{"id":6788,"date":"2012-09-24T17:11:33","date_gmt":"2012-09-24T23:11:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.selectstone.com\/?p=6788"},"modified":"2013-11-20T13:42:48","modified_gmt":"2013-11-20T20:42:48","slug":"lord-elgin-and-the-parthenon-marbles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.selectstone.com\/journal\/history\/2012\/lord-elgin-and-the-parthenon-marbles\/","title":{"rendered":"Lord Elgin and the Parthenon Marbles"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The-Parthenon-1-11\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In 1799\u00a0a\u00a0Scottish nobleman named Robert Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin, was appointed as the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in Constantinople.\u00a0While serving as ambassador, Lord Elgin managed to\u00a0obtain some of the most important marble scultpures from the Parthenon in Athens and ship them back to Britian. Almost ever since, Greece has tried to get back the “Elgin Marbles” and the British have refused to return them.<\/p>\n

\"\"The\u00a0Parthenon<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0is the best-known Classical Greek structure on the Acropolis, a steep-sided hill in the center of Athens.\u00a0It was\u00a0built from 447 to 438 BC\u00a0of marble quarried on nearby Mount Pentelikos.\u00a0The Parthenon\u00a0was a temple to the goddess Athena from its construction until the forth century AD.\u00a0 With the spread of christianity, the Parthenon became\u00a0a Christian Church\u00a0from the\u00a0forth century\u00a0until\u00a01448 when\u00a0Athens was conquered by the Ottoman empire.\u00a0 Thereafter, the\u00a0Ottomans used the Parthenon as\u00a0a mosque and defensive garrison. After the Greek revolution in 1828, most of the Christian and\u00a0Ottoman additions and modifications\u00a0were removed although damage continued.<\/p>\n

\"\"Although it was modified by both the Christians and later by the Muslims (Ottomans), the overall structure of the Parthenon survived mostly intact for\u00a0over 2000 years.\u00a0 However, it\u00a0was damaged extensively in the\u00a0two centuries\u00a0prior to\u00a0Lord Elgin’s arrival in 1799. The worst damage was done in 1688 when the\u00a0Venetian army attacked Turkish forces on the Acropolis<\/a><\/strong>. The\u00a0Turkish army was using\u00a0the Parthenon as a defensive stronghold to protect both people and arms.\u00a0\u00a0In 1688 attack, a\u00a0Venetian cannonball struck a cache of gunpowder stored in the Parthenon.\u00a0The resulting explosion blew out 28 columns of the Parthenon and killed 300 people.<\/p>\n

\"\"While ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in 1801, Elgin managed to get\u00a0two vague and\u00a0ambiguously written “firmans”\u00a0(written official permissions) from the ruling\u00a0Turks to\u00a0“measure, sketch, and make plaster molds”\u00a0and later to\u00a0take\u00a0“blocks of stone having inscriptions or figures upon them”.\u00a0Going far beyond what was actually written in the firmans, Lord Elgin’s agents\u00a0eventually removed 18 pedimental sculptures, 15\u00a0metopes, and\u00a056 blocks\u00a0of the freize.\u00a0 They also removed many marble sculptures and fragments from other structures on the Acropolis.\u00a0 These\u00a0“marbles” were crated and shipped back to England from 1801 to 1806.<\/p>\n

During a brief peace between England and France, Elgin tried to return to England in 1803.\u00a0 Unfortunately, he did so by\u00a0traveling through France.\u00a0\u00a0While in France, war was again declared and Elgin\u00a0was\u00a0held for nearly 3 years as a prisoner of war.<\/p>\n

\"\"Lord Elgin was finally able to return to England in 1806.\u00a0 After\u00a0having spent\u00a0a fortune of his wife’s family money\u00a0and incurring enormous debts of his own\u00a0removing and shipping the marbles back to England, Elgin was nearly bankrupt.\u00a0\u00a0After\u00a0years of\u00a0negotiations,\u00a0Elgin agreed to sell the marbles\u00a0to the British Museum in 1816.\u00a0Elgin estimated his total costs at about \u00a374,000.\u00a0 The price Elgin\u00a0got (\u00a335,000)\u00a0was less than half\u00a0his actual costs and almost all of it\u00a0went directly to his creditors. The marbles have remained in the\u00a0British Museum<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0ever since.<\/p>\n

\"\"In 2010 Greece completed a restoration of the Parthenon and has built\u00a0the\u00a0Acropolis Museum<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0to house, among other things, the\u00a0sculptures removed by Lord Elgin. Greece and others have put enormous pressure on the British to return the “Parthenon Marbles”. So far the British Museum has maintained that\u00a0Lord Elgin\u00a0aquired the\u00a0marbles legally and refuses to return them. We will see how long can the British can hold out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why are marble sculptures from the Parthenon in the British Museum in London? Will the British ever return them?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7145,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","category-history"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/www.selectstone.com\/journal\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/The-Parthenon-1-11.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.selectstone.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.selectstone.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.selectstone.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.selectstone.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.selectstone.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6788"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"http:\/\/www.selectstone.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6788\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7346,"href":"http:\/\/www.selectstone.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6788\/revisions\/7346"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.selectstone.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.selectstone.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.selectstone.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.selectstone.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}