Should the UK hand over the Elgin Marbles to Greece?

There is growing pressure on the British Museum in London to send the Elgin Marbles back to Athens in what would be a historic move. For two hundred years, the museum has owned and displayed two-hundred sculptures that once adorned the Parthenon – a temple built 2,500 years ago at the height of ancient Greek power, dedicated to the goddess Athena.

Today, if you get to visit the Parthenon in the Greek capital Athens, it’s very much a shadow of its former self. But then this iconic monument has experienced a rocky and turbulent history. Originally, it was a huge temple and strong-walled treasury for the ancient Greeks in the fifty century BC.

Later, when Athens became part of the Roman Empire, the Parthenon transformed into a church in the sixth century AD when the Romans converted to Christianity. Incredibly, this involved adding a bell tower to the temple.

In the 15th century, Greece was invaded by the Ottoman Empire – a Turkic and Muslim kingdom that came to dominate eastern Europe, north Africa and the Middle East for centuries. The Parthenon was changed into a mosque and the bell tower extended to become a minaret. Yet despite all this, the Parthenon was surprisingly intact as it marked two thousand years of existence.

But then disaster struck. In 1687, the Ottomans were at war with Venice – which was then an independent country. In the film below, I detail what happened to the Parthenon. Bit of a spoiler but basically, it was left in the condition you see today. If you think the Parthenon collapsed thousands of years ago, think again. It was wrecked just 340 years ago.

Semi-demolished and unloved, the Parthenon was looted for building material. A fate shared by many ancient buildings at a time before tourism and the notion of conservation. But in the 18th century, wealthy, intellectual Britons took a growing interest in the classical past. They made a beeline for Rome and Athens undertaking what became known as the “Grand Tour”.

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Meanwhile in the Ottoman capital Constantinople, the British ambassador was a member of the British nobility called Thomas Bruce – though you know him as Lord Elgin. Initially he sent a team to make drawings and casts of the Parthenon friezes but this somehow developed into the removal of half the Parthenon sculptures. What came to be known – notoriously – as the Elgin Marbles were then shipped to London.

I’ve looked back at newspaper commentary from Elgin’s lifetime and his lordship had plenty of critics. Although you get the impression that some of his critics were jealous they hadn’t got there first. However, Elgin’s claim that he had the approval of the Ottoman authorities to remove the marbles from the Parthenon and ship them off was greeted with scepticism – even in parliament.

One report in The Times on June 8, 1816, covers a debate in parliament where Elgin’s version of events was derided. His argument that he was rescuing the marbles from the Parthenon was rubbished. It was said that he had been given permission to “view” and “contemplate” the sculptures – not to pull them down and ship them off.

What should have happened ideally was that the Ottomans – referred to as Turks in this parliamentary debate – could have been taught to value these monuments as opposed to having them whipped away by Elgin. Parliament viewed Elgin’s conduct – especially in his role as an ambassador – as thoroughly inappropriate. Here is an excerpt from that 1816 newspaper article.

Elgin claimed to have spent something like 74,000 pounds to secure the marbles from the Parthenon. A select committee of the House of Commons looked into the whole affair in 1816 and decided to offer Elgin under half that amount to buy the marbles for the nation.

The committee sympathised with the argument that Elgin had “saved” the marbles, declaring they would have been destroyed over time by the “apathy of the Turks” and “barbarous violence” by passing travellers carrying off fragments. But the sympathy didn’t extend to given Elgin what he was demanding financially. There’s a constant inference – to be blunt – that Elgin was a bit of a chancer and a man in public office who was lining his pockets.

Should the dead be on display in museums?

Must admit I’ve seen my fair share of dead bodies in museums. Like all children, when I was first taken to see the ancient Egyptian mummies in the British museum back in the 1970s – I was eyes out on stalks! Take for example this chap below they used to call the “orange man”. He dates from about 3,400BC – also in the British Museum – and from what we call the pre-dynastic period. Now, as a result of seeing him, that term was embedded in my mind aged seven or eight.

His excellent state of preservation is because in the pre-dynastic period – a thousand years before the pyramids you know and love – bodies were buried in the sand. And that was a great preserver! You can still make out his ginger hair.

However – informative though this may be – some think orange man should not be there for us to gawp at. And this issue is becoming ever more pressing.

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Goodbye shrunken heads!

About five years ago, I visited the Horniman Museum in south London and was unable to find a particular exhibit that exerted a ghoulish hold on me when I’d first come to the museum as a child in the 1970s. Back then, a large glass case displayed several shrunken heads.

When I asked a curator where they were on this recent outing, she grimaced and said: “We don’t really put that kind of thing out anymore.” The shrunken heads are still shown in graphic detail on the museum website but are labelled as being “in storage”.

And the Horniman isn’t the only museum vexing over the ethics of corpses in cases. There’s a very heated debate going on behind closed doors about the morals as well as the potential negative PR that is attaching to having heads and bodies for the public to ogle at.

