by Rick Gekoski
It was a beautiful establishment, as well as a useful one. Standing next to the Mouseion (or Museum) in grounds like that of a modern university campus, scholars were given well-paid jobs for life under the (sometimes wilful) patronage of the King. There were botanical and zoological gardens, winding paths, colonnades and courtyards, in homage to the Aristotelian idea of the peripatetic pursuit of knowledge. An outdoor amphitheatre (the exedra) served as an equivalent of a college auditorium or theatre, a space set aside for lectures and performances.
Conditions were generally peaceful and beautiful, and the project astonishingly ambitious, energetic and well funded. But there were, of course, critics. There are always critics where academic life goes on, and intellectual foment occurs. Timon of Phlius derided the bibliophiles ‘scribbling endlessly and waging a constant war of words with each other’ in exactly the same terms as modern critics of academic squabbling.
Commentators are agreed that the hundreds of thousands of scrolls which were systematically collected – and created – at Alexandria perished in a fire. But there is no consensus as to who or what started the fire, or, indeed, when it occurred. Most accounts blame Julius Caesar, during his siege of the city in 48 BC. According to Plutarch: ‘when the enemy endeavoured to cut off his communication by sea, he was forced to divert that danger by setting fire to his own ships, which, after burning the docks, thence spread on and destroyed the great library.’ Other commentators have ascribed the loss of the library to different fires, at different times, and some (probably wrongly) believe it survived until its destruction by the forces of Caliph Omar some time around AD 640.
But whenever it happened, the one certainty is that the scrolls from the Alexandria library perished irretrievably, unlike the carbonised examples from the Villa of the Papyri. When – at last – a Polish–Egyptian archaeological team could make a reasonable claim to have discovered the site and ruins of the great library at Alexandria, in 2004, there was scant chance that anything of the written records would have survived. Ashes, long dispersed, only ashes. Nothing as substantial as carbon.
By a wonderful historical irony, the breakthrough that allowed the reading of the carbonised manuscripts from Piso’s villa was a result of technology pioneered by that colossal waste of money, the NASA space programme. When viewed under multi-spectral imaging infra-red light at between 900 and 950 nanometres, the carbonised papyri of Herculaneum burst into clear legibility. When the results were revealed to that most jaded of audiences, a colloquium of Oxford dons, in 1999, they positively shrieked with delight, as the dead texts returned from their two thousand years of silence.
Over the last six years it has become clear what an important source the papyri are, and will be. The bulk of them, predictably, are works by Philodemus. The Villa of the Papyri was an ideal place for an Epicurean to hang out, eat well, enjoy life, do a little philosophising. The basis of their thinking, roughly, consisted of praise and justification not for the having, but for the eating, of one’s cake.
This may strike you as trivial, or unworthy, but cake has had rather a hard time in Christian theology. We have been so keen on the life of the spirit or the mind, as opposed to the pressing imperatives of the body, so anxious to prepare for entry into a better world (in which cake doesn’t figure), that it is heartening to hear an argument for the pleasures of this life, now. As a philosophical position it is appealing but limited, though it is surprising what a fuss can be made of it. Among the new manuscripts were dozens of works by Philodemus, which may put us in danger of knowing more about him than we care to.
Described by Dr Andrew Gow as ‘pedestrian in style, earnest in tone, uninspired though not uninteresting in content’, the major interest in these texts consist of those fragments in which Philodemus argues with Aristotle about the nature of poetry. But this rather staid philosopher – why weren’t Epicureans more fun? – can be offset by quoting a poetic fragment found at Pompeii, almost certainly by the self-same philosopher, in praise of his mistress:
She is always ready for
Anything, and often lets
Me have it free. I’ll put up
With Philainion,
O golden Cypris, until
A better one is invented.
Now that’s more like it.
