MikePadgett.com

Pergamonmuseum

You’re a world away from rote learning by candlelight, severe teachers, inky papers and dreary prose and yet here on some wild, herb-scented hill, everything you read comes to life before your eyes. What you’re seeing is not really there, of course, but your imagination builds it anyway, doing in a mere glance what was done by centuries of war, culture and progress.

Byzantine decline and Ottoman rule spread a cloak over the landscape of old Greece, silencing it while the world continued to revolve busily elsewhere. Living memory has nothing much to say about the stones, white spots all over the sage green hillsides.

Certainly, they were hewn from some other sage green hillside and carved with the figures and symbols of some other culture. A centuries-long, slow motion explosion scattered them all over, until they became a grand puzzle that patiently awaits rediscovery and ultimately, a solution.

In the nineteenth century some adventurous Germans, rambling far off the usual beaten Classical trails, set about that grand puzzle. They cobbled together a collection of trial-and-error tools and techniques and in so doing they invented modern archaeology.

The Great Altar of Pergamon

The puzzle has been pieced together in Berlin’s Pergamonmuseum. A colossal feat worthy of the Gods, the Great Altar of Pergamon needs to be rearranged a little on occasion. Perfection is a German imperative, of course.

Pergamon was famed far and wide for its singular collection of texts. Plutarch reports that around 200,000 volumes were collected there, destined for Alexandria as a wedding present from Marcus Antonius to his bride Cleopatra.

The Egyptian queen’s gain was posterity’s loss, however, since the library of Alexandia famously burned down some time later.

The Altar, which appears to have been intended as a place for burnt sacrifices, depicts the Battle of the Gods, featuring all the main players.

Museums within a museum

In addition to impressive collections of Greek artifacts, the building also houses two enormous gates, that of the market in ancient Miletus and the other of Ishtar, from ancient Babylon, whose walls collectively constitute one of the original Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

In the floor above the Ishtar Gate can be found an impressive collection of Islamic art and the famous Mshatta Façade, part of an Ummayad building complex. This façade dates from the eighth century, around the same time that the first Caliphs of Córdoba ruled the region of Al-Andalus.

Ancient remains to go

A visit to the Pergamonmuseum raises in my mind the issue of what has been called Elginism, namely the illegal removal of historical artefacts from their original location, or ‘cultural vandalism’ for short.

Of course, there are important differences between the Pergamon exhibits – the Great Altar, Ishtar’s Gate, the Market Gate of Miletus and the Mshatta Façade – and the Elgin Marbles, from which the term above derives. For each of the examples in the Pergamonmuseum, permission was sought and granted.

And without the painstaking work of historians and archaeologists, the Pergamon exhibits might never have been restored and would surely have deteriorated further outdoors.

That said, we will likely never see again the Pergamon exhibits in their original surroundings, nor will those whose cultural heritage has now been lost to a foreign museum. They can stand on their sage green hillsides today, but there’s nothing left to see.