Indiana Jones and the Stuff He Stole (or, Archeological Controversies)

the porch of the Caryatids on the Acropolis's Erechtheion

The museums of Athens are mind-blowing. I saw rooms and rooms of statues, pottery, tomb markers, gold jewelry, and weapons, all casually just thousands of years old, now sitting behind glass for me and millions of tourists to peer at for ten euros a pop. But the story of how some of this stuff came to be in the museums of Athens is more complicated than you might think. So, just like at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark,when Indy lectures to a class of lovestruck girls who should snap out of it (he’s hot but he seems like an awful professor), I’ll tell you a little bit about the civilizations these artifacts came from. Just remember that, unlike Indy, I don’t have a doctorate. Yet.

He probably plagiarized his dissertation anyway.

gold from Mycenean tombs

The oldest things in Athens’ museums come from the Bronze Age, approximately 3200 BCE to 1100 BC, which was characterized by..uh…the use of bronze, especially to make weaponry. In Greece, the late Bronze Age was dominated by the Myceneans, the people who waged war against Troy, the people talked about by Homer and by the great Greek playwrights like Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides. Characters like Helen, Odysseus, Agamemnon, Oedipus, Antigone, Achilles, Clytemnestra.

The Myceneans also were responsible for the first written Greek, using a script called Linear B. Linear A, found on the same clay tablets as Linear B, hasn’t been deciphered yet, but was probably used by the Minoans. Most of what we have from the Bronze Age was found in Myceanean tombs. Jewelry, weapons, votive statues, and pottery were buried with the wealthy for their use in the afterlife and as gifts for the gods. I saw a lot of funeral steles, death masks, jewelry, and various vessels for wine. It made me reconsider my desire to be cremated and not buried. Maybe if I was buried, I could be buried with stuff that will also last three thousand years, like plastic straws, Tupperware containers, and Oreos, and then in a few millennia my grave will become famous.

Linear A and B tablets

What happened to the Myceneans? Their society collapsed, like Indy’s bravado when he sees a snake (not very manly, get it together dude). They were probably destroyed by a combination of invaders, earthquakes, and plague.

After the Myceneans, Greece entered the “dark ages,” the first age of what we now call “Ancient Greece,” and writing disappeared, reappearing later thanks to an alphabet adapted from the Phoenicians in North Africa. The next major phase of Greek history is the Archaic Age, which saw the rise of the city-state or polis and a huge boom in population. This is the time of the first Olympics, the birth of “democracy” in Athens, and the creation of Greek colonies everywhere from the eastern coast of Spain to the Black Sea.

the Parthenon, built during the classical period, is under constant repair and restoration

The next age, the classical period, was when Greece—Athens in particular—hit its stride. This is when the Greeks defeated the Persians and Herodotus wrote about it, when Athens got too big for its britches and lost to Sparta in the Peloponnesian War and Thucydides wrote about it. This is when 300 Spartans died at Thermopylae and when that dude ran to Athens from Marathon then died. This is the time of Pericles and Socrates and Lysander (who were all probably very gay, as all the Greeks were). This is when the first iteration of the Parthenon was built, along with many of the buildings I saw at the archeological sites I got into for free because I'm "disabled." This is when the plays and the histories and the poems were written, when statues and buildings were erected, when the traditions were established.

Why did the classical age end? Alexander the Great.

bust of Herodotus, aka "the Father of History," who wrote about the Persian war and Egyptian crocodiles alike

I’ll end our brief lecture here, because hopefully you know who Alexander was and what he did. Greece became part of his giant Macedonian Empire, which Alexander didn’t live long enough to actually govern, and then Greece became a part of Rome. But let’s go back to the stuff. What Indiana Jones really cares about.

Why have I brought Indiana Jones into this? There is always a question in the background of those terrible movies that is a real question concerning real artifacts: who do they belong to? Greece has been under that control of so many different entities at different points in time—so who owns which things? How do we know? How do we decide which things are worth preserving? What do we do with those things? The chain of custody is not exactly clear.

an Attic-style orange and black wine amphora

I’ll give you a hypothetical. A man who looks suspiciously like young Harrison Ford lives in a house in Turkey close to the Greek border. He decides he’s going to expand his house because he just learned that one of the many women he seduced on his archeological escapades is pregnant with twins! He is not thrilled. In the process of digging the foundation, he finds what looks like a gravesite. He investigates, calls his various archeological buddies, and they realize it’s the tomb of a wealthy woman and contains 1) human remains 2) a lot of gold jewelry 3) some pottery in the distinctive orange-and-black style of Athens.

