{"id":1489,"date":"2011-03-07T14:40:03","date_gmt":"2011-03-07T13:40:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?p=1489"},"modified":"2011-10-10T13:02:33","modified_gmt":"2011-10-10T12:02:33","slug":"afghan-show-at-the-british-museum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?p=1489","title":{"rendered":"Afghan show at the British Museum"},"content":{"rendered":"

Museums do make life easy.\u00a0 Four years ago I tried to reach the fabled site of A\u00ef Khanum on the shores of the River Oxus in north-eastern Afghanistan<\/strong>, the Greek city built by the followers of Alexander the Great.\u00a0 Despite having Ahmad Shah Massoud\u2019s ex-bodyguard with us, we were beaten back just a few miles from the site by the turbulent security situation close to the Tajik border. Even if we had got there, we might not have found much: recent photographs show that the lower half of the city has been comprehensively looted in recent years.<\/p>\n

.
\n\"\".<\/p>\n

Now the finest pieces excavated from that site are on display rather more accessibly just up the Holborn road. \u00a0The British Museum\u2019s superb new exhibition of the treasures of Afghanistan illustrates the extraordinary cross-cultural influences that one might expect from this crossroads of Asia:\u00a0\u00a0 an Aphrodite with an Indian bindi mark on her forehead;\u00a0 another Greek goddess riding a Persian chariot across a silver lunar landscape;\u00a0 Corinthian capitals beside Indian ivories.<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

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But the exhibition also raises some interesting wider questions.\u00a0 It has only been made possible by some brave Afghan curators who hid the artefacts while the National Museum of Kabul was looted by mujahedeen in the civil wars.\u00a0 For the past five years, the treasures of \u2018Alexandria on Oxus\u2019 have been homeless, on a permanent roving international exhibition that keeps them in perpetual exile but also has the effect that they are seen by far many more people than if they had remained at home.<\/p>\n

This comes just as after years of legal wrangling, Yale has finally agreed to return to Peru the artefacts Hiram Bingham took from Machu Picchu exactly a century ago – which is being hailed as a victory for the idea of \u2018art repatriation\u2019 by those who would like to see the Elgin marbles and other \u2018stolen treasure\u2019 similarly returned, and believe that artefacts are always best displayed in the country of origin.<\/p>\n

But the Afghan exhibition – and recent events in Egypt where the Cairo Museum was looted during the riots, let alone the damage done to antiquities in Iraq – are a good reminder that the best policy is surely not to keep all our Faberg\u00e9 eggs in the same basket:\u00a0 that a wide dispersal of a country’s treasures is all to the good, both because they can be seen by the world (and the British Museum, most visited tourist site in London, is in every sense a world Museum) and for safety.<\/p>\n

As one of the Egyptian curators commented after the losses from Cairo, who knows where may be at risk?\u00a0 Many Renaissance masterpieces were lost in the flames of Berlin during the Second World War.\u00a0 A painting can be stolen in Oslo or Paris.\u00a0 The Director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, is all too aware of this:\u00a0 it was \u2018 on his watch\u2019, as he puts it, \u00a0that a Leonardo cartoon was shot at when he ran the National Gallery.\u00a0 Indeed, it is his view that \u2018the mere act of putting any artefact on public display is to put it at potential risk.\u2019<\/p>\n

For too long we have allowed the suggestion that museums are somehow an extension of colonial appropriation and forgotten the incomparable good they do to serve scholars and preserve vulnerable works of art.\u00a0 The more a nation\u2019s culture is shared around the world, the better.\u00a0 Until we accept that a policy of repatriation of all artefacts is simplistic and indeed overly nationalistic, we risk losing not just the occasional artwork, but the central core of a country’s culture.<\/p>\n

A version of the above appeared in the Times<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Museums do make life easy.\u00a0 Four years ago I tried to reach the fabled site of A\u00ef Khanum on the shores of the River Oxus in north-eastern Afghanistan, the Greek city built by the followers of Alexander the Great.\u00a0 Despite having Ahmad Shah Massoud\u2019s ex-bodyguard with us, we were beaten back just a few miles […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,3],"tags":[38],"class_list":["post-1489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-afghanistan","category-travel","tag-afghanistan-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1489"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1489"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1489\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1491,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1489\/revisions\/1491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}