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Well I mean I have spent 5 minutes thinking about this but 1. Did the initial removal happen with approval of then government? 2. How legitimate was that approval considering all circumstances? 3. If there was no approval, what arguments exist for keeping them? 4. Can alternative arrangements be made (sale, sharing, arbitration)
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Oct 27, 2014 17:20
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WoodrowSkillson posted:Using what criteria? Are objects inexorably linked to the geographical area or to a political entity? Who gets Roman artifacts from Egypt taken by Napoleon? By the telekinetic property of commuting, the Grand Coalition of 1816. I'm pretty sure the UK is the only member that even exists anymore so Britain gets it lol.
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Oct 27, 2014 17:22
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euphronius posted:Well I mean I have spent 5 minutes thinking about this but Oh ooh what about like suppressed artifacts like if you stole degenerate art by Berlin artists from the Nazis or looted a Ming vase from the Red Guards' "olds to be smashed" pile. Now what if your did that 40 years before the fact? Aaaand what about native tomb robbers? Chances are if you leave something where it is it will end up smashed or in the black market. Very good in fact. You might say "give it to a native museum" but who's going to endow that museum smarty pants? And let's say you gave something to the Baghdad Museum or whatever 20 years ago. Oops, gone now. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 17:32 on Oct 27, 2014 |
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Oct 27, 2014 17:26
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Arglebargle III posted:Also they would have been in Greece for 200 years of war. When was the last time an invading power stored ammunition in a British landmark? While this is a nice point, the Parthenon got exploded in the late 17th century. Lord Elgin didn't take anything from the site for another 120 years, so the Elgin marbles actually survived the war just fine. He also took a bunch of stuff from the Acropolis, not just from the Parthenon. quote:Well I mean I have spent 5 minutes thinking about this but 1. Greece did not exist in 1812, The Ottoman Empire ruled Athens. 2. No, but the Ottomans no longer exist so no one cares what they think/thought. 3. Greece is not exactly the most stable nation in Europe. Additionally, the British Museum would be sad. 4. Probably! See The tomb of King Tutankhamen exhibit.
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Oct 27, 2014 17:37
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Jaramin posted:
I think the Ottomans were the legit rulers of Greece at the time though. If they said it was ok, and I understand there is debate on that point, I think that should be determinative. Although in the Marbles, I guess there is legit debate on whether Elgin had authority to do what he did.
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Oct 27, 2014 17:40
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Arglebargle III posted:And let's say you gave something to the Baghdad Museum or whatever 20 years ago. Oops, gone now. Haha, how ironic considering who caused the destruction of Iraq in that time period. Your museums are not safe because we are bombing and invading you.
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Oct 27, 2014 17:41
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Elgin Marbles should be given back to France because Guillaume le Conquérant's descendants still rule UK.
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Oct 27, 2014 17:49
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Arglebargle III posted:Also they would have been in Greece for 200 years of war. When was the last time an invading power stored ammunition in a British landmark? I'll have you know that the Guernsey and Jersey are cultural treasures 
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Oct 27, 2014 17:54
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Arglebargle III posted:Also they would have been in Greece for 200 years of war. When was the last time an invading power stored ammunition in a British landmark? If you consider Catholics to be an invading force, 409 years ago. 
