Comment by mherdeg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mherdeg | Hacker News Reader

Two of my favorite artifacts in the British Museum are the Young letter and the Champollion publication, where Young in 1818 explains his theory that hieroglyphic pictograms sometimes represent sounds, and Champollion in 1822 gives a detailed phonetic breakdown of each hieroglyph (photos in https://blog.britishmuseum.org/everything-you-ever-wanted-to... and also in https://cosmolearning.org/images/a-letter-from-thomas-young-...).

They're on display in a case, easy to miss, near the replica Rosetta stone that you can touch ( https://g.co/arts/Jc9fSG2q4FfZzCPT9 )

I love these artifacts because they show a real live example of the way people did science a few centuries ago.

The pace is thought-provoking -- it took 4+ years between one person's letter and another's results? we didn't even declare the translation "done" until 1824? -- and I've always wondered what was going on there.

This is an interesting book review, helps fill in some gaps for me!

I am a little surprised to see the author use the phrase "Elgin Marbles". This was used ubiquitously a few years back but at some point in the past 5-10 years the preferred phrase seems to have become "The Parthenon Sculptures" (see e.g. https://www.britishmuseum.org/about-us/british-museum-story/...). I'm not quite sure when this happened and when I looked it up recently I couldn't find good news coverage explaining the conscious choice to change the name.

Came across this podcast some weeks back where they tell the story of how various artefacts ended in British museums. Hopefully, they can expand this out to other museums round the world.

https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/stuff-the-brit...

I was about to make the same recommendation. Marc Fenell is great, he's been a beloved figure in Australian radio for some time. He has a very compassionate view on the world.

Elgin Marbles is such a famous, well-known, and old name that any modern renaming of it must succeed with culture before it sticks.

It'd probably stick pretty easily if they put the things back in the Parthenon, they're only know as the Elgin Marbles as the Earl of Elgin looted them.

And if Elgin had not 'looted' them it is also possible they would be scattered around Athens as landfill and building material.

As a simple example, the Rosetta Stone that is the focus of this article was yoinked by locals for building material and used as fill in the wall of a fort some distance away from its original location. It was only saved because when some French soldiers were rebuilding the foundations of the fort wall someone recognized the significance of the inscription on the stone.

It is a sad fact that were it not for this 'looting' we would have far fewer artifacts to examine and use to inform our understanding of the past because the locals would have continued to treat these sites and objects as open-air quarries.

This ignores the millions of artifacts in boxes that will almost certainly never see the light if day, and the untold number that the British destroyed while looting what they wanted/they colonized the area.

The artifacts are catalogued and stored, which is more than can be said when it comes to a lot of older cultures. I would have a lot more sympathy for the arguments that the rapacious British were nothing but a detriment to archaeology and understanding of the past when you could point me to the preservation efforts that existed before the British arrived. There were far worse outcomes in terms of historical preservation than to be colonized by the British (e.g. pity those locations colonized by the Spanish, who actually were as bad as you suggest the British colonizers to be.)

what is being used is preserved simply by its use. an idol in a hindu temple is sacred and washed and annointed. only when its removed from its context it needs to be preserved. the brits and other colonizers simply take what they want because guns rule.

>I would have a lot more sympathy for the arguments that the rapacious British were nothing but a detriment to archaeology and understanding of the past when you could point me to the preservation efforts that existed before the British arrived.

And I would accept this excuse if they now returned the items they looted to the countries that do have significant preservation efforts in place. Like Greece.

Sure the British could have been worse, but they were still pretty bad.

And so it goes on: Egyptian temples defaced by early Christians, Palmyra temples destroyed by Isis...

this is not always true.

many idols of gods in less famous and out of the way hindu temples in india were stolen and sold off to collectors in the west. these idols were there in the community forever and cared for, when they were stolen, the community simply accepted the loss because they didnt have the resources to chase it all up.

see this: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/05/07/the-idol-thief

from the article

Collectors often suggest that they are the custodians and preservers of antiquities that might otherwise suffer from neglect or mistreatment, but Ghiya described the callous mechanics that are sometimes required to smuggle a statue from one country to another. He recalled a squat stone Vahara—a depiction of Vishnu in his incarnation as a boar—that stood in the village of Attru, in southeast Rajasthan. The boar weighed more than a thousand pounds and its legs and torso were covered in a magnificent phalanx of tiny, intricately carved figurines. Ghiya’s thieves stole the statue in the late nineteen-eighties, lacing a chain through the boar’s open mouth and yanking it from its stone pedestal, shearing off its lower jaw and breaking its legs in the process. The piece was eventually sold to a private collector in Zurich.

I found this interesting article from someone who argues that Elgin took the sculptures as a public-relations move designed to refocus public attention away from his wounded nose and strained marriage: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/TWC2404381...

The sculptures were created approx 440 BCE, and Elgin wasn't involved with them till around 1800 CE, so it's not obvious that "Elgin Marbles" is an old name in this context. It's also not obvious that Elgin removed them legitimately (the alleged source of his authority is either lost or never existed in the first place).

European museums are full of looted treasures taken from other countries. Perhaps it seemed a little inappropriate to continue to name them after the looter rather than the place they came from?

See it another way: the people who "owned" the things did nothing with them for centuries, when Champolion decoded the language millenia later, while the Egyptians were busy praying their new gods destroying their own ancient culture.

You dont need to have been shat from an egyptian vagina to deeply understand, respect and eventually contribute to its culture a thousand times better.

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