Chipping away at the deadlock over Elgin Marbles' ownership

(NYTIMES) - Few cultural disputes inflame passions more than the disposition of the Parthenon Marbles. Public debate about the statuary has raged since the early 1800s, when the sculptures and bas-reliefs, which date from 447BC to 432BC, were stripped from the Parthenon and other Classical Greek temples on the Acropolis of Athens by agents of Thomas Bruce, a Scottish statesman and seventh earl of Elgin. The marbles were purchased - some say looted - by Elgin during his time as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, the occupying power; they have resided in the British Museum since 1817.

Greek campaigners have repeatedly called on Britain to repatriate the works, arguing that the Turks were a foreign force acting against the will of the people they had invaded. The works, commonly known as the Elgin marbles, would instead be exhibited in Athens, in a purpose-built museum at the foot of the Acropolis. In May, the Greek Culture Minister, archaeologist Lina Mendoni, said in a statement to The Guardian: "Lord Elgin used illicit and inequitable means to seize and export the Parthenon sculptures, without real legal permission to do so, in a blatant act of serial theft."

But officials at the British Museum have staunchly rejected the requests. Backed by a succession of British governments, the museum has justified retaining the marbles on the grounds that Elgin acquired them legitimately; it claims that taking the relics to London helped to safeguard them from neglect and the corrosive effects of Athens' acid rain and that they are part of a shared heritage, and thus transcend cultural boundaries. "We are open to exploring any potential loan," a British Museum spokesman said, "with formal acknowledgement of the lender's title to objects and a commitment to return objects a standard precondition."

But Greece will neither acknowledge the lender's title to the objects, nor will it abide by the "standard precondition". Professor of classics Mary Beard at the University of Cambridge and a British Museum trustee is on the fence about the marbles. "I see the good arguments for returning them and also the good arguments for keeping them," she said.

In her book, The Parthenon, published in 2002, she wrote that the temple has come to stand for deracination, dismemberment, desire and loss. "For me," she has said, "the Parthenon sculptures raise some of the biggest questions of cultural property, ownership and where works of art 'belong'."

Mr Roger Michel, executive director of the Institute of Digital Archaeology, believes the long-running dust-up can be resolved with the help of 3D machining. His University of Oxford-based research consortium has developed a robot with the ability to create faithful copies of large historical objects.

In 2016, in Trafalgar Square in London, the organisation unveiled a two-thirds scale model, made of Egyptian marble, of a Syrian monument called the Monumental Arch of Palmyra, also known as the Arch of Triumph. The original was built by the Romans and was thought to be two millenniums old, but it was wantonly destroyed by Islamic State in Iraq and Syria fighters in 2015. Boston University's archaeology professor Andrea Berlin said the institute's efforts to resurrect lost antiquities could have the effect of changing the relationship between viewers of a monument and what it stands for.

On June 29, at a workshop in Carrara, Italy, the robot began carving a highly detailed copy of one of the Parthenon marbles on display at the British Museum: a life-size head of a horse. Fashioned out of local marble, the copy is the prototype of a copy to be carved from a block of marble quarried on Mount Pentelicus, the main source of the stone for the construction of the Acropolis. A week later, Mr Michel said, the robot will hew a copy of a second Parthenon marble: a metope, or sculpted panel, of the Centauromachy, a mythic battle between the civilised Lapiths and bestial Centaurs at the wedding feast of Peirithous and Hippodamia.

In Mr Michel's mind, the copies are intended for the British Museum. "Our sole purpose is to encourage repatriation of the Elgin marbles," he said. "When two people both want the same cake, baking a second, identical cake is one obvious solution."

The rub, he said, is what constitutes "identical" in this context. "If we take the British Museum at its word, the only attributes of the marbles that matter to the museum are its physical qualities and the extent to which they reveal the history and aesthetics of antiquity."

In March, after the museum refused a formal request to have the pieces scanned, Mr Michel and Dr Alexy Karenowska, technical director of the Institute of Digital Archaeology, showed up in the Duveen Gallery of the British Museum as visitors and resorted to guerilla tactics. While security staff looked on, the two used standard iPhones and iPads, as many of the latest models are equipped with Lidar sensors and photogrammetry software, to create 3D digital images. The 3D images of the marble horse head were uploaded into the carving robot, which shaved the prototype over four days.