Other finds were remarkable: more than half of the works of Epicurus, and an unknown treatise of Philodemus’ master, Zeno of Sidon (the first text of his ever to come to light), were also uncovered and brought back to life. As work went on in the 1990s, it became clear that the Villa of the Papyri was larger – much larger – than had been imagined. It is now estimated that at least two further unexcavated levels, perhaps some 30,000 square feet, are still underground. And there is a growing consensus that more papyri – perhaps the main bulk of them – were in a further library or libraries which have not yet been excavated. According to this theory, the 1,800 scrolls found at the higher level, and scattered about the floors, were probably being transported in crates, in the hope of saving them from the encroaching disaster. They may have been taken from the even more extensive treasury below.
But as keenly as one might wish these possible treasures investigated, there are sober voices arguing for calm. As Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, the Director of the Herculaneum Research Project, has observed, it is also a priority to preserve the excavated remains of the Villa, which are ‘undergoing a conservation crisis – it’s crumbling away. It’s hard to believe if you didn’t see it with your own eyes … to keep this delicate “reborn” patient alive is a massive challenge … Because of this crisis, I’m almost indifferent on the subject of the papyri.’
So there we have it. One, perhaps two further libraries, preserved but unexcavated. The classicists slavering, demanding texts; the politicians and archaeologists wondering what the hurry is. Those manuscripts certainly aren’t going anywhere, and until the time is right, and the conditions above ground improved, surely the lost treasures of the Villa of the Papyri can wait?
It isn’t a question of money, which has been made available by an American charity. The cost of recovering the buried manuscripts is estimated at something like $25 million, which (need I remind you?) is less than a professional sports team can pay for a good player. Add some more money, and you could do the necessary ground work as well. It’s only a matter of priorities.
I suspect that the relatively leisurely pace of the excavations at Herculaneum is a direct response to how important the further buried material is conceived to be. Of the 1,800 recovered manuscripts, few could be described as finds of the highest importance, and God knows no one is clamouring for more texts by Philodemus.
Imagine, though, if the remains of the scrolls at Alexandria had been similarly carbonised. Ptolemy Soter had set a goal of collecting 500,000 scrolls, and it was impossible to land a ship in the harbour at Alexandria without surrendering any on-board scrolls to be copied for the burgeoning library collection. And if there were significant gaps in the collection, the library would attempt – in a sort of precursor of the inter-library loan – to borrow significant material from elsewhere.
Ptolemy III applied to Athens, according to Galen’s account, for permission to borrow and to copy significant scrolls by the three great Greek tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. The Aeschylus papyri, for instance, being the only known transcription of the complete works, were of incalculable value, even then. Unwilling to part with such treasure without a significant ransom, the Athenians demanded a surety of some 15 talents (over 900 pounds of precious metals, worth many millions of dollars today) to guarantee the safe return of the scrolls. They were never returned (though copies of them were sent back to the Athenians), being reckoned to be worth more, even, than their ransom value, for it was presumably an enormous coup for the Alexandrians to hold original material of this kind.
Papyrus is a notably frangible material, and it is likely that, if fire hadn’t destroyed the manuscripts at Alexandria, something else would have. W
hat we have received as the literature and philosophy of the ancient world is but a tiny fragment of what once existed, and many of the greatest works from that period are irretrievably lost. As Stuart Kelly concludes, in his The Book of Lost Books, ‘the entire history of literature is also the history of the loss of literature.’
It would be wrong-headed to claim much benefit from this loss. There are only seven surviving plays of Aeschylus (of a total of eighty), seven from Sophocles (from a probable thirty-three, though others have estimated as many as 123), eighteen (of ninety odd) from Euripides and hardly anything from other contemporary playwrights. What survives is esteemed so very highly, surely, not merely because of its inherent qualities, but because it is so little garnered from so much: a reminder of how delicate our cultural and artistic heritage is, and how much we have to do to preserve it.
