It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny.
— Benedict Anderson1
I. Through the first decade of the nineteenth century, Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, British ambassador to the Ottoman court in Constantinople from 1799 to 1803, had numerous sculptures removed from the Parthenon in Athens and shipped to London. He did so, we are told, with permission from the governing Ottoman authorities. The original legal instrument has disappeared and is said to exist only in an Italian translation made for Elgin by the Ottoman court. Some then and now question the legality of Elgin’s actions. The Italian language document gives Elgin the right to draw, measure, and make plaster casts of the sculptures, and dig for others that might have been buried. It also allows for “some pieces of stone with old inscriptions and figures” to be taken away. Did this refer to the sculptures on the building or only the fragments found on the ground? The document is not clear. And without greater clarity (and, at this point, probably even with it), no legal case can be made against Britain’s ownership of the marbles. Still, the modern government of Greece has consistently called for their return.
Whatever the legal circumstances of Elgin’s actions, they could hardly have been surreptitious. The sculptures, both freestanding and in relief, were numerous and heavy and had to be taken off the building and down from the temple’s considerable height. They then had to be transported to ships, where, for fear of sinking the ships themselves, Elgin’s agents sawed off the backs of the thickest relief slabs before loading them. They then sailed slowly away from the coast of the then Ottoman territory, out to sea, and for weeks toward Britain. Considerably impoverished as a result, Elgin offered to sell the sculptures to the British nation. A Select Committee of the House of Commons received testimony from leading British artists as to the sculptures’ quality, importance, and value. Pronounced worthy of acquisition in 1817, the Elgin Marbles, as they were called, were placed on public display in Montagu House. Thirty-five years later, they were transferred to their first permanent gallery in the new, Robert Smirke–designed British Museum.
Byron famously criticized their acquisition by the British government, including in verse: “Cold is the heart, fair Greece! That looks on thee,/ Nor feels as lovers o’er the dust they lov’d;/ Dull is the eye that will not weep to see/ Thy walls defac’d, thy mouldering shrines remov’d/ By British hands . . . ” Keats wrote positively of them in a sonnet, “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles.” And Goethe celebrated their acquisition as “the beginning of a new age for Great Art.” In the meantime, what remained of the Parthenon—which was much depleted not only from Elgin’s actions, but also from years of damage, architectural accretions, vandalism, and, most dramatically, the destruction of much of the building in 1687 when Venetian forces of a Christian Holy League formed against the Ottomans bombarded the building with more than seven hundred cannonballs, ultimately igniting the ammunition stored there in a vast explosion that killed as many as three hundred people—became an emotional symbol of a newly independent Greece.
A first attempt at an independent Greek government failed when its president was assassinated in 1831. Two years later, after independence was finally achieved with help from international forces, a monarchy was established with the seventeen-year-old son of King Ludwig of Bavaria on the now Greek throne. Plans were drawn up to rebuild Athens as the new state’s national capital. Maximilian, the king’s brother, commissioned the Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, who had never been to Athens, to design a royal palace for the Acropolis. But for reasons in part of cost, security, and lack of water supply, the plan was never completed. Another, perhaps more influential reason was that Schinkel’s rival, Leo von Klenze, the king of Bavaria’s favorite architect, was convinced that the entire hill of the Acropolis should become an archaeological zone. And so it did, on August 28, 1834.
Klenze oversaw the lavish ceremony marking the occasion. The young German prince (now Greek king) rode up to the Acropolis on horseback. There he was met by young girls dressed in white, carrying myrtle branches. As a band played, he took his place on a throne within the Parthenon and in front of soldiers and courtiers listened to a speech delivered by Klenze in German. “Your majesty stepped today,” Klenze thundered, “after so many centuries of barbarism, for the first time on this celebrated Acropolis, proceeding on the road of civilization and glory, on the road passed by the likes of Themistocles, Aristeides, Cimon, and Pericles, and this is and should be in the eyes of your people the symbol of your glorious reign. . . . All the remains of barbarity will be removed, here as in all of Greece, and the remains of the glorious past will be brought in new light, as the solid foundation of a glorious present and future.” The material remains of the years when the Parthenon served as a Byzantine church and an Ottoman garrison, complete with a small mosque, were removed. The Acropolis became the political symbol of the new Greece. As one archaeologist put it, speaking at a meeting of the newly formed Archaeological Society of Athens in 1838, “it is to these stones [the sculpture and architecture of classical Greece] that we owe our political renaissance.” Or, as another archaeologist wrote more than a century later, in 1983, the Parthenon is “the most sacred monument of this country . . . which expresses the essence of the Greek spirit.”
It is on this basis that the Greek government is calling for the Parthenon marbles to be returned, and not just from the British Museum but from all the foreign countries in which they reside. They have come to be treasured as critical to the identity of the modern nation-state, a vital link with its imagined ancient past from which it claims to have been unjustly separated by more than one thousand years. It is not because they are to be restored to their original location on the Parthenon itself (they are to be shown in a museum newly built on a site across from the Acropolis), nor because they can not be studied equally well in London. It is because they are said to belong to Greece and to hold within them the very spirit of its people. They are political symbols first, not archaeological artifacts of scientific value.