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Oct 27, 2014 18:00
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I do think the "display case" part of museums is important too. Where I live (Alberta, Canada), museums have pretty narrow collections. Tools and flags from 1915, reconstruction of a Cree campsite, and fossils, fossils, fossils. It's all fine, all very geographically and culturally appropriate, and really not compelling. I was an adult (visiting New York, and soon thereafter Greece) before I saw the kind of stuff that got me interested in history. Rather than repatriating, I'd rather see these undisplayed pieces get spread further afield (barring some specific research goal, specific context, or whatever). Lots of people could benefit from a basic "history of the world" display in a local museum, and I think you could assemble a lot of those displays out of stuff that's going to be "one more example" in either its current location or wherever "home" is. quote:Haha, how ironic considering who caused the destruction of Iraq in that time period. To be fair, it's not like Saddam had been a great steward in the time leading up to that. Dude was nuts. That said, buried in this particular part of his crazy, I'll admit I think there's a tiny nugget of awesome - I mean, conservation is cool but REBUILDING BABYLON. jmzero fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Oct 27, 2014 |
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Oct 27, 2014 18:01
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What really needs to come back is making plaster casts of famous old buildings, the Carnegie Museum's Hall of Architecture is great because it has all these casts from all over Europe of old buildings like the Parthenon, Notre Dame, etc. Too bad that went out of style in the 1920s
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Oct 27, 2014 18:24
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jmzero posted:To be fair, it's not like Saddam had been a great steward in the time leading up to that. Dude was nuts. That said, buried in this particular part of his crazy, I'll admit I think there's a tiny nugget of awesome - I mean, conservation is cool but REBUILDING BABYLON. A lot of the bricks have Saddam's name carved onto them. Admittedly after this the occupying forces used it as a helicopter base for a while. I don't want to get too preachy about this stuff because archaeologically speaking most stuff gets appropriated and re-used by later societies and cultures which is, in itself, good data. It's also a pretty standard thing that people do - they re-use old stuff. I'm personally appalled by the recent treatment of Babylon but my successors in a century's time will just file it down as one of many periods of Babylon's history, dig up some shell casings and move on. The best solution for museums is ultimately touring exhibits and better worldwide co-operation between museums. A lot of stuff that UK museums have repatriated came with caveats that the collections should be toured, and likewise plenty of the stuff they've held on to has been toured to help justify holding onto it. This squares the circle of 'common human inheritance' as best as you can really do. Other museums, particularly university ones which have massive back catalogues of material, actively look to repatriate to the large number of 'native' museums that do indeed exist: the USA is actually a good example for this, as one of the consequences of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act is that many federally recognised tribes now maintain their own museums and archaeological units. My university was a Scottish one that does a lot of Native American work and purely from a practical perspective its willingness to repatriate and co-operate is part of the reason they're still able to excavate: they have a better reputation than a lot of other outfits. Then again my postgrad university did a lot of work in Syria and you can imagine how that's gone  Making my thesis a lot more depressing than I expected I can tell you.
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Oct 27, 2014 18:30
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Deteriorata posted:My understanding of it was that Romans respected tradition so certain religions that predated the founding of the Republic were given a certain protected status, Judaism being one of them. As long as Christians identified as a Jewish sect, they were also protected, but once they split they were on their own. Supposedly the Jews formally disowned the Christians at a conference at Jamnia ca. 95 AD. Some evidence shows the Jewish community was willing to pray and sacrifice to God in the name of the Emperor which was fine with them. Which also seems like how many of the monotheistic religions operated during the later Empire.
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Oct 27, 2014 19:24
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Grand Fromage posted:One thing is museums aren't just display cases. The majority of what they do is research work that takes place in those back rooms nobody gets to see. Yeah, i was thinking that perhaps i had less of an issue with displaying stuff that was found locally, but then i remembered that i have more in common with a random Greek person living today than the Germanic people who strolled around the place where i now live 1500 years ago and well, that whole argument kinda flew out the window. Still, walking around the Forum in Rome is not something that could really be replicated by placing bits and pieces of it in a museum, so i guess sometimes it works to experience things in their original place? Then again, the Pergamon Altar was still impressive despite it being in a museum. The Ara Pacis too.
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Oct 27, 2014 20:11
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My thing with the Elgin marbles is not that they belong to the Greek government or anything, but that there IS a facility in Athens and I would like to see them in context because that'd be awesome.