Harrison Ford owns his house and the land that it’s on. You’d think that means he owns whatever he finds on it. But soon, the Turkish authorities come knocking. Thanks for finding this, Harrison, we’ll take it now! After all, the Ottomans ruled this land for over five hundred years. The modern Republic of Turkey is the heir apparent to the Ottoman Empire. The gravesite belongs to the Turkish government, which will protect it as an important piece of cultural heritage.

But wait, now the Greeks are here! They say that all this belongs to the Greek government, because 1) it dates to the time of Alexander the Great, who was Greek (not really) and 2) it contains items clearly of Greek origin (the pottery).

some pottery not found in Harrison Ford's backyard

Who does Harrison Ford give the stuff to? Should he ask for payment? Should he give it to the highest bidder? What if a wealthy man who looks suspiciously like George Lucas approaches Harrison Ford and offers him a ton of money for the artifacts? What if it turns out that the artifacts were originally discovered further east, in Lebanon, and were reburied here by British soldiers during World War I who intended to come back for it? Does the stuff belong to Harrison Ford, George Lucas, the Lebanese, the Greeks, the Turkish, or those soldiers? This is how complicated these questions can be.

I’ve decided that the end of this hypothetical goes like this: Harrison Ford disappears in the middle of the night with the gold, leaving the skeleton, the pottery, and his pregnant baby mama behind.

Now that you understand the kinds of questions that must be asked, there are two real-life stories I’d like to tell you that can either be viewed as triumphs or as tragedies, depending on your perspective.

The first is the story of Heinrich Schliemann, an egotistical German archeologist who spent his life (during the 19th century) trying to find the places that Homer talked about in the Iliad and the Odyssey. He made a lot of money early in his life through dubious means (cough arms dealing cough), and once he didn’t need to work anymore, he turned his attention to archeology. Note that he was not trained in history or archeology; he was just a rich dude with too much time on his hands whom people never said no to.

Schliemann excavated what he believed to be the site of historical Troy in Turkey and, ended up destroying eight or nine levels of remains in his effort to get to the Troy that Paris brought Helen back to. Those remains can now never be studied. Then he smuggled his findings out of Turkey into Greece, was sued by the Ottomans, paid them off, abandoned his Russian wife to marry a seventeen-year-old Greek girl, and had two (more) kids that he named Andromache and Agamemnon. The Greeks allowed him to dig at Mycenae, but only under the supervision of an actual archeologist. There he found a bunch of graves and the famous Mask of Agamemnon, which Schliemann thought was Agamemnon’s actual funereal mask. He died of an ear infection Naples and has a needlessly giant mausoleum in Athens that I saw and that cats now nap in. He’s the man who found of a lot of the stuff that now sits in the National Archeological Museum, but who knows how much he destroyed in the process.

You can obviously tell what I think of Schliemann. Not much.

The second story involves a little more international intrigue. In 1801, Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin, was Britain’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. He decided that he liked the 5th century BCE friezes that decorated the Parthenon, and that British people would like them too! So, he took them. Over a period of eleven years. Probably illegally. Elgin claims the Ottoman government—which controlled Athens at the time—gave him permission, but there is no proof of this.

a Parthenon frieze that Elgin didn't steal and is now in the Acropolis Museum

And they’re still there, sitting in the British Museum under the name of “the Elgin Marbles.” Elgin sold them to the British government to finance his divorce. The collection includes one of the Caryatids, one of the six columns sculpted in the shape of a woman that held up a porch in the Erechtheion, the smaller temple on the Acropolis. The other five are in the Acropolis Museum in Athens, with a gap left for the sixth one. A little “f*ck you" to the Brits, because Greece, along with many other states and people, believe that the marbles were stolen and should be returned to Athens. As recently as 2021, UNESCO asked the British to enter into mediation talks over the marbles. The Brits said no, thank you.

one of the original Caryatids in the Acropolis Museum

What do you think Indy would do? Do you think he would have been like Schliemann and Elgin and taken what he wanted?