But if they are political symbols for the Greeks, important to their national identity, they have also been claimed as symbols of and vitally important to the cultural values of modern Britain, where they have resided and been seen publicly now for nearly two hundred years, longer even than there has been a modern state of Greece. As the British Minister for the Arts said in 2000, at a meeting of the Select Committee for Culture, Media, and Sport investigating the illicit trade in cultural property, “I understand the emotional importance . . . to the Greek people of this case. I would also say with respect that we too in this country are heirs to the classical tradition. I would say that the diffusion of the classical culture of ideas, values and of physical relics and monuments over two millennia, has contributed in profoundly important ways to the history that has led to the emergence of the world that we have. It seems to me unthinkable that we would wish to reverse that process.”2
II. In the summer of 1799, French troops in the Egyptian city of Rosetta were hard at work rebuilding the walls of a fifteenth-century fort in an effort to secure the Egyptian coastline against the British fleet. A French officer named Pierre François-Xavier Bouchard came across a fragment of a stone with writing on it. Sensing that it was important, he showed it to his superiors who sent it to the Institut d’Égypte in Cairo, where it remained until it fell into the hands of the victorious British, who removed it (together with other “nationalized” antiquities from the Institut) to London in 1802.
The text inscribed on the stone’s surface is in three scripts: Egyptian hieroglyphs (“the writing of the divine words”), Egyptian demotic (“the writing of documents”), and ancient Greek (“the writing of the Ionians”). It documents the terms of an agreement between a synod of Egyptian priests and the Macedonian ruler of Egypt, Ptolemy V, on March 27, 196 B.C. It promises that a copy of the text in the three languages will be placed in every temple of the first, second, and third divisions in the land “alongside the statue of the king who lives for ever.” The Rosetta Stone, as it has come to be called, is less important for its content than for its being deciphered (other Egyptian texts of equal or greater importance exist; and there are even other copies of the Stone’s text itself, the so-called “Decree of Memphis”). It unlocked the door to the ancient Egyptian language and allowed for the history of that ancient land to be written.
The two key figures in the history of the Stone’s deciphering are Thomas Young, a British, Quaker polymath, who even on his deathbed was working on his Egyptian dictionary, and Jean-François Champillon, a brilliant and precocious student of languages and a dedicated Egyptologist. In many ways they could not have been more different.
Young was educated in Edinburgh, Göttingen, and Cambridge. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society by the age of twenty-three; he would later become its foreign secretary. Although he worked as a doctor of medicine, he lived off a generous inheritance and wrote on any number of scientific topics, from anatomy to mechanics, the wave theory of light, navigation, and longitude. As a student of languages, he invented the term “Indo-European” for the family of languages that included most European languages as well as Persian and many dialects of modern India. He was introduced to Egyptian in 1814 and five years later published in the Encyclopedia Britannica what he had come to know about the equivalents between demotic script and hieroglyphic groups.
Champillon, seventeen years Young’s junior, was born into a shopkeeper’s family in December 1790. With an older brother he moved to Grenoble when he was nine, and there began his studies of languages, including Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac. At age sixteen, he announced to the Grenoble Society of Sciences that he intended to decipher Egyptian and reconstruct the history of the Pharaohs, which he did eight years later with the publication of L’Égypte sous les Pharaons, a copy of which he sent to the Royal Society in London where Thomas Young came across it. Over the next eight years, Champillon concentrated on Egyptian hieroglyphs and in 1822, at a meeting of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, and in the company of Young and Alexandre von Humboldt, he read his famous paper, which has since been known as the Lettre à Monsieur Dacier. In it he outlined the hieroglyphic alphabet he developed from the Rosetta Stone. Two years later, he published his summa—Précis du système hiéroglyphique des anciens égyptiens—which earned him a curatorial position at the Louvre. In 1826, Champillon made his first trip to Egypt, where he studied obelisks at Luxor and the inscriptions in the Valley of the Kings. In 1831, he was elected to the world’s first chair of Egyptology, at the Collège de France.
The two men met only a few times, but knew each other’s work well; Champillon begrudgingly admitted the importance of Young’s earlier, more tentative discoveries, and Young acknowledged the extraordinary, groundbreaking discoveries of his younger colleague. Ultimately, their work made possible the deciphering of hieroglyphs and is, as one Egyptologist has written, “the creator of the entire Historie of ancient Egypt, because it has enabled us to read the texts which led us to start writing [the history of Egypt itself].” And it all began with the Rosetta Stone, and its chance find, reused as building material in a wall of a medieval fort.
The Egyptian government has called for the Stone’s return, claiming that it is important to Egyptian identity, although at the time of its taking there was no independent state of Egypt and wouldn’t be for more than one hundred years. Nor was there a local regard for the land’s ancient heritage. Until the final decades of the nineteenth century, Egyptians showed little interest in their ancient past, and this despite the extraordinary evidence of it all around them. They believed that their significant history began with the advent of Islam many centuries later. It was only through European interest in the remains of ancient Egypt, in great part provoked by the finding of the Rosetta Stone and the deciphering of its hieroglyphs, that the Egyptians also became interested. And then their interest was as much for the current political value of those remains as for their scientific importance. Almost immediately they were used to strengthen Egypt’s separatist ambitions within the Ottoman Empire, making the claim that Egypt was an old, venerable land, older and more venerable even than the Ottoman Empire itself.
The Rosetta Stone was found without archaeological context. In the terms of the current argument between museums and archaeologists over the relative value of unexcavated antiquities, the Rosetta Stone would be pronounced meaningless. Were it to come on to the art market today without provenance (knowledge of where it was found and the history of its recent ownership) and/or without legal, export documents issued by its “country of origin,” museums would be discouraged from acquiring it. If a museum did, it would be criticized in the international community. Archaeologists criticize museums for acquiring antiquities without documented provenance prior to 1970 (the date of the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export, and Transfer of ownership of Cultural Property) or without export license. They would rather allow an unexcavated, undocumented antiquity to remain on the private market than to have it be brought “inappropriately” into a public museum collection.
