The success of the UNESCO Nubia Campaign, launched in 1960, and ending in 1980, became a defining moment in the development of the World Heritage Site Programme. As tokens of its gratitude to countries which especially contributed to the campaign's success, Egypt donated four temples: the Temple of Dendur was moved to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Temple of Debod was moved to the Parque del Oeste in Madrid, the Temple of Taffeh was moved to the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in the Netherlands, and the Temple of Ellesyia to Museo Egizio in Turin.
So, Egypt "donated" four temples . . .
The Temple of Dendur was dismantled and taken to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City where it was reassembled in a purpose designed architectural space . . .
. . . thus providing Rob Reiner with a mise en scène for the film When Harry met Sally.
As you enter the Great Court of the British Museum in London, to the right of the old Reading Room of the British Library, where Karl Marx, amongst so many others, spent years engaged in his studies, you will find the old King's Library.
Today this is where you will find in Room 1 of the British Museum the Enlightenment Gallery. It is this so-called "enlightenment" that informs the emergence of a complex construction of ideas, a knowledge system, that provided the European "mind set" to engage with our whole planet, mine it for information and material, create systems for the organization and categorization of an encyclopedic edifice of knowledge, and trade with, and exchange with, and conquer the world in the present whilst appropriating multiple pasts.
What is displayed in the museum is the evidence of human ways of living that have passed into history or that we have made impossible!The seeds, and the process of culturing them, are to be found in this engine room of knowledge, along with a process of appropriation that has led today's situation of the globalisation of culture and claims of 'universalism'!
The King's Library was a royal collection of books created by King George III and donated to the nation. A gallery, named after the collection, was built at the British Museum in 1827 to house them. It is the oldest room in the Museum and now home to the permanent exhibition Enlightenment: Discovering the world in the eighteenth century.
This collection of over 60,000 books, was formed by King George III (1760–1820) and given to the nation in 1823 by his son King George IV. When the library was donated there was not enough space to house it in the original British Museum building. This led to the construction of today’s quadrangle building, designed by the architect Sir Robert Smirke (1781–1867), and the room for the King’s Library was the first wing of the new building to be constructed (1823–1827). It was on a grand scale: 91m (300 feet) long, 12m (41 feet) high and 9m (30 feet) wide, with a central section 18m (58 feet) wide. Its great size called for the pioneering use of cast iron beams to support the ceiling.
Originally, it was not intended to be a public room. There were two entrances, one at either end of the room, and 12 reading desks to be used by the library assistants. The central section of the room was meant to consist of 12 columns made from Aberdeen granite. The first four were bought, and are still in place, but the cost of polishing them was so expensive that no more were purchased.
In 1997 the books were transferred to their new home in the King’s Library Tower in the new British Library building at St Pancras, London. The books currently occupying the cases in the King’s Library are on long term loan from the House of Commons library.
Careful restoration work between 2000 and 2003 revived the original room to its previous glory of the 1820s, in time to celebrate the British Museum’s 250th anniversary. Repairs to the oak and mahogany floor and classical architectural features have refreshed the space. Hundreds of square metres of plaster were cleaned to restore the yellow and gold ornamentation and the re-gilded balcony. Two hundred kilometres of wiring (twice round the M25 motorway) enabled a subtle lighting system to be installed, which aims to complement the newly-restored colour scheme.
The result was that two centuries of use and London grime were washed away and a major permanent exhibition, using thousands of objects from the Museum collection to show how people understood their world in the Age of Enlightenment.
Return to the modern world
In the Heritage section of the Guardian newspaper Jonathan Jones writes brilliantly on this, and at the time of his writing the new gallery and exhibition had only recently been opened to the public.
How can you contain the wild and dangerous ideas and imaginings of the Enlightenment in an exhibition - or, for that matter, a museum? Rather well, it turns out. Brilliantly, even. The British Museum has done something almost unprecedented. For years, artists, curators and historians have been imagining the museum as a work of art. But no museum of this stature has thought to make such an exhibition of itself on this permanent and serious scale - to make its own history its inquiry.
You enter the King's Library from the white contemporary space of the Great Court and are immediately in another time. Ahead of you is a giant ancient Roman vase - or rather, a fake, put together from fragments by the architect and fantastic illustrator Giovanni Battista Piranesi.
The extravagant invention of Piranesi is a reminder that not even the cult of ancient Greece and Rome in the 18th century can easily be understood as European triumphalism. Piranesi portrayed ancient Rome, in his prints of colossal ruins and prisons, as a place of diabolical sublime power very similar to the realm of William Beckford's fictional Caliph, Vathek.
It turns out that beneath its modern collections, the British Museum has long hidden a ghost collection, an embarrassing trove of oddities dating back to its origins. Now these have been brought out of basement cupboards to once more delight and instruct.
There is a "mermaid" made from a monkey and a fish; there are numerous classical fakes; and, contrary to every expectation you might have of the British Museum, there are animals. The original 18th-century museum encompassed natural history as well as every other knowledge, and so the King's Library has items from the foundation collections of today's Natural History Museum, including species novel and confounding in the 18th century, such as the platypus.
Fossils, minerals, mummies (including the "mummy's finger" used in the early 18th century by Hans Sloane, the doctor whose collections were the foundation of the museum) and objects brought back from Cook's Pacific voyages: curiosities without end, representing an age whose curiosity was insatiable. The 18th century was interested in modelling knowledge, in encyclopedias and dictionaries. Collecting was another encyclopedic enterprise. At this stage it did not yet sustain the ordered, and ordering, classifications of Victorian science. The world for a moment was held in suspension, in a vacuum flask, and everything - from the age of the earth to the meaning of hieroglyphs - was still to be asked.
Islam, too, was to be considered, to be studied. Sloane's cabinet of curiosities contained amulets inscribed with texts from the Koran that were carefully translated for him into Latin; the entire Koran was translated into English in 1734.
Among all the tales of exploration and interpretation, a cynic might say, this wonderful display conveniently distracts attention from the most notorious skeleton in the cupboard of the museum's early history: Lord Elgin's removal of the frieze of the Parthenon from Ottoman-ruled Athens in 1799. But who was the man of the Enlightenment - Elgin, or his critic Lord Byron?
Elgin and his party were magnificently entertained in Istanbul, and their relationship with the rulers of the Ottoman Empire was good enough to procure a licence from the Sultan to remove "any pieces of marble with inscriptions or figures thereon" from the Acropolis. Ever since, critics have attacked the value of this licence and the propriety of Elgin making a deal with the despotic rulers of Greece. But Elgin was making the assumptions of the 18th century. Christian demonisation of Turkey was specious, argued Gibbon. The Marbles were a legitimate trade in the emporium of the Enlightenment, thought Elgin.
In the Romantic age that followed the Enlightenment, even as Napoleon read and admired the Koran, modern, ethnocentric nationalism was born. The Greek war of independence became a rallying call for Christian Europe against Islamic Turkey. And among all the other thoughts provoked by this new display, one is that maybe the campaign to return the Elgin Marbles to Athens can never be entirely free of the new Romantic faiths that ended the Enlightenment and initiated a far less attractive version of modernity.
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