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Tribal groups demand their ancestors back – no more dead bodies in museums

Indigenous peoples, tribes and nations are increasingly animated about their ancestors being exhibits. Concerns have been raised from tribal nations in the United States to aboriginal peoples in Australia – and lots of places in between. And you have allegations of racism or colonialism attaching to the display of Ancient Egyptian mummies or Inca sacrificial victims.

Those hostile parties may not be – for example – Egyptian in the case of the mummies but ‘feel’ or believe they have an affinity with these remains. No matter how tenuous one may feel their claimed link is – it’s now becoming difficult to ignore.

Guidance on displaying dead bodies in museums

The United Kingdom government has issued guidance in the past to museums on how to treat human remains. And since 1996, the UK has been committed to repatriating aboriginal remains to Australia and New Zealand. In one example in 2017, over a thousands remains including 13 skulls were sent back.

The British Museum lists its human remains online and it makes for fascinating reading:

From Australia: Human skull (adult, male?), covered with pigment; with grass plug in nasal aperture
From Borneo: Decorated human skull made of bone (human), wood, cane, shell (cowrie), gum.
From Chile: mummified child’s foot with sandal
From China: a skeletal human hand with a bangle on the wrist
From Ecuador: shrunken head with feathers and beetle wings
From Egypt: Fragments of bone and two teeth from infant sacrifice.

And so it goes on…

Egypt’s recent public display of new mummies

In 2020, the Egyptian authorities invited the media to snap at 59 ancient coffins just discovered. One of them was opened up in a flourish to reveal the mummified body within. In a sign of changing attitudes, many people registered their disgust at this theatricality.

Catholic shrines and death

For many Catholic shrines, removing bodies from display would effectively end their pulling power for both tourists and pilgrims. For example, in Palermo, Sicily you have the Capuchin Catacombs where hundreds of bodies, many in their Sunday best, are hanging from the walls. They date from the 17th to the early 20th century.

The Capuchin Catacombs includes the body of a girl, Rosalia Lombardo, who died in 1920. And yes, she is exceedingly well preserved. I have seen her myself (in 2019). Visitors claim that she blinks at them. I got no blink in case you’re wondering.

But I have to admit this display possibly crosses a line. Why? I suppose the relatively short amount of time that has elapsed since her death; her very young age which is rather creepy in of itself and the fact that the 1920s were not Ancient Egypt.

We were not routinely mummifying bodies at that time. So why not put this poor girl where she should be? In the ground.

Dead crusaders on display

In 1976, I was taken to see the desiccated remains of several bodies in the crypt of Saint Michan’s church in Dublin, preserved by the very dry air underground. In those days, you were invited by the guide to shake hands with one of the bodies. And being a child who liked to show off a bit, I grasped the bony fingers of an 800-year-old crusader.

However, times really have changed. Because two years ago, that wasn’t enough for some vandals who broke through a steel door, stole the aforementioned crusader’s head and “desecrated” the body of a nun. I don’t even want to ask!

It does beg the question though whether these kinds of displays, which have an almost Victorian fairground quality, encourage boorish and despicable behaviour and if their time has been and gone.

Or are we getting too sensitive?

But maybe we’re all being way too sensitive. In 2010, a survey by English Heritage found that only 9% of the public opposed bodies being displayed in museums. I will bet that percentage has risen however. But for museums, it’s not just the wider public that are a concern – but those activist groups representing tribes and nations that feel enough is enough.

What do you think? I’d love to know.

Finding primitive humans – Strange Evidence

I’m on season five of Strange Evidence airing on a TV channel near you. Most likely you’ll catch it on the Science Channel so look out for it!

The team and I look at an unexplained incident in south east Asia where some bikers chanced upon what looked like a three foot human. Was he a long lost cousin of ours startled by the sound of those roaring bikes in the jungle?

Other episodes of Strange Evidence season five to whet your appetite:

Curse of the Zombie Graveyard
Hunt for the Nuclear Monster
Church of the Death Eaters
When Bigfoot Attacks
America’s Atomic Aliens
Escobar’s Ghost
Nuclear Demon Mummy

I really enjoyed participating in the Strange Evidence episode on the ghost of notorious drug dealer Pablo Escobar. His luxury residence was being dynamited after his death when somebody filming the demolition picked up a white, translucent figure wafting through the rooms. So – had Pablo come back to haunt his pad one last time?

As the opening titles to Strange Evidence explain – the series is based on our surveillance culture. We are being watched all the time by fixed cameras in multiple locations. Most of us also have smartphones and record every aspect of our lives.

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So it’s hardly surprising that every so often something is caught on camera that defies explanation. On Strange Evidence, we look at the footage and then the options getting expert opinion on what might be going on. And there’s some pretty crazy stuff as you’ll see that gets captured on phones and cameras.

Toppling statues and renaming streets – nothing new

Across the world – but particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom – we see the toppling of statues and a move towards the renaming of streets. Much of this a reaction to the association of people and names with historic racism.

Opinions are divided and I suspect will become even more so. But here’s the thing. There’s nothing very new in any of this. People have been tearing down statues for centuries. Names of streets and buildings have changed according to political fashion. What we’re witnessing is not something unprecedented.