If by chance a scholar came across the Rosetta Stone in a private collection, she would be discouraged from publishing it in today’s leading English-language, archaeological journals. Those journals have policies against serving “as the initial place of publication or pronouncement” of any unprovenanced object acquired by an individual or institution after December 30, 1970, unless it was in a collection prior to that date, or there is evidence that it was legally exported from its country of origin. Such policies are intended to support national cultural laws of “source” countries to discourage the looting of archaeological sites and illegal trafficking in antiquities. Not being acquired or published, and thus neither studied nor deciphered, the Rosetta Stone would be a mere curiosity, Egyptology as we know it would not exist, and modern Egyptians would not know it to claim it as theirs.3
III. Chen Mengjia, a leading Chinese scholar of ancient bronzes and Chinese writing, committed suicide in 1966 during the Cultural Revolution. He had been accused of being a Rightist and hounded by colleagues and students. He had published his first article on ancient Chinese bronzes in 1936: “The Sacrificial Systems of Shang and Zhou as Found in Ancient Inscriptions.” He was appointed instructor at Yanjing University that same year, and a year later was appointed research professor at Qinghua University. When war broke out with Japan, he moved with his university to Kunming in Yunnan Province, where he continued to publish on inscriptions found on ancient oracle bones and bronzes. In 1944, he was among the first to receive a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation under a new program to encourage Chinese scholars and advance the study of Chinese language and history in the United States. He arrived in Chicago in November and assumed his position in the Department of Oriental Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. A month later, while touring through the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, he stated in an interview with the Shanghai Evening Post his intention to survey American collections of Chinese bronzes and speculated that the United States would become the center of the study of Chinese art and Sinology and that the greatest collections of Chinese art would be preserved here after the war.
Chen was already familiar with Chinese bronzes in foreign collections and had written a two-volume catalogue of them for a commercial press in Shanghai in 1941, although with the disruption of the war it was never published. In 1945, he was invited by the Art Institute of Chicago to survey its collection of bronzes. His work was published a year later, under the authorship of both Chen and Charles Kelley, the museum’s curator of Oriental art. Chen’s contribution can be found in the catalogue’s extensive, scholarly entries, which are introduced by a succinct account of the history and function of ancient bronzes, from the Shang through the late Western Zhou dynasties and Chan Kuo period. Where the bronzes have inscriptions, those are reproduced. And where there are similar examples in the United States, those are noted.
A year later, Chen was back in China at Qinghua University. He had recently completed his study of Chinese bronzes in American collections and was seeking a publisher. In 1952, he accepted a position at the Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. There he continued to publish actively on inscriptions, bronzes, and oracle bones. By 1957, however, he was being attacked by the anti-rightist movement in part for having lived in the United States. And in 1963 he was made to wear “the hat,” by which he was publicly denounced. His American study appeared in 1960, without his participation, in two volumes under the title, Shang and Zhou Bronzes Stolen by the American Imperialists.
Chen’s political troubles began when he disagreed publicly with Mao’s campaign to modernize the Chinese writing system in the 1950s. The Chinese leader hoped even to replace Chinese characters with an alphabet. Chen spoke openly of his opposition to the proposed reforms. He was a scholar of ancient writing and admired its beauty and rich allusiveness. He was also a distinguished, published poet. In 1957, a young scholar, who had once worked closely with Chen, published an article critical of the older scholar’s (until then) definitive writings on oracle bones, the foundation of our knowledge of earliest China. The article’s author, Li Xueqin, wrote that Chen “has not presented anything substantial enough to match his arrogance . . . [and that] he neglects many essays and theories of other scholars, instead collecting only his own ideas. . . . This self-boasting attitude should not be accepted by us.”
Li Xueqin remains a major figure in Chinese archaeology and early history. He has written widely on oracle bones and ancient bronzes. And he is the director of the Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology Project, funded by the central government to establish exact dates for China’s early cultures. The project is controversial inside and outside China. While it funds important archaelogical work, it is thought to be politically motivated and many of its conclusions are judged spurious at best. Previously, the earliest date in Chinese history for which there is sufficient archaeological and textual evidence had been 842 B.C. Using new scientific analyses, Li’s project has established an earlier date of 1046 B.C. But this is only a start. The Chronology Project is preparing for a new initiative on the origins of Chinese civilization, which it expects to be able to date much farther back. Li admits that some critics believe he and his group are trying to extend Chinese history for political reasons. “But this isn’t true. We just want to figure out how China developed. It’s no different from studying ancient Greece, or Egypt, or Israel. These other ancient cultures have all been studied more than China. And China has a special characteristic: it still exists, whereas the others have all disappeared.”
