Sphinx

I’ve spent the last couple of days in Aarhus, enjoying some fabulous (though eye-wateringly expensive) beer and giving a lecture to students on ‘Who Owns Classics?’ The answer to that is of course some combination of ‘everyone’ and ‘no one’; the following forty-three minutes was taken up with the exploration of why nevertheless some people feel they have a special claim on classical culture and others may feel excluded or even unworthy (heroically avoiding any mention of one B. Johnson as the epitome of an entitled, proprietorial attitude towards antiquity – until someone else raised it in the questions afterwards).

Right at the beginning, I did touch on the issue of people owning specific fragments of classical antiquity – pots, coins, papyri etc – and the issues that this can raise, feeling quite frustrated that I’d encountered the perfect example just ten minutes earlier, too late to properly incorporate it into the lecture (since I was desperately trying to stick to time for a change – and managed it!). Vinnie Nørskov has produced a display for the university’s Museum of Ancient Art and Archaeology of black market antiquities: not just the objects themselves (originally confiscated by the Italian police), but the modern packaging in which they were found, and the reconstruction of the history of their discovery and sale (insofar as this is possible).

Perhaps this isn’t a completely original idea – I don’t go to enough museums or follow the literature closely enough to know – but it’s enormously effective in emphasising the importance of context: the actual context in which the objects were found, their implication in networks of clandestine excavation and sale, the fetishisation that makes this profitable – and the original context that has been lost. It would be interesting to do something similar with the recent controversy about papyri – always with the question of how supposedly disinterested scholarship, focused on what we can learn from these remnants of the past rather than (mostly) obsessed with possessing them, nevertheless contributes to the enterprise, wittingly or not. Anyway, I just wanted to share a few photos…