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Oct 27, 2014 20:46
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the JJ posted:My thing with the Elgin marbles is not that they belong to the Greek government or anything, but that there IS a facility in Athens and I would like to see them in context because that'd be awesome. In what context, though? One of the neat things about all the various ruins, whether you're talking about Athens or Rome or Chichen Iza or wherever, is that the poo poo's basically where it stood/fell/crumbled however many years ago. I totally grant you that walking around the Roman Colosseum or even more recent buildings like the British Parliament or the Vatican and thinking to yourself "neat things happened here" is really loving awesome. One of my most memorable personal little moments happened at a ruined chapel and tower in rural Ireland - it was just a really neat thing that really drove home a human continuity of settlement in the area over a long loving time, and it was really cool just to stand there and marvel at how much was (to someone raised Catholic) familiar and how much was odd as gently caress. The marbles, though? They would be on another shelf in another museum. Sure that shelf would be in Athens but at the end of the day it's still a shelf in a museum and not in the context that it was created, used, and ultimately destroyed. I don't know, it just seems like the difference between seeing a bunch of FDR's poo poo at a display in the Smithsonian vs. if they moved the same stuff to a display in the Oval Office, if that makes any sense. edit: plus, and I'm admittedly getting really meta-historical with this - the whole loving British Museum is just such a goddamned monument to capital-E Empire that it's mind blowing. The building, the collection, loving all of it is so Victorian it hurts. No matter how much they throw around some window dressing to acknowledge modern sensitivities the building and institution is as much a relic of a specific time and place in English history as any of the objects that it represents. It's the crystallization of a moment in history when it was possible for one specific country to gather items as diverse as the Marbles, the Rosetta Stone, etc. and present them for public viewing. poo poo, just the very idea that they SHOULD be available for public viewing and not sitting in some lord's private collection like you see with the renaissance antiquarians. Being a part of the Museum is as much a part of the history of the Marbles at this point as their stint hanging off of the side of a building in Athens. edit x2: the first time I went to the British Museum I must have wandered around for at least an hour just totally brain-hosed by the notion of it being artifacts within an artifact. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 00:34 on Oct 28, 2014 |
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Oct 28, 2014 00:25
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I guess I consider the context of the location of the museum as important as the context of viewing it then and there. If I could go from walking in Athens straight to the museum and then straight from there back out to Athens that says more to me about those marbles than (I feel, all this is perfectly subjective of course) those marbles add to the British Museum. Given equal curation and storage facilities, and maybe a practical amount of time touring, yeah, I'd like to see those in Athens. Mostly as you say, when you go to an old ruined church (Visby, Gotland had that moment for me) you sort of get that connection to when an artifact was used or at least used last. The joy/curse of the museum is that it freezes (friezes  ) that moment. I get what you mean about an artifacts appropriation telling as much history as the artifact itself. I like to play a game where I hunt for the Ottoman arsenal mark* on sets of arms and armor. It's always fun when you find it on Saffavid/Persian stuff. I think there's also a very ornate European set that was given to the sultan as a gift or something with that etched on it. *Sorry for poo poo tier through the glass cell phone photo.
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Oct 28, 2014 01:18
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WoodrowSkillson posted:Using what criteria? Are objects inexorably linked to the geographical area or to a political entity? Who gets Roman artifacts from Egypt taken by Napoleon? I think the Romans would have wanted their stuff to be parceled out according to the rule of the strongest.
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Oct 28, 2014 02:16
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WoodrowSkillson posted:Using what criteria? Are objects inexorably linked to the geographical area or to a political entity? Who gets Roman artifacts from Egypt taken by Napoleon? All artifacts should be buried in pharaonic tombs. 
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Oct 28, 2014 02:48
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Please tell me more about the distribution of goods in the ancient world. How did the governments of Rome and ancient China track how much was out there in terms of raw goods? Were there government attempts at redistribution or was everything rather LF? If the government kept some kind of tally of available goods, how did they avoid the issue of local governments lying about how much they had (like in Mao's China and Stalin's USSR?)
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Oct 28, 2014 14:51
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China had a strong professional core of state-vetted "managers". Emperors have noticed that if you let locals manage reporting or appoint your people for life-long or hereditary posts you end up with corrupt officials, so good emperors rotated those bureaucrats every couple years.
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Oct 28, 2014 15:42
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In Rome, the 'normal' trend was privatised tax collection where tax collectors would bid for the right to collect taxes, promising to bring a certain amount to the government with the expectation that they could keep any excess for themselves. Diocletian implemented a radically new system to pay for a more professional Imperial bureaucracy (and to combat inflation) that involved reducing all goods (including physial labour) to a generic unit of manpower and charging taxes based upon population in this unit of tax. So while they might not have an exact Domesday Book type account of goods in a place tax collectors would be able to judge what was owed, either in money, goods or labour, for an area. Of course he also decreed that whatever your father did for a living was what his lineage would do forevermore to prevent any unpredictable shifts in relative numbers of workers/services (barring I guess more long term trends due to certain segments of society having disproportionate numbers of children which probably wasn't considered a big worry). Also to go back to the conversation regarding why Christianity was an issue in Rome more than any other group: Epicureanism wasn't /r/atheism modern readers of it might take it for. Epicureans wanted to be seen to be paying homage to the gods as much as they might have flown close to the sun in the sense of questioning their physical reality. Sacrificing to the gods wasn't a meaningless act they could indulge in, it was (depending on your interpretation) a symbolic act that encouraged man to more closely pursue the moral virtues me projected onto the gods or an act of worship of an existing non-physical pantheon, whose reality didn't mean they could directly effect the physical world. They were light and day with proper monotheism and even more so with a monotheistic cult that was successfully spreading and had no great historical backing. Someone earlier mentioned complaints about Jewish prosletysing and that First/Second Temple Judaism was significantly different from what we are familiar with today. That's certainly worth bearing in mind but it seems clear that even if there wasn't some intrinsic difference of Christian vs. Jewish evangelism there was clearly a difference in effectiveness that made Christianity a greater threat than Judaism. The cult of Sol Invictus wasn't persecuted (thought that did make a greater effort to subsume rather than eliminate polytheistic cults) in the same way. I'd say part of that was because it wasn't as effective and so wasn't seen as a threat on the same level. Its high water mark was Elogobalus and he was eliminated (although there was more than just the monotheism for this. Crazy don't do good in charge), Christianity's threat though was far more diffuse and couldn't be dealt with by simply removing one person.
