I chose this particular sculpture because it gives us the bitter insight that, in the short term, reason does not always prevail. The defence of the rationally ordered state will cost some of its citizens their lives. And yet – and this is why this sculpture is such a supreme achievement – the dying human body is shown with such pathos, the fierce struggle depicted with such balance, that the victory goes not to the strutting half-beast, but to the Athenian artist who can turn conflict into beauty. In the long run, this sculpture seems to say, intellect and reason alone can create things that endure. The victory is not just political: it is artistic and intellectual.
This is the Athenian perspective; but how was the Parthenon perceived by people who came from one of the other Greek cities? You might expect that because the Parthenon is called a temple, it would have been a place of prayer and sacrifice; in fact, it became a treasury – a war-chest to finance the defence of Greece against the Persians. In time, though, this fighting fund became protection money, demanded by Athens from the other Greek cities when Athens placed itself at the head of them. It forced them into becoming satellites of the growing Athenian maritime empire. And a great chunk of that money was siphoned off by the Athenians to fund the Acropolis building programme. Mary Beard gives us the non-Athenian view of the Parthenon:
The Parthenon must have been the kind of building that you spat at and kicked if you could. You knew, if you were one of Athens’ subjects, that this was a statement of your own subordination. There was a clear and vociferous faction in Athens when the Parthenon was built, which said the money shouldn’t be spent that way. That this was, in the words of one, dressing Athens up like a ‘harlot’. That’s very odd for us to empathize with now, because the Parthenon sculptures seem so austerely beautiful. It’s hard to think of them in terms of prostitution. It’s very discomforting to think of our touchstone of good Classical taste as having appeared vulgar. But it clearly did, to some.
One of the many extraordinary things about the Parthenon is that it’s meant so many different things to different people at different times. Conceived as the Temple of the Virgin Athena, it was for centuries the Christian Cathedral of the Virgin Mary, and it later became a mosque. By the end of the eighteenth century, it was a neglected ruin in a diminished Athens ruled by the Turks. But in the 1820s and 1830s, the Greeks won independence, and they were given a German king by their European allies. The new state needed to define what kind of society it wanted to be. Olga Palagia takes up the story:
Greece was resurrected in about 1830. We had a German king who came to Greece from Bavaria, and the Germans decided they were going to resurrect the Athens of Pericles. This initiated, I think, the perennial identification of the new Greek nation with the Parthenon. So, we have been restoring it from 1834, and I’m sure that this will never end! It will be a constant attempt to restore and redefine the Parthenon as a symbol. So the seed the Germans sowed in 1834 has really become very big and important.
So this great building had, by the 1830s, acquired yet another meaning. Not as the self-image of one ancient city, but as the emblem of a new modern country. And it was an emblem familiar to all educated Europeans, through the sculptures in the British Museum, which had been on display since 1817.
One of the most striking things about recent European history is how countries wanting to define and strengthen their present identity look to particular moments in the past. In the last hundred years or so, more and more people in Ireland, Scotland and Wales have wanted to see themselves as the heirs of a people that flourished in northern Europe at the same time as the Athenians were building the Parthenon. And it’s those other Europeans of 2,500 years ago – Europeans dismissed by the Greeks as barbarians – that I’m going to focus on next.
28
Basse-Yutz Flagons
Bronze flagons, found in Moselle, north-eastern France
AROUND 450 BC
There are no written records from the people of northern Europe of 2,500 years ago; they are mentioned briefly and disparagingly by the Greeks, but we don’t have their side of the story, and the only way we can really get to know these people – our close neighbours and, for some of us, our ancestors – is through the things they’ve left behind. Here, luckily, we’ve got a good deal to go on, including this spectacular pair of wine jugs, which are key objects in helping us understand the society of early northern Europe.
They were found in Lorraine, in north-eastern France, near the town of Basse-Yutz, and they’re always referred to as the Basse-Yutz Flagons. They’re bronze, elegant and elaborate. They are about the size of a large bottle of wine, a magnum, and they hold about the same amount of liquid, but they’re in the shape of large jugs, with handle, lid and very pointed spout. They’ve got a broad shoulder, which tapers to a narrow, rather unstable base. But what strikes you at once about these two flagons is the extraordinary decoration at the top, where animals and birds cluster together, and it must have been what everybody would have looked at as they were feasting with these amazing objects.
These richly decorated flagons were stumbled on in 1927 by workmen digging in Basse-Yutz. Nothing quite like them had ever been found in western Europe before, and the strangeness of their style and decoration led many experts to assume that they must be fakes. But the curators at the British Museum were convinced that they were genuinely ancient; that they represented a new, unknown chapter in European history. So the flagons were acquired for the then colossal sum of £5,000. Betting the bank on this kind of acquisition is a huge gamble on curatorial knowledge, but in this case it paid off, and research has since confirmed they were indeed made about 2,500 years ago, that is, at roughly the time that the Parthenon was being built in Greece, the Persian Empire was at its zenith and Confucius was teaching in China. The Basse-Yutz Flagons are now celebrated as two of the most important and earliest pieces of Celtic art anywhere.