Li Xueqin is also head of an advisory committee to the Poly Art Museum, a private museum with ties to the People’s Liberation Army. His is the final voice in approving the museum’s acquisition of Chinese antiquities. The museum is dedicated to buying back for China what it believes to be important national cultural treasures. The museum has an extraordinary, if small, collection of early bronzes as well as an exquisite collection of mostly Northern Wei and Northern Qi stone sculptures. It is serious about its installation standards, having just moved into new space in a new Poly Group headquarters in Beijing. Its cases and lighting are standard setting for Chinese museums and the equal of the best museums in the world, and its publications are thorough and exacting. In both its installation labels and published catalogues, it takes pains to reproduce ancient inscriptions found on its bronzes. But it almost never publishes an object’s provenance, because its collections do not come from excavations and almost never have provenance. They are “bought back” for China from foreign collections, the sources of which remain unknown. Many of the bronzes have been purchased from European dealers who bought them from Hong Kong dealers who got them from “old collections.” None of this is documented, however. And none need be. The important thing is that the Poly Art Museum is bringing them home to China, returning them “to their native place, putting an end to their wicked fate of wandering without proper shelter,” as the museum proclaims.4
I recount these stories to make a simple point. The real argument over the acquisition of undocumented (unprovenanced) antiquities is not what it appears to be. It is not really between art museums and archaeologists, about the protection of the archaeological record from looting and illicit trafficking in antiquities. It is between museums and modern nation-states and their nationalist claims on that heritage. Archaeologists are part of the argument as allies of those states (or “source” nations; those with ancient remains within their jurisdiction). Archaeologists encourage the institution of nationalist retentionist cultural property laws, believing them to be important to the protection of archaeological sites. That their work is used by source nations for nationalist political purposes is the price archaeologists pay for excavating within national jurisdictions.5
When I have made this point at various conferences, archaeologists have objected, arguing that they can not be held accountable for how national governments misuse their work; they are mere scientists, disinterested scholars using scientific methods to uncover the early history of humankind. Some have even argued that the misuse of their work is no different than the way national governments misuse museum work. After all, national museums are important instruments in the formation of nationalist narratives: they are used to tell the story of a nation’s past and confirm its present importance.
That may be true of national museums, but it is not true of encyclopedic museums, those whose collections comprise representative examples of the world’s artistic legacy. National museums are of local interest. They direct attention to a local culture, seeking to define and legitimize it for local peoples. Encyclopedic museums direct attention to distant cultures, asking visitors to respect the values of others and seek connections between cultures. Encyclopedic museums promote the understanding of culture as always fluid, ever changing, ever influenced by new and strange things—evidence of the overlapping diversity of humankind. Take, for example, just six objects in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.
1. This fangding, or rectangular caldron, made of bronze and dating from the Shang dynasty, ca. 1700–ca. 1050 B.C., was acquired by the Art Institute in 2004 (fig. 1, p. xx).6 Especially striking for its stately dignity and architectonic elegance despite its diminutive size (8.5 inches high), the caldron’s decoration includes a pair of profile birds with long, trailing tails and feathers cast in high relief against a background of squared spirals or leiwen above a margin of rounded forms that frames a panel of squared spirals resembling interlocked Ts. Its round, stout legs are decorated each with relief ogre masks (taotie). In form and quality and bold character of its casting, the caldron is typical of the late bronze art of the Shang, who ruled north central China along the lower reaches of the Yellow River during the second half of the second millennium B.C.
Bronze casting requires an abundance of copper and a highly developed technology for converting the natural material into bronze and casting it into the resulting forms (excavations have unearthed more than 350,000 metric tons of slag from a single, ancient mine!). During the Shang, vessels like this were typically cast from ceramic cast molds. First a model of the vessel was sculpted from high-quality clay, then pieces of molds were pressed onto its surface. The decoration’s broad design was carved on the model and transferred onto molds and further refined. After the inner model and the outer model were reassembled, molten bronze was poured into the cavity between the model and the mold. When the bronze was cool, the assembled model was removed and the resulting bronze vessel filed and polished. The advantage of this technique was the superb clarity in the cast bronze, but it required high-quality materials, aesthetic sense, and sophisticated technology. The disadvantage of the ceramic mold technique was that it left small seams of bronze between the parts. For this reason projecting flanges were elaborated into highly decorative features, such as those we see on this fangding.7
Figure 1. Fangding, 12th/11th century B.C. China, Shang dynasty Bronze (8
× 6¾ × 5½ in.) Avery Brundage, Russell Tyson, and Alyce and Edwin DeCosta and Water Heller Endowments; General Acquisitions Fund, 2004.701
The excavations at Anyang, the richest area thus uncovered for our understanding of the Shang, were the first major excavations undertaken in China, beginning in 1928. Earlier discovery of oracle bones— found in urban medicinal shops, far from any archaelogical context— allowed scholars to document Shang life, including the important role played by ritual.8 Among the most important rituals were those that sanctioned the kinship organization. These used bronze vessels as symbols of aristocratic authority. At the highest levels they were made to symbolize the dynastic rule of a state. Most of the bronzes found in Anyang were excavated from grave sites, where they once served in the burial rites for the deceased’s ancestors, who are thought to have derived their strength in part from offerings of wine, flesh, and blood presented in bronze vessels. Just what the decoration on the vessels means is unknown and much debated. It may simply register a regard in the ritual of honoring the deceased and one’s ancestors. This caldron bears an ancestor dedication cast on the interior, noting that it was made for Father Yi, and is marked with a noble clan sign.