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Oct 28, 2014 16:27
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lol Good emperors appointed good Grand Censors, who appointed good Assistant Censors who monitored and investigated provincial officials. Grand Censor was a step above the "cabinet-level" positions in modern parlance and his little department existed purely to monitor the rest of the government and make staffing decisions. I've also seen the title translated as Imperial Secretary but that's lame and nondescript and my dictionary says censor.
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Oct 28, 2014 16:28
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I always kind of saw Ancient Rome as being similar to modern day China except everyone was a member of a Triad.
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Oct 28, 2014 16:38
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Wasn't Sol Invictus unrelated to Elagabalus except for both being sun gods? I know there's translatio grecia, though.
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Oct 28, 2014 16:40
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I'm an idiot so it may just be a naming coincidence but he definitely did do a whole renaming Jupiter as Sol Invictus and pretty much replacing the pantheon. There may have been two theologically similar groups with the same name that were totally distinct though (the monotheism ideas and sun centralism had certainly arisen earlier in Egypt for example with Aten).
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Oct 28, 2014 16:50
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Athens building a multi-million dollar exhibit for something they don't physically have reminds me of that time that Khosrau I sacked Antioch, took exact measurements and moved all the inhabitants into his newly built replica Weh Antiok Khusrau, or Better than Antioch, Khosrau Built This. Late antiquity  I've got an odd question, but does anyone know of any good books on the Roman Empire that are simple enough for a kid to read? My cousin hates reading and as a result reads way below her grade level since she never reads but she likes it when I tell her stories of Rome during car rides. My thinking is that if she gets a book of a subject she's actually interested vs something her school is forcing her to read, she'll actually read it and then get better at reading and save her a lot of headaches down the road.
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Oct 28, 2014 21:33
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Don Gato posted:Athens building a multi-million dollar exhibit for something they don't physically have reminds me of that time that Khosrau I sacked Antioch, took exact measurements and moved all the inhabitants into his newly built replica Weh Antiok Khusrau, or Better than Antioch, Khosrau Built This. Late antiquity Seutonius
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Oct 28, 2014 21:35
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Don Gato posted:I've got an odd question, but does anyone know of any good books on the Roman Empire that are simple enough for a kid to read? My cousin hates reading and as a result reads way below her grade level since she never reads but she likes it when I tell her stories of Rome during car rides. My thinking is that if she gets a book of a subject she's actually interested vs something her school is forcing her to read, she'll actually read it and then get better at reading and save her a lot of headaches down the road. It definitely seems like it'd be a good avenue for connecting her with reading. Real history might be tricky, though there might be a few young-adult adaptations of Julius Ceasar or the story of Spartacus. I might try Greco-Roman mythologies, particularly ones with lots of pictures. Personally I've always been a big fan of The God Beneath the Sea (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_Beneath_the_Sea). If you drop by your local library they should have a whole section of kids books based on mythology and folklore. I've been a reader since a young age, but I definitely remember what a joy it was to discover that my local library had shelf after shelf of short folk stories for kids. Chat with the librarian and see if they have some graphic novels that are set in antiquity - read them with her, and if your cousin likes them then take her back to the library with you the next time and show her how easy and not-scary it is to pick out some great and accessible books.
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Oct 28, 2014 21:53
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http://www.amazon.com/Cartoon-History-Universe-Volumes-1-7/dp/0385265204 It might be a graphic history but this is what sparked my love of history in middle school and I rapidly started picking up books to explore the details.