Toppling statues and temples in Ancient Egypt

When I first toured the temples of ancient Egypt in 2009, I was really struck by the amount of early Christian defacing and destruction of the Pharaohs’ legacy. To make the point that the Christian God was better than Horus or Osiris, Christian zealots got to work with their chisels and hammers.

Byzantine crosses were etched deeply into the walls of temples that were already two thousand years old by that time. And an entire temple to the god Serapis was torn down by Christian monks. Goodness knows how many statues came toppling down.

Romans – big into toppling statues

The Romans were forever tearing down the statues and melting down the coinage of previous emperors no longer in favour. And then they became Christian and evolved into the Byzantine empire – with Constantinople as its capital – there were the endless iconoclastic disputes.

This is when some Christians believed all icons, statues and visual depictions of God were pagan graven images and had to be destroyed. A point of view revived centuries later in the Protestant Reformation. That saw English churches stripped of their ornate rood screens and effigies of the Virgin Mary and saints.

Walls with colourful images were similarly whitewashed. All of which left us with the simple village church that most people think is “traditional” in England. In fact, it was the product of an act of massive nationwide vandalism orchestrated by King Henry VIII’s minister Thomas Cromwell.

Renaming entire cities – a long history!

Renaming streets and even whole cities has been a recurrent feature of history. New York was called New Amsterdam under Dutch rule. Toronto was originally called York before its incorporation in 1834. In Australia, Melbourne was called Bearbrass once upon a time.

In India, Kokata was formerly Calcutta and before that the very English, Fort William. Africa has renamed many cities to re-Africanise them. So in Zimbabwe, the city of Salisbury was renamed Harare in 1982. While Kenya removed the English colonial name Broderick Falls from one of its towns and chose instead Webuye.

It’s unsettling for many people to see statues toppling to the ground. But rest assured, that they were almost made to be toppled. Historically speaking, it’s amazing how long some of our statues have lasted.

As somebody who grew up in Britain, I was certainly shocked on a visit to Richmond, Virginia to see how the Confederacy is still very much in your face. Of course the historian inside me is interested. But I don’t need a boulevard full of slave owners memorialised in stone and bronze to remind me of the Civil War.

Are you missing Game of Thrones?

If you are then I am posting here my iPhone footage of the Game of Thrones live concert experience back in 2018. I saw this amazing spectacular with composer Ramin Djawadi conducting the orchestra and choir – plus actors and dancers, etc.

So – relive the glories of Game of Thrones by clicking on my video to watch!

Ancient bog body murder mystery

Viewer discretion: The following blog post does include images of two thousand year old bog bodies – those of a delicate disposition may wish to skip this post – as we look at an ancient bog body murder.

All over northern Europe, mysterious two thousand year old bodies have been dug up from peat bogs. These so-called bog bodies are remarkably well preserved in many cases.

Disturbingly, they seem to have been victims of human sacrifice. Evidence of being hit and strangled can be detected.

Ancient bog body – victim of murder or ritual sacrifice?

I was in the National Museum of Ireland last month and saw several examples of these bog bodies. The damp conditions of peat bogs means that their skin and internal organs are in remarkably good condition.

And most of these bog bodies date from what we call the Iron Age and are found in those countries to the north of the emerging Roman Empire – such as Britain, Ireland and Denmark.

Clonycavan Man – Iron bog body in savage murder

Let’s start with one bog body called Clonycavan Man found in February 2003 at a peat extraction works in County Meath, Ireland. He was damaged from the waist down because of the action of a peat harvesting machine but his upper body and head were in a good state.

So much so that archaeologists were able to reconstruct what he looked like when he was killed between 392 and 201 BC. Note the moustache, beard and the “man bun” hairstyle, made popular again by hipsters in our time.

He was killed by a series of blows to the head and may also have been disembowelled. Here is what this bog body looks like today in a glass case at the Museum of Ireland.

Clonycavan Man – note his man bun hairstyle – image by Tony McMahon

Baronstown West Man was found during peat cutting in 1953. He was at a depth of around 1.9 metres. A layer of interwoven birch or hazel sticks had been placed on top of him and there was something resembling a woollen shroud fixed to his body. It’s believed that at the time of death he was between 25 and 30 years of age.

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He’s not one of the better preserved specimens and dates from around 200 to 400 AD.

The skull of Baronstown West Man detached from the body but with hair well preserved – National Museum of Ireland – image by Tony McMahon

In the British Museum today you can see the remains of Lindow Man who was discovered in Cheshire in 1984 with very clear evidence of having been strangled and struck in a sacrificial rite.

Bog body confused for modern murder

A year before, a female bog body was unearthed that at first was believed by police to be the corpse of a woman murdered in the 1960s.

For two decades the police had been trying to find the remains of a woman called Malika de Fernandez. Her estranged husband had long been suspected of having done her in. When the body of Lindow Woman emerged, police thought they had solved the crime and they confronted her husband who immediately confessed to the murder.

Unfortunately for him, it was then revealed in subsequent forensic tests that the body was not twenty years old – but two thousand years old! He tried to retract his confession but was found guilty of murder and received a life sentence in prison. You could say that this bog body had the last laugh!

Beardy History

History and Mystery from TV historian Tony McMahon

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