2. A year later, the Art Institute acquired a much larger ding vessel, dating from the Western Zhou, the successor to the Shang (fig. 2, p. xxii). It includes an extensive inscription cast on the caldron’s interior bowl and is decorated with patterns of recumbent c- and s-shapes with narrow, trailing ribbons with frilly hooks derivative from zoomorphic designs of dragons or birds on early Shang bronzes, and suggests an important symbol of statehood and royal power. Its inscription reads:
The Grand Captain’s young son Captain Wang says:
“Illustrious august
deceased-father Duke Jiu was beautifully capable of making accordant his heart and making wise
his virtue, with which he served the past kings, and gained purity without flaw. Wang for the first time has gone on to emulate
Figure 2. Shi Wang Ding, early 9th century B.C. China, Western Zhou dynasty Bronze (19¼ × 16
in.) Major Acquisitions Centennial Fund, 2005.426
his august-deceased father, respectfully
morning and night taking out and bringing in the king’s commands, not daring not
to follow through or to manage. Because of this, the king has not forgotten the sagely man’s
descendant, and has greatly praised his accomplishments and awarded him beneficence. Wang dares
in response to extol the Son of Heaven’s illustriously fine beneficence, herewith
making for my august deceased-father Duke Jiu this offertory caldron; my Captain
Wang for ten thousand years have sons’ sons and grandsons’ Grandsons eternally to treasure and use it.”
Sometime in the eleventh century B.C., the Zhou overthrew the Shang royal house and founded a dynasty that lasted for eight centuries. Inscriptions on Zhou bronzes, like the one just quoted, are important for our knowledge of the dynasty’s history. They document social and dynastic relations and ritual practices, such as Captain Wang’s commissioning of this large bronze to commemorate the honor of his deceased father, Duke Jiu.9 As with the Shang fangding, the importance of this Zhou vessel lies in its size and quality of manufacture— the thickness of its wall, strength of its structure, and crispness and clarity of its casting—in the beauty of its design and decoration, and in the contents of its inscription. Centuries—and in the case of the Shang, millennia—before the Greeks, bronze makers in the central river valleys of China possessed a sophisticated understanding of metallurgy and a refined sense of aesthetic form and were making bronze vessels of astonishing range and quality.
3. Just steps away, in a neighboring gallery, is this bronze plaque from the Royal Kingdom of Benin, in the west of Africa (fig. 3, p. xxiv). Dating from the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, the plaque (commonly referred to as bronze but actually made of leaded brass; brass being an alloy of copper and zinc rather than copper and tin as bronze is), probably once decorated a pillar in a courtyard of the royal court.10
Much of the Benin Kingdom was located in what is now the Edo State in the southwest of Nigeria. According to oral history, the kingdom was founded in mythological times by the Ogiso rulers, the first royal dynasty of Benin (until ca. A.D. 1200). The earliest European reports date from three centuries later, with the arrival of the Portuguese. Over the next five hundred years, Benin carried out a prosperous trading relationship with the Portuguese, British, Dutch, and French, exchanging pepper, ivory, cotton, textiles, redwood, palm oil, ivory, and slaves for a diverse set of European luxury goods, including European and Indian textiles and fine silks, hats, and Mediterranean coral. In the late nineteenth century, the Benin coast was dominated by the British. In 1897, violence erupted between the British and forces loyal to the Benin king. As retribution for the deaths of members of the British mission, a punitive exhibition was organized, which occupied the royal city of Benin in 1897 and led to the removal of hundreds of Benin bronze plaques, brass sculptures, and ivory tusks to Britain. The British Museum acquired a number of them and the rest were distributed throughout Europe, mostly to museum collections in Germany and Austria, while a few made their way to the United States, including this one in the Art Institute, which was acquired by the museum in 1933.
Figure 3. Plaque with Courtier, 16th/early 17th century Edo, Court of Benin Bronze (13 
× 11 × 1 in.) Samuel P. Avery Fund, 1933.782
The bronze reliefs have no parallel in African art. Their quality of manufacture and formal elegance even led some European intellectuals to propose very early contacts between Benin and Europe; how else, it was asked, could Africans have produced them? (The celebrated, early-twentieth-century German mathematician, Frobenius, even argued on the evidence of a passage in Plato, which describes an island far beyond the straits of Gibraltar surmounted by a large castle ornamented with bronzes, that the Benin bronzes derive from—and even prove the existence of—Atlantis!) The bronze plaques typically portray figures who, by their clothing and attributes, can be identified by their specific function in the Benin court hierarchy. The court’s power structure, of which much is known through oral and written history and recent anthropological research and studies, was characterized by a complex system of hereditary and nonhereditary titles. The king, or Oba, was distinguished from a courtier, drummer, hornblower, or other kind of attendant by his costume, decorative attributes, and handheld elements. He sat at the top of a hierarchy which included multiple layers of chiefs (Uzama chiefs—closest to the Oba—town chiefs, and palace chiefs), a state council, district administrators, and affiliated guilds. In this plaque, the male figure wears a coral-studded cap and high coral-beaded collar, indications of his courtly rank, and carries an eben, or ceremonial sword. Typically, a courtier would carry an eben in court rituals, tossing and twirling it many times to pay homage to the king and and show fealty to him. Similar rituals were performed before the Oba’s ancestral shrines.
4. Such royal ancestral shrines included carved elephant tusks, often inserted into pedestals in the form of bronze heads of Obas. This mid-nineteenth-century tusk, acquired by the Art Institute in 1976, was among more than hundred that came from ancestral shrines in Oba Ovonramwen’s palace (fig. 4, p. xxvi).11 It would have protruded upward from the center of the crown of a bronze head and served as a focal point for a commemorative celebration of sacrifice dedicated to the spirt of the Oba’s deified father. Carved on the length of its surface are nine rows of motifs, the most important of which are in the center of each row, which would have been clearly visible from the altar. The most significant motif in the second row is the Oba Ewuare the Great, who ruled Benin in the late fifteenth century. He is often associated with a leopard and viper, which respectively gave him strength and good fortune. Here he is shown holding a coiled mudfish in each hand, symbolizing his connection to Olokun, the lord of the great waters of the world, from whom he derived his powers of creativity and destruction.