13
So Many Vases: The Cradle of Civilisation
It is called the ‘cradle of civilisation’. Six thousand years ago, the fertile lands of Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (often posited as the location of the Garden of Eden) became the home of a succession of cultures – the Sumerians, Assyrians and Babylonians – which produced what is sometimes referred to as the ‘first book’ – the epic of Gilgamesh – and an immense variety of beautiful objects, many of which may be seen in museums round the world. It is a fabled territory, astonishing in the diversity of its stories, arts and sciences, the place where mathematics, astronomy and medicine were first practised.
Nowadays it is called Iraq, and it is a sad and sorry place. Yet no matter how horrific its recent history, even under the reviled Saddam Hussein, Iraqis are rightly proud of what they regard as their heritage, and their National Museum in Baghdad has long been recognised as one of the finest collections of Mesopotamian antiquities in the world.
Whether it still is, is uncertain. Closed after the Iraq War began in 2003, due to the widespread damage and looting that took place, its façade pockmarked with bullet holes and breached by a tank shell, the museum was unprotected because the one American tank that was in fact stationed in front of it apparently lacked clearance to retaliate or to intervene. The situation was so dangerous that the building was closed to all its staff – the only people with free entry were the looters – just as its Director, Donny George, had warned: ‘if anything happens, then the Museum will be targeted.’ He was soon to seek asylum abroad after receiving death threats.
His museum was under siege. It has been (conservatively) estimated that some 15,000 antiquities went missing, many of which have since appeared on the market in the West. Of these, thousands were so small and apparently untraceable that they simply disappeared. These consisted, as the Guardian was later to report, of:
the little scraps of history, less beautiful but more precious to the experts: the poems and spells, star charts and family histories, shopping lists and tax bills inscribed on scruffy little lozenges of mudbrick or cough drop-sized cylinder seals, which seeped out through Iraq’s borders into the world’s antiquities markets.
While a heartening number of major pieces were eventually restored to the museum, being more recognisable and harder to sell, most of the remarkably resonant bits and pieces never had a chance. The curator Irving Finkel of the British Museum, an expert on Babylonian artefacts, said that he was ‘not aware of any major recovery of these pieces … I’m not holding my breath for one.’
But there were some pleasing surprises, as thousands of works fell back into place, some of which had been removed for safe keeping, others of which had clearly been taken by locals who had second thoughts. An amnesty for looters speeded the process, though Sarah Collins, a curator at the British Museum who worked with the Iraqi Museum for several months after war ended in 2003, reported that many people returning artefacts still expected to be paid. They weren’t. Paradoxically, though, she noted that such unrestrained looting was a relatively new phenomenon: it ‘wasn’t a problem under Saddam. He beheaded a couple of looters and that put a stop to it.’ This wasn’t strictly true – it would be amusing to regard it as a form of wish fulfilment – because Mesopotamian antiquities had been leaking out of Iraq for centuries, even under the strict policies of Saddam.
Collateral damage? Bush and Rumsfeld’s soldiers lay waste to one of the treasures of ancient Mesopotamia.
Among the most significant of the returned objects was the Warka Mask, a beautiful and mysterious image which is some 5,500 years old, and which after its theft had been buried (no one knew by whom) in a field outside Baghdad. It was thought to have been sold several times locally after it was stolen, but eventually the thieves realised that it was probably too well known to be saleable in the wider antiquities market. The equally important Warka Vase was similarly returned (in pieces), securely wrapped up in a blanket in the boot of a car. But for every such gain – or regain – there were commensurate losses, a great many of them untraceable because the museum contained so many uncatalogued pieces.
It is a tragedy, and a disgrace. It could well have been avoided. Both the Bush and Blair administrations had been warned, well in advance of the first strikes, that the museum needed to be protected. Neither government took the relatively simple necessary steps – a tank which was actually authorised to act, and a few tough-looking armed guards might have done the trick – and for days after the first incursion into the museum on 11 April looters were free to come and go as they liked, to take away anything that was even remotely transportable. In the darkness – Baghdad’s electricity was down – 120 internal doors to the offices and galleries were crowbarred from their hinges, and even the furniture was removed, while much of the collection and records were carted off.