In northern Europe at that time, around 450 BC, there were no towns or cities, no states or empires, no writing or coinage. From the Russian Steppes to the Atlantic, there were merely small communities of farmer-warriors, connected across thousands of miles by trade, by exchange and frequently by war. It was a precarious existence for most, but life for those at the top of the pile, in the Iron Age Rhineland, could be very glamorous indeed. The smartest graves in the region where the flagons were found have wagons and chariots, hangings of silk, exotic hats, shoes and clothes – and, of course, all the equipment you needed for throwing parties. Mere death was not going to keep these northern Europeans from the good life, so the graves have lots of drinking vessels – bowls and cauldrons, drinking horns and flagons.
Many of these objects must have been traded over the Alps; there are Greek pots and vessels, and lots of flagons made in the Etruscan cities of northern Italy. A jaundiced, and misleading, way of describing the owners of the Basse-Yutz Flagons would be as the Iron Age ‘nouveaux riches’ – northerners looking to use Mediterranean design and taste to show off their own sophistication and aspirations. That view, first formulated by the Greek writers and rehearsed later by the Romans, has created the stereotype of an uncouth northern Europe in perpetual admiration of a cultured south. It is a stereotype that goes back more than 2,500 years, and it still shapes the way Mediterranean Europe thinks about the north – and even the way the north thinks about itself. Over the centuries this myth has, I think, done a great deal of damage.
The bronze, the design and the craftsmanship of the Basse-Yutz Flagons make a nonsense of the Greek myth of these northern Europeans as crude barbarians, and they tell us a great deal about the scope of their world. These people lived in small communities, but they were masters of complex metal technologies, and the materials from which our flagons are made make it clear that they had plenty of international contacts: the source materials for making this bronze are copper, from the Alps to the south, and tin, probably from Cornwall in the far west. Patterns on the base of the flagons are familiar from Brittany to the Balkans
, while there are shapes inspired by palm fronds found in the art of ancient Egypt. And then the very idea of a flagon itself is foreign – it’s a popular shape created by people living in northern Italy. A feast with these flagons at the centre would leave the visitors to these new rulers in no doubt at all that the people they were visiting were international, cosmopolitan, rich and intensely sophisticated.
Three hounds eye a small duck on the flagon’s spout
On each flagon, there are at least 120 separate pieces of coral – probably from the Mediterranean. They’ve now faded to white, but originally they would have been bright red, giving a striking contrast to the lustrous bronze. You can imagine the flagons standing by blazing firelight, with the flames reflected in the bronze and deepening the red of the coral, while the wine, beer or mead they contained was ceremonially poured for important guests.
The animals on the flagons also tell us a great deal about the people who made them. The curved handle is a lean, elongated dog, stretching forward, fangs bared and holding in its mouth a chain that connects to the stopper. Dogs would have been an essential part of hunting life, and two more, smaller, dogs lie on either side of the lid. All three dogs have their attention focused on a tiny bronze duck that sits right at the end of the spout. It’s a lovely touch, both moving and funny. When somebody poured from the flagon, it would look as though the duck was swimming on a stream of wine, mead or beer.
What would be clear to anyone whose cup was being filled from these flagons was that these luxury goods were local. No piece of Italian design ever looked like this. The extravagant shape, the unique combination of decoration, the animal imagery, all said loud and clear that these were made north of the Alps – examples of a new wave of creativity among craftsmen and designers, a rare confidence in taking elements from different foreign and local sources to forge a new visual language. It was to become one of the great languages of European art.
So, who were these drinkers who could make such wonderful things? We don’t know what they called themselves, because they didn’t write. The only name we have to go on is one given to them by uncomprehending foreigners, the Greeks. They called them ‘Keltoi’; it is the first written reference to the peoples we know as Celts. And this is part of the reason that we call the new art style seen on these flagons Celtic art – although it is very doubtful that the people who made or used this art called themselves Celts, or indeed called the language they spoke Celtic. Sir Barry Cunliffe, former Professor of European Archaeology at the University of Oxford, explains:
The relationship between Celtic art and people we call Celts is very complex. In most of the areas where Celtic art developed and was used, people spoke the Celtic language. That doesn’t mean to say that they thought of themselves as Celts or that we can give them that sort of ethnic identity, but they probably spoke the Celtic language, therefore they could communicate with each other. In the area in which Celtic art developed in the fifth century, roughly eastern France and southern Germany, people had probably been speaking the Celtic language for a long time.
The people we call Celts today live far to the west of the Rhine Valley where our flagons were made – in Brittany, Wales, Ireland and Scotland – but throughout these Celtic lands we find artistic traditions that echo the decoration on the Basse-Yutz Flagons. What has since the nineteenth century been called Celtic art connects our two ornate flagons with the Celtic crosses, the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels, made in Ireland and Britain more than a thousand years later. In metalwork and stone-carving, inlays and manuscript illumination, it’s possible to trace the legacy of a language of decoration, shared across much of western and central Europe, including the British Isles.
