesn't think much of it. "A translation of the imperialism of the 19th century to the globalization of the 20th century" is what he calls the concept, and his view counts. Pandermalis is president of the organization behind the New Acropolis Museum in Athens, conceived as a standing rebuke to the British Museum's continued possession of the most passionately disputed cultural property of them all, the 5th century B.C. Elgin Marbles. Those are carvings taken from the Parthenon in the early 19th century at the direction of Lord Elgin, who was then British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Together the Elgins constitute roughly half of the surviving figures from the Parthenon. Most of the rest remain in Athens.
To MacGregor, whose museum displays the marbles in galleries near its great collections of Egyptian, Near Eastern, Asian and African art, the division of the work between London and Athens is ideal. "The sculptures are part of two separate stories," he says. "One is the story of architecture and sculpture in Athens. The other is the story of sculpture in the world."
To the Greeks, it's not so ideal. They want the marbles back, and the New Acropolis Museum is an ingenious part of their lengthy campaign to retrieve them. It will display the Greek portions of the Parthenon frieze side by side with pale plaster copies of the portions in London, like empty chairs at a banquet table. Meanwhile, the Greeks have also proposed that the British Museum might simply lend them the Elgin Marbles for the official opening of the museum later this year. There's just one problem. The British Museum insists that Greece must first recognize, formally, that the marbles are its property. "The conversation," says MacGregor, "cannot even begin until that has happened."
It isn't just source nations like Greece that have it in for the museums. So do archaeologists, who complain that simply by providing a commercial market for ancient objects, museums and private collectors encourage looters who vandalize archaeological digs, removing the artifacts from surroundings that hold clues about the culture that made them. To most people, a Mesopotamian cult figure or a Maya stela, before it's anything else, is a work of art. To an archaeologist, it's first a crucial piece of a much larger puzzle, the puzzle that is history itself. And theft breaks the puzzle into pieces that can never be put back together. "Archaeologists are concerned about all the other information that goes along with [found objects]," says Alex Barker, who directs the Museum of Art and Archaeology at the University of Missouri-Columbia. "And that's a very fragile thing."
Current Status: Greece considers Lord Elgin's agreement with the Ottomans dubious at best. They claim the Sultan was bribed and that, as an occupier, he really had no authority over the Parthenon to begin with. Calls to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece have fallen on deaf ears; the British argue that giving the marbles back would do everything from irreparably destroying them to creating more demand for the return of ancient art, draining the collections of European museums.
Time Magazine by Andrea Dorfman / New York, Jeff Israel / Rome
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