That’s appalling, surely? Not to Donald Rumsfeld, the American Secretary of Defense, who was uninterested in these trivial collateral losses, merely remarking that ‘democracy is messy’. When informed how messy, and how great was the loss, not just of human life but of art and antiquities, the indefatigably loathsome Rumsfeld reportedly informed colleagues that the war in Iraq was an absolutely necessary response to the attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11: ‘There just aren’t enough targets in Afghanistan. We need to bomb something else to prove we’re, you know, big and strong and not going to be pushed around.’ So what if museum and cultural artefacts were destroyed? Looking at pictures of the looting, Rumsfeld joked that ‘it’s the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you’ve seen it twenty times and you think “My goodness, were there that many vases?” Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?’
The modern history of the looting of Iraq begins with the Gulf War in 1991, and the imposition of United Nations trade sanctions, which had devastating effects, not all of which were intended. In the absence of international trade, with tourism virtually non-existent, ordinary Iraqis found themselves suffering more than their leaders, desperate to make a living. And any country with as rich an archaeological past as Iraq is going to be a hotbed of casual collection – call it looting if you wish to be severe – of the available detritus. ‘The problem is, if you dig pretty much anywhere, you’ll find something ancient and interesting’, said an Interpol Agent from the Stolen Works of Art Department. The further problem was that 99 per cent of the objects uncovered in this haphazard manner were either damaged in the process or discarded as insufficiently saleable.
Shards of this and that, bits of cuneiform tablets and cylinder seals, broken pieces of sculpture, bricks, tiles, pottery – yes, including vases – were gathered up from holes as deep as swimming pools, and the best of them were sold through the covert antique trade and in local bazaars. At the ancient site of Umma, over 200 looters a day were regularly to be found, with their own electrical generators to aid night excavation, and an infrastructure of vendors to supply food, drink and cigarettes. But this was not merely a motley array of poor people literally scraping a living: terrorist groups, reportedly including Al Qaeda, Sunni ins
urgents and later the Shiite militias, apparently used the limitless supply of antiquities as a source of funds, while unscrupulous international antiquities dealers made rapacious use of the steady supply lines into and from Baghdad.
By the time the Iraq War started, there were already established conduits out of the country for saleable items. The West was soon flooded with material, and the only law impeding the looting of Iraq was that of supply and demand: all of a sudden there was such a glut of ancient Mesopotamian material that eventually prices fell, auction houses lost interest, collectors filled their boots and walked away.
It was, observed several journalists, ‘the death of history’. The redoubtable Robert Fisk, suitably appalled and condemnatory, had recourse to the common (and lazy) metaphor about ‘priceless’ treasures. The truth was just the opposite: all this looting was occasioned by the fact that these objects have prices. There is an international market in them, though the on-site looters got only a tiny fraction of the prices in New York or London. As a report by local archaeologists (cited by Fisk) observed, looters ‘have been trained in how to rob the world of its past and they have been making significant profit from it. They know the value of each object and it is difficult to see why they would stop looting.’ Several of the looters, questioned as to why they wished to destroy historical sites of such ‘priceless’ value, simply replied that the nation had given them nothing, and cursed its history.
It was wicked, illegal and unseemly, and prompted furious discussion. In the West, the debate about Iraq’s lost treasures centred on Chicago. In 2006 its Oriental Institute entitled an exhibition on the subject ‘Catastrophe! The Looting and Destruction of Iraq’s Past!’ The institute took an unambiguous stance in opposition to the importation of stolen artefacts, and their purchase by international museums which ‘actively encourage’ donations from benefactors (who may receive a tax break in doing so) without questioning the provenance of the objects themselves. In contrast, the Institute announced proudly, they were vigilant about what they purchased or received as donations, lest they inadvertently encourage further theft and looting.