Content area
Full Text
In 1799 Thomas Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin and 11th of Kincardine, set foot in Constantinople. Elgin was the new British ambassador to the Ottoman empire, which then included Athens. His job was to try to forge links with the Ottomans, but he had other, private motives. Elgin had his eye on the numerous treasures from antiquity that were firing the popular imagination. Initially, he intended merely to record these, and took a team of artists with him. But he soon realised his contacts meant that he could get permission from the Ottomans to remove pieces back to London. In 1801 his staff started to chisel off the first Parthenon sculpture from the ruins on the Acropolis, from where they were ultimately shipped to the British Museum.
And so began what Dorothy King rightly calls archaeology's greatest controversy. It has been going on for almost 200 years, with various degrees of fervour, and never more...