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Oct 28, 2014 22:03
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Grand Fromage posted:One thing is museums aren't just display cases. The majority of what they do is research work that takes place in those back rooms nobody gets to see. I honestly think this argument makes a lot of sense. There has been so much willful destruction of statues, artifacts, literature, etc.. etc over the the centuries, and even in the last decades. Plenty of countries do not have the resources or will to protect their cultural heritage. Museums allow you to have a deeper connection to an artifact, because you get to see it with your own eyes. Like the OP said, not everyone will have the means to travel to different countries. But almost everyone can afford a trip to a museum once in a while, especially when there is a specific exposition you may be interested in.
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Oct 28, 2014 23:02
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Don Gato posted:I've got an odd question, but does anyone know of any good books on the Roman Empire that are simple enough for a kid to read? My cousin hates reading and as a result reads way below her grade level since she never reads but she likes it when I tell her stories of Rome during car rides. My thinking is that if she gets a book of a subject she's actually interested vs something her school is forcing her to read, she'll actually read it and then get better at reading and save her a lot of headaches down the road. I've seen this work wonders before.
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Oct 29, 2014 01:00
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Don Gato posted:Athens building a multi-million dollar exhibit for something they don't physically have reminds me of that time that Khosrau I sacked Antioch, took exact measurements and moved all the inhabitants into his newly built replica Weh Antiok Khusrau, or Better than Antioch, Khosrau Built This. Late antiquity How young is young? D'aulaires' Book of Greek Mythology was my gateway drug to a lifetime of reading and enjoying the classics. I don't remember what grade I was in when I first read it, but it was elementary school sometime. Rome Antics is about the modern city, but has plenty of reference to the architecture of the ancient buildings. I'd say it's around fourth, maybe fifth grade level. Pompei... Buried Alive! is pretty much what it says. It's maybe second/third grade level.
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Oct 29, 2014 02:48
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Don Gato posted:I've got an odd question, but does anyone know of any good books on the Roman Empire that are simple enough for a kid to read? My cousin hates reading and as a result reads way below her grade level since she never reads but she likes it when I tell her stories of Rome during car rides. My thinking is that if she gets a book of a subject she's actually interested vs something her school is forcing her to read, she'll actually read it and then get better at reading and save her a lot of headaches down the road.
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Oct 29, 2014 04:48
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Thanks for the suggestions people, looks like someone is not getting the toys she wanted for Christmas this year 'cause Santa Gato has the gift of ROMA INVICTUS  .Tao Jones posted:How young is young? She's 11 right now, but my guess is that she reads at a 4th grade level at best since I have literally never seen her with anything more complicated than the manual to The Sims. cheerfullydrab posted:The best children's book about Roman history would be a folded piece of paper that says The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon on the outside and when you open it up it just says "gently caress Christianity PS Eastern Empire never happened" You have no idea how tempted I am to just do this.
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Oct 29, 2014 06:26
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You could also try Terry Deary's Horrible Histories series, but they're written for a specifically UK audience and have a lot of UK-based in-jokes so they might not translate well? That being said he's done versions for pretty much every major Western historical culture so if your kid likes one there's a good twenty more of them.
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Oct 29, 2014 16:01
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What's the general line of thought about the Aeneid? I've heard the whole praise of Rome tons before but is there any value in the idea that he was secretly writing about his problems with Augustus and the state? I honestly find it very hard to believe he was doing anything other than praising Augustus and Rome.
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Oct 29, 2014 19:44
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Obliterati posted:You could also try Terry Deary's Horrible Histories series, but they're written for a specifically UK audience and have a lot of UK-based in-jokes so they might not translate well? That being said he's done versions for pretty much every major Western historical culture so if your kid likes one there's a good twenty more of them. I'm from the US and liked those as a kid, I'd says it's fine.
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Oct 29, 2014 22:22
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Obliterati posted:You could also try Terry Deary's Horrible Histories series, but they're written for a specifically UK audience and have a lot of UK-based in-jokes so they might not translate well? That being said he's done versions for pretty much every major Western historical culture so if your kid likes one there's a good twenty more of them. I read these in elementary school and found them plenty funny. They have pictures too. I say go for it.
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Oct 29, 2014 22:23
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TropicalCoke posted:What's the general line of thought about the Aeneid? Well for one it's a loving boring book.
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