Mr Michel said that the final models - both of Pentelic marble - would be completed by the end of this month, after which they are to be exhibited at an as yet undisclosed location in London. Later this summer, Mr Michel plans to have the robot fabricate two more copies and touch them up to show how the originals would have looked, with any absent pieces restored and damage repaired.

As enticing as the Parthenon undertaking may sound, some archaeologists who have supported repatriation expressed unease, noting that the institute and its Palmyra model have been heavily criticised by scholars regarding the source of funding, the lack of public consultation and the whiff of British imperialism.

Ms Mendoni of the Greek Culture Ministry did not respond to a request for comment on the imitation works.

The Greek government's apparent reluctance to weigh in troubles Mr Bernard Means, director of the Virtual Creation Lab at Virginia Commonwealth University. Mr Means said he would only have attempted such a project with the consultation and full support of Greece. "Otherwise, the effort is suggestive of that colonial mindset, where those who appropriated objects without the informed consent of the colonised feel they have the right to do with the objects as they please - often in the guise of science, and even if well-intentioned," he said.

The Parthenon, designed some 2,500 years ago by sculptor Phidias, was the quintessence of Hellenic architecture: perfect lines, tall Doric columns along the sides and friezes in high and low relief that convey a Panathenaic procession, an ancient Greek festival to celebrate the city's patron goddess, Athena.

For 1,000 years, the temple was left more or less intact. When Christianity gained a foothold in the eastern part of the Roman Empire, the Parthenon became the Church of the Parthenos Maria (Virgin Mary), then a mosque and finally a Turkish gunpowder depot

By the time Elgin took up his diplomatic post in Constantinople, some 40 per cent of the temple's original sculptural decoration had been destroyed. A vaguely worded licence from the Ottomans authorised Elgin's men to remove "some pieces of stone with old inscriptions, and figures". Although there was no explicit permission to cut sculptures off the Parthenon, Elgin apparently took an expansive view, carting off about half of the surviving sculptures on the Athenian citadel.

In 1816, the cash-poor Elgin sold the marbles to the British Parliament for £35,000 - the equivalent of at least £3.6 million (S$6 million) today. The artefacts were then passed into the trusteeship of the British Museum. The campaign to recover the marbles began almost as soon as they were taken down from the Parthenon. In 1811, poet Lord Byron ridiculed him in the poem The Curse Of Minerva: "England owns him not: Athena, no! thy plunderer was a Scot."

The push for Western nations to return cultural artefacts to their countries of origin has been gaining momentum. This spring, a museum in Palermo, Italy, permanently returned to Athens a fragment from the Parthenon showing the foot of the Greek goddess Artemis.

Although the British government has been under increasing pressure to give back the marbles, the British Museum itself has avoided the conversation. Its defenders contend that restitution would set a disturbing precedent and that major museum holdings everywhere would be in jeopardy. "This is an argument that will run and run," said British classicist and author Daisy Dunn. "It's hard to see how a solution that satisfies both parties will ever be found."

Although the British Museum is unlikely to yield, many archaeologists say the case for the return of the relics is strong and persuasive. Dr Tim Schadla-Hall, an archaeologist at University College London, argues that "a more relaxed approach to genuineness and authenticity is acceptable today and is already accepted by most of us as consumers of the past".

Producing quality facsimiles of the great sculptural works of antiquity and the Renaissance was a Victorian obsession, and London museums are crammed with plaster casts of Classical originals. Foremost among these are the lofty Cast Courts at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which hold models of Trajan's Column, Michelangelo's David and the tomb of Henry VII of Luxembourg, all of which are to size.

Western culture tends to privilege original objects, Dr Karenowska said, largely out of a desire to make physical connections with the past. This is why Ms Dunn doubted that a solution that pleases both the British Museum and the Greek government will ever be achieved. The biggest hurdle, she said, is that the words "copy" and "replica" still mean "second best", even if that is not necessarily the case. "However strong the intellectual argument, semantics prevail.

"It is hard to imagine anyone who wants the marbles to remain at the British Museum being satisfied with something produced in part by robots, when the originals represent to them the high point of human artistry," Ms Dunn added.