A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [70]
When my soldiers in great numbers peacefully entered Babylon … I did not allow anyone to terrorize the people … I kept in view the needs of the people and all their sanctuaries to promote their well-being … I freed all slaves.
The most famous beneficiaries of Cyrus’s shrewd political judgement after the conquest of Babylon were the Jews. Taken prisoner a generation before by Nebuchadnezzar, they were now allowed to return home to Jerusalem and to rebuild their temple. It was an act of generosity that they never forgot. In the Hebrew scriptures Cyrus is hailed as a divinely inspired benefactor and hero. In 1917, when the British government declared that it would establish in Palestine a national home to which Jews could once again return, images of Cyrus were displayed alongside photographs of George V throughout eastern Europe. Not many political gambits are still paying dividends 2,500 years later.
One of the perplexing things about the Persian Empire, though, is that the Persians themselves wrote very little about how they managed it. Most of our information comes from Greek sources. As the Greeks were for long the enemies of the Persians, it’s rather as if we knew the history of the British Empire only through documents written by the French. But modern archaeology has provided new sources of information, and in the past fifty years the Iranians themselves have rediscovered and reappropriated their great imperial past. Any visitor to Iran today feels it at once. Michael Axworthy explains:
There is a huge and unavoidable pride in the past in Iran … It’s a culture that is at ease with complexity, that has faced the complexity of different races, different religions, different languages, and has found ways to encompass them and to relate them to each other and to organize them. Not in a loose way or in a relativistic way, necessarily, but in a principled way that keeps things together. And Iranians are very keen for people to understand that they have this long, long, long history and this ancient heritage.
Axworthy’s phrase ‘empires of the mind’ sums up pretty well the theme that I’m trying to tackle in these chapters, but perhaps ‘states of mind’ would be more accurate – because I’m discussing objects that show us how different people imagine and devise an effective state. For Persia I’ve been looking at a toy chariot; for Athens I’ll be looking at a temple. As you’d imagine, because they for so long were at war, Greeks and Persians had very different ideas of what a state should be. But precisely because they were at war, each tended to define the ideal state in opposition to the other. In 480 BC Persian troops destroyed the temples on the Athenian Acropolis. In its place the Athenians built the Parthenon that we know today.
There are few objects that over the last 200 years have been so widely seen as embodying a set of ideas as the Parthenon. And I’ll be discussing one of the sculptures that decorated it next.
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Parthenon Sculpture: Centaur and Lapith
Marble relief, from the Parthenon, Athens, Greece
AROUND 440 BC
Around 1800, Lord Elgin, the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, removed some of the sculptures from the ruins of the Parthenon in Athens, and a few years later put them on public show in London. For most western Europeans it was the first time they had ever been able to look closely at Greek sculpture, and they were overwhelmed and inspired by the vitality and the beauty of these works. But in the twenty-first century, the Elgin Marbles, as they have long been known, are famous less as art objects than as the focus of political controversy. For most people today, the Parthenon sculptures in the British Museum provoke only one question: should they be in London or in Athens? The Greek government insists they should be in Athens;