James Cuno: Archaeology must be shielded from nationalistic laws and politics
[James Cuno is president and director of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a former director of the Courtauld Institute of Art and the Harvard University Art Museums. This essay is adapted from Who Owns Antiquity: Museums and the Battle Over Our Ancient Heritage, published in May by Princeton University Press.]
... Laws intended to retain antiquities within the jurisdiction of the modern nation-state concentrate the risk to antiquities by keeping them in one place. Were we to distribute that risk among many countries, as we once did through partage, there would be a better chance that fewer excavated antiquities would be damaged or destroyed and more of them available for sustained research.
The latter point is important: The work the curators of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute have done on the inscribed tablets composing the Persepolis Fortification Archive, which has transformed our understanding of Achaemenid Persia, was possible only because the tablets were removed to Chicago in 1936 and have been carefully studied there ever since. The painstaking research documenting and transcribing the tablets could not have been done in the field alone.
The sad truth is that nationalist cultural-property laws are not intended to protect the world's ancient heritage. Instead, they are meant to claim that heritage as the property of the modern nation-state, important to its identity and esteem. They are used to legitimize modern governments' claims as heirs to an ancient past: modern Egypt to Pharaonic Egypt, modern Greece to Athens, Italy to ancient Rome, the People's Republic of China to the first emperor, modern Iraq to Mesopotamia (Saddam's government's slogan was "Yesterday Nebuchadnezzar, today Saddam Hussein"). As such, the laws impose nationalist characteristics on antiquity when none could possibly exist. And they distort the truth of culture, which is that it is and always has been fluid and mongrel, the result of contact with new and strange things, never static or pure. As the Ghanian, British-educated, Princeton-based philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has said: "Cultural purity is an oxymoron."
Nationalist cultural-property laws are political instruments. And the political motives that inform them can also, as in the case of the Peru-Yale dispute, inspire calls for the repatriation of ancient artifacts removed before the laws came into being. The promise of research and teaching, scholarly exchanges, joint excavations, and collaborations on museum building hang in the balance.
Does antiquity "belong" to modern nation-states in any meaningful way, and should nations be encouraged to restrict the world's access to antiquity through retentionist cultural-property laws? Or should we, for the preservation and understanding of our ancient heritage, argue against such laws and for the reinstatement of partage — the very means by which not only so much of the collections at Harvard, Yale, Penn, and Chicago were built, but the collections locally too, in Baghdad, Kabul, and elsewhere?
The imposition of nationalist, retentionist cultural-property laws has resulted only in putting our ancient heritage at risk and encouraging its misuse for political gain. Woolley was right when he wrote to the Times 74 years ago. For most of the last hundred years, antiquities have been politicized as nationalist cultural property. That has to change if we are to resolve competing interests that, as Yale's president wrote, serve "science and human understanding."
Read entire article at Chronicle of Higher Ed
... Laws intended to retain antiquities within the jurisdiction of the modern nation-state concentrate the risk to antiquities by keeping them in one place. Were we to distribute that risk among many countries, as we once did through partage, there would be a better chance that fewer excavated antiquities would be damaged or destroyed and more of them available for sustained research.
The latter point is important: The work the curators of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute have done on the inscribed tablets composing the Persepolis Fortification Archive, which has transformed our understanding of Achaemenid Persia, was possible only because the tablets were removed to Chicago in 1936 and have been carefully studied there ever since. The painstaking research documenting and transcribing the tablets could not have been done in the field alone.
The sad truth is that nationalist cultural-property laws are not intended to protect the world's ancient heritage. Instead, they are meant to claim that heritage as the property of the modern nation-state, important to its identity and esteem. They are used to legitimize modern governments' claims as heirs to an ancient past: modern Egypt to Pharaonic Egypt, modern Greece to Athens, Italy to ancient Rome, the People's Republic of China to the first emperor, modern Iraq to Mesopotamia (Saddam's government's slogan was "Yesterday Nebuchadnezzar, today Saddam Hussein"). As such, the laws impose nationalist characteristics on antiquity when none could possibly exist. And they distort the truth of culture, which is that it is and always has been fluid and mongrel, the result of contact with new and strange things, never static or pure. As the Ghanian, British-educated, Princeton-based philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has said: "Cultural purity is an oxymoron."
Nationalist cultural-property laws are political instruments. And the political motives that inform them can also, as in the case of the Peru-Yale dispute, inspire calls for the repatriation of ancient artifacts removed before the laws came into being. The promise of research and teaching, scholarly exchanges, joint excavations, and collaborations on museum building hang in the balance.
Does antiquity "belong" to modern nation-states in any meaningful way, and should nations be encouraged to restrict the world's access to antiquity through retentionist cultural-property laws? Or should we, for the preservation and understanding of our ancient heritage, argue against such laws and for the reinstatement of partage — the very means by which not only so much of the collections at Harvard, Yale, Penn, and Chicago were built, but the collections locally too, in Baghdad, Kabul, and elsewhere?
The imposition of nationalist, retentionist cultural-property laws has resulted only in putting our ancient heritage at risk and encouraging its misuse for political gain. Woolley was right when he wrote to the Times 74 years ago. For most of the last hundred years, antiquities have been politicized as nationalist cultural property. That has to change if we are to resolve competing interests that, as Yale's president wrote, serve "science and human understanding."