Figure 4. Royal Altar Tusk, 1850/1888 Edo, Court of Benin Ivory (58¼ × 77 × 5 in.) Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Edwin Hokin, 1976.523
The ancestral altars provided models of the life well-lived. They commemorate a life and a reign. This is especially important in royal altars, for a king’s place in history is central to the sense of identity and continuity of the Edo as a people and a nation. The combination of the ivory—with its narrative imagery—and the likeness of the Oba’s head in bronze, in which the ivory is inserted, connect that particular ruler with the continuity of the dynasty and protect his role in it for all who follow him. It establishes the deceased monarch as one who once shaped—and through the power of ritual continues to shape—events important to the history of the Edo.
5. Ivory like this tusk was a much prized export commodity from Africa, and had been for centuries. An ivory box in the Art Institute, acquired in 1926, was probably made in Sicily early in the thirteenth century (fig. 5, p. xxviii). Its thin ivory plaques were carved from a thick African elephant’s tusk probably obtained from Muslim traders from the Swahili coast of east Africa (who had traded for it in the interior of South Africa; likely exchanging silk and cotton obtained from trade in the Indian Ocean).12 The Swahili lived (still live) along the coast of eastern Africa, from what is now Somalia in the north to Mozambique in the south. Their culture is ethnically diverse, largely urban, with a common language and shared Islamic faith, and is marked by a long history of commercial trade with distant ports. By the eighth and ninth centuries, contact with the Islamic world meant contact with an enormous network of trade routes along the African and Arab coasts, up the Persian Gulf and across the Indian Ocean to what is now India and Indonesia, and beyond to China. By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the trading ports of Malindi, Mombasa, Zanzibar, and especially Kilwa were marked by beautifully built structures described in 1331 by the famous Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta.13
Through a network of exchanges northward, trade between the Swahili coast and the Mediterranean Sea flourished during Europe’s medieval period. The strategically placed island of Sicily, which was held successively over the centuries by Byzantine emperors, Fatimid rulers, and Norman kings, participated actively in this trade. The decorations on this box are evidence of the island’s rich and diverse artistic inheritance. Its arabesques, gazelles, peacocks, and the formulaic inscription in Arabic (“May glory endure”) derive from Islamic metal works and ceramics; as does its use of gold and vivid tempera colors, now visible only in traces. Such Islamic works were typically traded from the Levant or Egypt—especially metal bowls, buckets, and caskets decorated with inlaid metal arabesques—and were especially prized for their exoticism and magnificence. That this box was likely first used to hold jewelry or other domestic valuables and later used as a Christian reliquary (many similar ones still remain in church treasuries) is no contradiction. Its status as a luxury good, made of costly materials and exquisitely ornamented, made it a perfect receptacle for the relics of a saint, the most precious of all items for its Christian owner. And its decorative references to the Biblical east (the Levant and the Islamic lands, generally) made this point all the stronger.
Figure 5. Casket, 1200/25 Sicily Ivory, brass, tempera, and gold leaf (3 × 6¼ × 3¼ in.) Samuel P. Avery Endowment, 1926.389
6. The transformation of objects through trade between Europe and Islamic Egypt is evident in this beautiful fourteenth-century German monstrance, once a highly prized part of an ecclesiastical treasury, known commonly as the Guelph Treasure (fig. 6, p. xxx).14 The term “monstrance” derives from the Latin monstrare—to show. During this period, changes in the church’s liturgical practices called for the public display of relics during the celebration of the Mass, giving monstrances pride of place on altars.
Made of gilt silver, the Art Institute’s monstrance is in the shape of a medieval church building, complete with two buttresses and a small chapel surmounted by a delicate crucifix. At its center is a translucent, rock crystal bottle, within which is said to be a tooth of Saint John the Baptist (identified by an inscription on a small piece of paper in the relic’s linen wrapping). The bottle itself was originally a perfume bottle made in Fatimid—Muslim—Egypt. There rock crystal was especially prized as the most precious of stones, celebrated for uniting “the fineness of air with the quality of water.”15 When the eleventh-century Fatimid rulers fell on hard economic times, much of the caliph al-Mustansir’s palace treasury was looted, sold, or disappeared. Chronicles of the day report that tens of thousands of gold, silver, precious stone, and rock crystal objects either left Cairo or were melted down during the crisis of 1070–71. The Byzantine court in Constantinople was probably the foremost recipient of these goods, no doubt many of which, in turn, came to Europe when Venetian ships sacked Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade in 1204. (The Islamic rock crystal and cut glass objects in Venice’s Saint Mark’s Treasury were probably acquired in this fashion.) Others made their way on to the European market, where they competed with others circulating having been purchased directly in the bazaars of Cairo during the preceding two centuries.16
When the maker of the Art Institute monstrance was looking for a beautifully crafted, transparent object into which he could place the saintly relic, he turned to this piece of rock crystal. Its multifaceted surface refracts lights and enhances the glimmer of the gilt metal surround. It is as if a boundless aura of light lies at the center of this miniature church building. And within it, seemingly held by the power of magic and belief itself, is the precious relic of the Baptist. Nothing could be more appropriate for housing such a precious thing, or better represent the later Medieval church’s regard for beautiful things in and of themselves and for how they further endow holy things with visual power. That this rock crystal bottle, which probably originally held perfume, was made in and for a Muslim culture, was either of no interest or of very special interest indeed. Its origin in Fatimid Egypt—or generally, as with the ivory box, from the East, the Biblical lands—was reinforcing of the relic’s claim to be from the Baptist himself: container and its contents, one and the same.
