February 11, 2010
Neil MacGregor talks about the Elgin Marbles & Cyrus Cylinder
British Museum director, Neil MacGregor has given a talk, mentioning both the Elgin Marbles & the Cyrus Cylinder. He says that the sense of national identity that people get from these pieces is an example of seeing what one wants to see – but surely his own interpretation of the artefacts as part of a global story that can only be told when they are assembled together in the British Museum is far more of a digression from the original significance of these particular artefacts.
From:
Guardian
British Museum’s Neil MacGregor on the Parthenon marbles and Cyrus cylinder
Tuesday 2 February 2010 22.45 GMT
Charlotte HigginsNeil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, gave the first of the London Review of Books’ winter lectures, organised to celebrate the journal’s 30th birthday. He began by talking about John Dee’s obsidian mirror, in which the Elizabethan magus could supposedly see angels. That became MacGregor’s metaphor: we look at objects and find in them what we want to see. And so to the Parthenon marbles and the Cyrus cylinder (a clay cylinder inscribed with a decree from the Persian ruler Cyrus the Great). “A whole nation,” MacGregor said of the marbles, “has decided they embody something fundamental about Greek national identity. It is a prime example of seeing what you want to see.”
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