Stolen gifts: Egypt and the Cyclades

A visit to the British Museum to see an exhibition of Indian sacred art, but ... I had to get there first.

The British Museum is a pilgrimage site for me. In all the horror of our museums’ wrongness and plundering outrage, the fragments of life and culture that they harbour have inspired me my whole life; from being a five year old copying Egyptian friezes in the National Museum of Scotland, to a thirty two year old studying at the School of Oriental and African studies, ten minutes walk away from the British Museum’s back door.

Every time I visit, I feel the ghosts of the thousand missing contexts. Multitudes of cultural complexities demeaned and desecrated, now reduced to short descriptions on small white cards. Every joy of discovery sits beside the knowledge that the thing should not be there at all.

This is the history of empire, and there’s no escaping it.

Still, I go. I go to pay homage; to try to atone for the sins of my forefathers by standing before every miraculous stolen thing, mouth open in awe.

The lowering pseudo-Greek façade cast shadows upon us as we queued to get in. I had thought that maybe being there at opening time would make for some quiet meandering through a few rooms before the crowds, but those days are clearly gone. Ten minutes past ten, and there were people everywhere, swarming around the enormous Assyrian guardians towering above our heads. Rivers of schoolchildren poured into the gaps between the glass cases, family groups dithered and consulted, trying to decide where to go next. It was almost impossible to pause to look.

One of the first things I saw was someone who had featured in a couple of my paintings in 2021.

Marble figure of a woman (Spedos type). Cycladic (Keros-Syros culture). 2,600 - 2,400 BCE, British Museum

I’d never seen the original sculpture before. It’s from the Cycladic culture; 3100 - 1000 BCE, an early civilisation roughly contemporary with Minoan culture on Crete¹.

Despite my interest in the importance of cultural context and specificity, when it comes to responding to these very old human creations, I find myself not really concerned with understanding the complexity of all the relevant historical and cultural detail. To properly grasp the nuance of any such contexts would require a lifetime of study, and with artefacts this old, a great deal of what people have to say about them now is largely speculation anyway, as all we have to study are de-contextualised fragments. My interest here is in the fact that something reached out across thousands of years and spoke to me without words; this is my ‘power of images’, the core of my lifetime fascination.

I wandered for a while, trying to find the quiet spots. I decided to avoid the Egyptians, but somehow the crowds swept me into the depths of a forest of mummies, despite my intentions.

They had pulled the hordes like a magnet. I couldn’t walk past the glass cases but had to wait for uniformed boys to make a little gap for me to squeeze through.

Pushed up against the glass by the crowds in the strangely subdued lighting, I ended up inches away from the faces of these silent beings.

I was mesmerised by the depth of the colours and the intricacies of detail, but afterwards I wished I had stood back more. While the details were breathtaking, what lives in my memory is the feeling of the whole collection in that semi-darkened room. Multiple presences. Silent but somehow warm; soft eyes, looking back at me from uncountable past centuries. Ritual time.

I ate the whole museum that day. Now I have to work out how to respond to it all.

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I’d love to chew the fat about anything that comes into your mind after reading …

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycladic_culture