Figure 6. Monstrance with Tooth of Saint John the Baptist, 1375/1400 Germany, Lower Saxony, Brunswick Gilt silver (17 × 5¼ in.) Rock crystal, 900/1000 Egypt, Fatimid dynasty Gift of Mrs. Chauncey McCormick, 1962.91
What have we learned from this brief glimpse at six objects installed in just three neighboring galleries of the Art Institute? We have traveled halfway around the world and over thousands of years, from what is today China to Nigeria, Egypt, Sicily, and Germany. We have seen how bronze is worked magnificently in two, seemingly very different cultures; and how in each of the courts of the Zhou and Benin, objects were used to document courtly history and dynastic relations. We have also seen how in these courts, as in Medieval European Christian communities, precious objects were central to ritual practices, and how these rituals venerated, sometimes included pieces of, or were buried with human bodies. We have seen how objects move about the world through trade or because of economic hardship, looting, and violence. And we have seen how different cultures use, reuse, and transform other cultures’ objects or decorative motifs, either indifferently or because they add value to the object in its new cultural setting. And in each instance, we have admired the beauty and workmanship of the object and the sophistication of the culture within which it was produced. Unsuspected connections were made between cultures, and great distances in space and time were overcome.
This is the promise of the encyclopedic museum: the museum as a repository of things and knowledge, dedicated to the dissemination of learning and to the museum’s role as a force for understanding, tolerance, and the dissipation of ignorance and superstition, where the artifacts of one time and one culture can be seen next to those of other times and other cultures without prejudice. This is the concept of the museum dedicated to ideas, not ideologies, the museum of international, indeed universal aspirations, and not of nationalist limitations, curious and respectful of the world’s artistic and cultural legacy as common to us all.
Nationalist cultural politics and their legal instruments—nationalist retentionist cultural property laws—argue against these values and call for the return of cultural artifacts to national jurisdictions. They claim ownership of the world’s ancient heritage. They declare antiquities found within the borders of modern nations as the cultural property of particular nations. And they claim cultural, spiritual, even racial descent from the ancient peoples who made those antiquities. The Parthenon Marbles should be returned to Greece because they are of Greece; they embody its spirit and connect modern Greeks to their ancient ancestors and confirm ancient legitimacy on their modern government. The Rosetta Stone should be returned to Egypt because “it is the icon of our Egyptian identity” (in the words of Zahi Hawass, director of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Cairo). Its importance lies in the role it played in deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs from which the history of ancient Egypt has been written as the origins of modern Egypt. And Chinese antiquities belong in China. They are evidence of China’s long and glorious history, which lives still in the present, in the living culture of modern China. That they are currently outside China is a sad reminder of the nefarious doings of foreign imperialists and of treasonous politicians who removed much of the Imperial collection to Taiwan on the eve of the Communist victory. Greece, Egypt, and China have each enacted strict cultural property laws investing ownership of antiquities found or thought to have been found within their state jurisdiction: they are state property and their export is forbidden without state permission.
The international archaeological community has allied with national governments in encouraging such laws (and the bilateral treaties and international conventions which reinforce them) because it believes they protect archaeological sites from looting and destruction. And yet, by any measure, they have failed to do so. Archaeological sites continue to be looted and destroyed at an alarming rate. All of the cultural property laws in force over the past four decades have not stopped— cannot stop—this. They are a failed regime. Calling for more and ever more restrictive laws will make no difference. Archaeological sites will continue to be looted so long as there are people anywhere in the world willing to pay money for looted antiquities, and so long as there are people living in poverty and the chaos of war and sectarian conflict who are willing to break the law to uncover and sell them. Looting is not a leisure time activity. It is an act of desperation. And people living desperate lives will continue to loot. And archaeological sites will continue to be destroyed. And not only through looting, but through war itself, rampant development, and environmental catastrophies.
The question then is: should the fate of the archaeological record— and of antiquities alienated from their archaeological context—remain under the jurisdiction of national governments? Is there an alternative? Yes. And it was once in place and encouraged the scientific excavation of the archaeological record and the preservation and sharing of ancient artifacts between local governments and international museums. It is called partage. Under that policy, foreign-led excavation teams provided the expertise and material means to lead excavations and in return were allowed to share the finds with the local government’s archaeological museum(s). That is how the collections of archaeological museums at the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard and Yale Universities were built; as well as important parts of the collections of the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was also how the collections in archaeological museums in Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Turkey were built. Foreign museums underwrote and led scientific excavations from which both the international archaeological and local political communities benefited. While local tensions increased over time as nationalist aspirations took hold, partage served both communities well. It was only with the flood of national retentionist cultural property laws in the second half of the twentieth century that partage all but disappeared. The collections of the university museums mentioned above now could not be built, and the directors and faculty curators of those museums, many of whom are the loudest proponents of national retentionist patrimony/cultural property laws, could not teach and research as they do now. Much of their work is dependent on a policy no longer legal in the countries with jurisdiction over the archaeological materials they study.
