Now, if this were a blog merely about London, I should advise you to skip reading it. (What more can anyone say about London that has not yet been said? Especially since I did not discover any new restaurants, crash any interesting parties, or stumble unto (or into) any new and exciting clubs.) But this was no ordinary excursion into the old Imperial capital. I went there for the express purpose of seeing the “Forgotten Empire” exhibition, on Achaemenid Persia, at the British Museum (with the rare participation of the Iranian National Museum). So, if you are interested in things ancient, read on.
The exhibition has got rather mixed reviews in London papers and, interestingly enough, the reviews do not necessarily reflect the usual political fissures of English newspapers.
On the left, the anti-war crowd crowed about the past glories of a country now under verbal attack by another Empire, warning the US of a similar fate to that of the Persians. (With what glee some commentators noted that Persepolis lay unknown and under dust for well over a millennium, until a lost European explorer suggested that the ruins might be the fabled city mentioned in Herodotus. Take that Washington!) Also on the left – more on the lunatic side – anachronisms heaped upon anachronisms as ideology got the better of common sense, with critics questioning the wisdom of “glorifying” Imperial conquest or “the oppressive system that forced slaves to build vast palaces and monuments to egos” at a time when other Empires are being built, etc.
On the right, most critics used the occasion to drag the whole history of post-Seljuk and post-Moorish Islamic decline into their “analysis”, predictably tut-tutting what had happened to glorious Persia as a result of – what else? – fundamentalist and calcified Islam. And why wait for Islam? After all, weren’t the Greco-Persian wars of the early Achaemenid era merely a precursor to the “clash of civilizations” of today? The right drew its own conclusions, of course: some opting for war, others for encouraging Persians to find their past glory, again …
Bah, humbug, was my reaction to the critics.
And, alas, to the exhibition.
As I walked about in the dark, dank, small, and stiflingly hot room in which the exhibition was mounted, I was not entirely thrilled but could not quite put my finger on what it was that I found problematic. After all, many of the items were part of the British Museum’s permanent collection, and so I had seen them before. But then, perhaps that was it: they had been in far better display cases in the permanent collection, as opposed to the cramped and dark corner to which they were relegated in the exhibition.
But it was something else that was bothering me. Some of items on display had already been displayed in another touring exhibition only five years ago. Of these – and this is unforgivable for a museum of this caliber – the two most prized items were silver and gold rhytons (drinking cups) about which the only information available was that they were “said to be from Hamedan”. I was struck by this. “Said to be”? By whom? What are the doubts? What is the real provenance? Have they not been authenticated? If not, why are they on display?
They are beautiful pieces alright. But it does make a difference whether they were made by Lydian artists resident in Ekbatana and Persepolis around 540 B.C. or fifty years ago in some faux-antique-producing workshop in Tehran. It gives me no confidence in an exhibition to simply gloss over the uncertainties.
This was not all – it got worse.
There were plaster casts of the bas-reliefs from the Gates of Nations in Persepolis. At first I allowed myself to be impressed – I have not been there and had only seen pictures of the reliefs. The sensation did not last long. I was reminded of Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, in which the Ishtar Gate of Babylon is mounted in all its full glory; in another room, you can see an entire temple. In the British Museum itself, the Assyrian collection, or indeed the Elgin Marbles, is set in halls and spaces that give you at least an inkling of the majesty of their original setting, of the artistry of the architects. And the plaster cast? It was pathetically set in a dark room with low ceilings. There was no sense that the cast was from a part of two grand staircases going up to a gate opening onto the Apadana, the Hall of Nations, at some 120 meters long and wide, or that the staircases lead from road to a stone platform (on which the palace was built) of an area about 125,000 sq. meters. There was no sense of scale in this reproduction. Not to mention that there were no interpretative notes telling the viewers what all the figures meant.
After all, all along the staircases (on the site) are the images of people bearing gifts. This is the most ancient representation that we have of the rites of Noruz – the Iranian/Persian new year – celebrated each year on the Spring equinox. Each figure represents one of the “nations” that formed the Empire; each national representative carried a gift from their territory for the Great Kind. Some were accompanied by a Persian guard; others were alone. Some of these national representatives (such as the Medes or the Parthians) appear armed on the reliefs; others are not. The differences in representation were significant; they indicated whether a nation was a partner or a subject nation to the Persians (only free peoples were armed). Another thing you could see on the reliefs is the nature of the national costumes. The Persians are fully covered, whereas the Medes (and certain other nations) showed skin. And so on. I did not see any notes explaining the significance of the carvings on the staircases. Without such interpretative notes, the reliefs are simply crude images on a wall; you get no sense of why this Forgotten Empire needs to be remembered.
And the biggest travesty of all: the treatment of the Cyrus Cylinder. The notes said something along the lines that, “although the cylinder was found in the site of Babylon, successive Iranian governments have laid claim to it as a Persian heritage.” The notes further point out, quite helpfully, that “notions of human rights that Iranians claim to find in the cylinder did not, of course, have much resonance at the time of the conquest of Babylon.” And so on. All of which is true; all of which is beside the point.
The cylinder was found in Babylon and it is dated to the conquest of Babylon by … Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Achaemenid Empire. It begins with the words, “I, Cyrus, King of Kings, king of the four corners [of the world] …”. It talks about how Cyrus came to Babylon, freed the people from their yokes, respected the Babylonian gods, etc. etc. Of course the cylinder was found in Babylon: it was a propaganda piece by the conquering army of the Persian Empire for the benefit of the Babylonians. But in this, it is no more Babylonian in origin than General MacArthur’s statements of assurance in Tokyo were “Japanese” in origin merely because they were delivered there.
And of course to talk of “human rights” as we understand them in connection with the 2500 year old cylinder would be anachronistic. The point is that in its context what Cyrus said in Babylon was quite revolutionary. Only forty years before the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus, Babylon had conquered Jerusalem, razed the city and enslaved its people. This was in living memory. (“By the rivers of Babylon, we sat down and remembered Zion.”) Barely a century before, the Medes and the Babylonians had conquered Assyria, destroyed Nineveh, sowed salt in the land, massacred hundreds of thousands and sold the rest to slavery. The descendants of those slaves would still have been in Babylon at the time of the conquest. Thus, for Cyrus to show up and – even if in propaganda – proclaim his respect for the Gods of Babylon, and offer to “lift their yokes”, would have been, and indeed was, a unique event, a huge departure from the conduct of warfare and of Empire-building.
It’s perfectly alright to try to demystify the cylinder, but not at the cost of distorting what is not just Persia’s heritage, but the heritage of mankind: this is where we were 2500 years ago. How much have we progressed since?
And so, despite the superficially admirable effort of mounting this exhibition, the real Empire remains forgotten. Perhaps I should get back on my dormant novel …
To get over the disappointment, I got a ride on the London Eye. Unlike Paris, though, London is not a pretty city from above. The twelve pounds I spent on the large Ferris wheel would have been better invested on an open-top double-decker. Live and learn.