But this is no easy lineage to interpret. The problem of understanding the ancient Celts is that we are looking at a fifth-century Greek stereotype, compounded by a much later nineteenth-century British and Irish one. The Greeks constructed an image of the ‘Keltoi’ as a barbaric, violent people. That ancient typecasting was replaced a couple of hundred years ago by an equally fabricated image of a brooding, mystical Celtic identity, which was far removed from the greedy practicalities of the Anglo-Saxon industrial world – the romanticized ‘Celtic Twilight’ of Ossian and Yeats. In the twentieth century it did a great deal to shape the idea of Ireland. Since then, especially in Scotland and Wales, being Celtic has taken on further constructed connotations of national identity.
The idea of a Celtic identity, although strongly felt and articulated today by many, turns out on investigation to be disturbingly elusive, unfixed and changing. The challenge when looking at objects like the Basse-Yutz Flagons is how to get past those distorting mists of nationalist myth-making and let the objects speak as clearly as possible about their own place and their own distant world.
29
Olmec Stone Mask
Stone mask, found in south-east Mexico
900–400 BC
The people who made this mask were the Olmec, who ruled in what is now Mexico for around a thousand years, from 1400 to 400 BC. They’ve been called the mother culture – the cultura madre – of Central America. The mask is made in polished green stone, and unlike a sculpted head it’s hollowed out at the back. The white, snake-like streaks in the dark stone give it its name, ‘serpentine’. When you look closely, you can see the face has been pierced, and has been ritually scarred.
The previous objects in this world history have taken me along the royal roads of the Persian Empire, into mythical battles in Athens and to some heavy drinking in northern Europe. Each object has shown how the people who made it defined themselves and the world around them about 2,500 years ago. In Europe and Asia it is striking that self-definition was usually in distinction to others – partly by imitation but usually in opposition. Now I’m looking at an object from the Americas, from the lowland rainforests of south-east Mexico, and this Olmec face mask shows me a culture looking only at itself. It’s an aspect of the great continuity of Mexican culture, a culture as old as that of Egypt.
Most of us in Britain don’t learn a lot about Central American civilizations at school; we may be taught about the Parthenon, and even perhaps Confucius, but we don’t on the whole learn a lot about the great civilizations occurring at the same time in Central America. Yet the Olmecs were a highly sophisticated people, who built the first cities in Central America, mapped the heavens, developed the first writing and probably evolved the first calendar there. They even invented one of the world’s earliest ball games – which the Spanish would encounter about 3,000 years later. It was played using rubber balls – rubber being readily available from the local tropical gum trees – and although we don’t know what the Olmecs called themselves, it’s documented that the Aztecs called them the people of Olmen, meaning ‘the rubber country’.
It is relatively recently that the Olmec civilization was uncovered from the jungles of Mexico; only after the First World War were their sites, their architecture and above all their sculptures found and investigated. Discovering when the Olmecs lived took even longer. From the 1950s new techniques of radiocarbon dating allowed archaeologists to suggest dates for the buildings and therefore for the people that lived in them. The results showed that this great civilization flourished about 3,000 years ago. The discovery of this ancient and long-lived culture has had a profound effect on modern Mexican notions of identity. I asked the celebrated Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes what it means to him:
It means that I have a continuity of culture that is quite astonishing. Many Latin Americans who are merely migrants from European countries, or do not have a strong Indian culture behind them, don’t appreciate the extraordinary strength of the culture of Mexico, which begins a very long time ago in the twelfth or thirteenth century before Christ.
We consider ourselves heirs to all these cultures. They are a part of our make-up, a part of our race. We are basically a Mestizo country, Indian and European. The Indian culture has infiltrated into our literature, i
nto our painting, into our habits, into our folklore. It is everywhere. It is a part of our heritage, as much as the Spanish culture, which for us is not only Iberian but also Jewish and Moorish. So Mexico is a compound of many civilizations, and part of them are the great Indian civilizations of the past.
So who were the Olmecs? Whose face does this mask show, and how was it worn? Olmec masks have been intriguing historians for a long time. Scrutinizing their features, many scholars believed that they were looking at Africans, Chinese or even Mediterranean people, who had come to colonize the New World. I suppose if you look at our mask, wanting to see an African or a Chinese face, you can just about persuade yourself that you can; but the features are, in fact, entirely characteristic of Central American people. This face is one that can still be seen in the descendants of the Olmecs living in Mexico today. But the desire to discover European or Asian elements in ancient American societies, to find evidence of ancient links and influences, is deep and it is revealing. The similarities between the cultures of the old and the new worlds are so strong – both produced pyramids and mummification, temples and priestly rituals, social structures and buildings that function in similar ways – that scholars for a long time found it hard to believe that these American cultures could have evolved in isolation. But they did.
A History of the World in 100 Objects Page 17