If the ancient past and antiquities are important—and we can all agree they are—they are important to all of us and not only to the governments (and some citizens or subjects) of modern nations with jurisdiction over them. I will argue that the best way to preserve the archaeological record and unprovenanced or “alienated” antiquities is to encourage scientific excavation of the archaeological record, protect archaeological sites, broaden access to their finds through the restoration of partage, allow for the reasonable acquisition of unprovenanced antiquities, strengthen existing and establish new encyclopedic museums, and develop programs for sharing and exchanging collections and scholarly and professional expertise broadly.
Some readers will interpret my argument as favoring museums in the developed, first world at the expense of those in the developing, third world. Nothing could be farther from the truth. That encyclopedic museums are currently predominantly in the developed world is not an argument against the idea of the encyclopedic museum. Indeed, the promise of the encyclopedic museum is an argument for their being everywhere, in both the developed and developing world, wherever people are broadly curious about our common past, from New York to London, Berlin, Istanbul, Cairo, Lagos, Mumbai, and Tehran, Beijing; everywhere.
Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, is articulate about the cosmopolitanist aspirations of the encyclopedic museum. He likes to point out that the British Museum was established for the whole world on the premise that the study of things gathered together from all over the world would reveal the truth and “not one perpetual truth,” in MacGregor’s words, but “truth as a living, changing thing, the truth constantly remade as hierarchies are subverted, new information comes, and new understandings of societies emerge. And as such truth emerged, it was held, it would change those societies and the result would be tolerance.” The British Museum’s collection was formed as a means to knowledge and a way of creating a new kind of citizen for the world. That it was in London was only because London met its founder’s terms: his collection would be kept together and would be open, free to any and all interested persons. It could easily have been in another European capital but at the time, London was the most cosmopolitan and largest city in all of Europe. It was presumed that more—and more different—people would experience the collection in London than anywhere else. And that was most important to the museum’s founder. “Sir Hans Sloane gave his collection for a purpose, more than to a place,” MacGregor points out. “The place was important only in so far as it advanced the purpose for which Sloane gathered and gave his collection of wonderful things. He wanted the museum to be where it would best be used by a large number of people, international people as much as possible.”17
This is why the British Museum was founded in London. And just as it is important to engage with the diversity of the world’s cultures under one roof in London, it is important to do so everywhere. Building encyclopedic collections in itself, wherever it can be done, is important for the preservation of the world’s artistic culture and for the encouragement of global understanding. And not just global understanding in terms of other people and other cultures elsewhere, but in terms of other people and other cultures here, where we live, at home. The world is becoming increasingly diverse, although not everywhere, of course. Economic and political circumstances conspire against open and free migration across the globe. But wherever the patterns of human migration are taking people—to Paris, London, Rome, New York, Chicago, and smaller cities in every hemisphere (about 3 percent of the world’s population, or nearly 200 million people, lived outside the country of their birth in 2005)—living conditions are becoming more and more diverse and are requiring ever greater and more sensitive understanding of and respect for the differences and similarities between cultures.18
This is why I am arguing against nationalist retentionist cultural property laws. They nationalize and fail to protect our ancient heritage, and they conspire against a greater understanding and appreciation of the world’s many, diverse cultures. No culture of any consequence is free of influences from other cultures. All cultures are dynamic, mongrel creations, interrelated such that we all have a stake in their preservation. National retentionist cultural property laws deny this basic truth. They depend on the myth of pure, static, distinct, national cultures. And not just about living cultures, but about ancient cultures, too. They define and seek to regulate access to ancient cultures on the grounds that they belong to the modern nation as the work of its descendents and the origins of its modern culture and identity. They promote a sectarian view of culture and encourage the politics of identity at a time when nationalism and sectarian violence are resurgent around the world.
Museums and archaeologists can agree on this: the argument over antiquities is not between us. It is really between us and nation-states with nationalist retentionist cultural property laws. We, museums and archaeologists and the public we serve, all have an equal stake in the matter. The situation is grave, to be sure. We are losing ground against the destruction of the archaeological record through war, environmental damage, economic development, looting, and acts of nature, and against the rise of nationalism and its claim on antiquity and on culture, generally. We cannot afford to waste time debating the same tired question of whether or not museums should acquire unprovenanced antiquities. That just won’t do. We can do better. We have to.
Many people deserve mention for their invaluable assistance with this project, more than I can acknowledge here. Hanne Winarsky and Brigitte Pelner of Princeton University Press shepherded this book through editing and publication with care and diligence. At the Art Institute of Chicago, Maureen Ryan, Lisa Burback, Dorothy Schroeder, Julie Getzels, Robert Sharp, and Jack Brown and his staff at the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries helped in numerous ways, as did Jay Xu and Elinore Pearlstein. Colleagues with whom I have discussed this topic over the years, including Kwame Anthony Appiah, Jonathan Bloom, Sharon Cott, Steven Kinzer, Josh Knerly, James Lally, Neil MacGregor, John Henry Merryman, Philippe de Montebello, and Timothy Potts, and colleagues with whom I have disagreed on conference panels, in print, and in hallways at meetings, as well as students in seminars and lectures, and friends and colleagues who have read parts of this manuscript, and the perceptive anonymous readers commissioned by Princeton University Press; all have refined and helped shape my understanding of the intellectual and professional principles and practices that inform art museums and archaeologists in their work, and just what is at stake in seeking common ground for the resolution of our differences.
James Cuno
