Since the 16th century, wealthy northern Europeans had admired the collections of the cardinals and popes in Rome and, when they went on Grand Tours of Italy as part of their education, they tried to buy antique statues and send them home.Back home, the custodians of this booty, often employed by rich patrons to look after their cabinets of newly acquired curiosities, became the first antiquities dealers and by the 18th century a lively trade and an art market had grown up around them.
The following sections tell the story of how the activities of treasure-seekers evolved from plundering the past to preserving and studying the legacy of the ancient world.
1751
STEWART and REVETT and the ACROPOLIS
Two English gentlemen, James Stewart and Nicholas Revett, arrive in Athens to draw its ancient monuments. Dressed in Turkish costume, they draw for four years and eventually produce several large volumes called The Antiquities of Greece.
Unlike their contemporaries, who usually use ancient ruins as backdrops for pictures of nymphs and shepherds, Stewart and Revett conduct a proper survey of the ancient buildings on the Acropolis, which involves making precise drawings and scientific measurements.
Stewart and Revett belong to the first generation of European architects to classify the monuments of the past into distinct archaeological periods.
Unfortunately, their publications also serve as shopping lists for connoisseurs, who soon visit sites, not to take measurements, but to take away monuments.
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1798
NAPOLEON and EGYPT
The 26-year-old French general Napoleon lands in Egypt, marches on Cairo and defeats its rulers at the Battle of the Pyramids.As well as soldiers, Napoleon brings with him groups of French artists, scientists and engineers, who begin to study the remains of Ancient Egyptian civilisation.
They set up a Scientific and Artistic Commission in Cairo, to examine and study every aspect of this ancient land, as well as an institute to evaluate all scholarly work on the subject.
One of the huge statues found in ruins by the French is that of Ramesses II, which is 20 metres (60 feet) high.
This massive statue becomes a legend in Europe not only because of its size, but also because the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley writes an evocative poem, called 'Ozymandias', about it.
Back to time line1800
LORD ELGIN and the MARBLES
The first archaeological drawings of the Acropolis in the 18th century soon provide shopping lists for collectors who want to possess rare works of art.
Most notorious of them all is Lord Elgin, the powerful British ambassador to Turkey, who sends artists and workmen to Athens to remove the Parthenon’s exquisite marble frieze, with its sculptures of horsemen and gods, and ship it to London.
To the horror of the town governor and the rest of Europe, the workmen build a huge wooden scaffold around the Parthenon and smash parts of the temple’s marble cornice off before removing a row of sculptures.
Today, the Elgin Marbles are displayed in the British Museum in London and are at the centre of an unending controversy as successive Greek governments have asked for them to be returned.
They are a symbol of collectors' greed.
Back to time line1805
BELZONI and the VALLEY OF THE KINGS
After Horatio Nelson's victory in the Battle of Trafalgar, in which the British fleet defeats the French, the Napoleonic army gradually quits Egypt.
British scholars and collectors now move in. An Italian, Giovanni Batista Belzoni, is employed by the British government to remove the statue of Memnon from its resting place at Karnak.
The head is very large but Belzoni manages to transport it to Cairo, from where it is shipped to London, and displayed in the British Museum.In 1817, Belzoni visits the Valley of the Kings, where 40 tombs of the pharaohs are situated. He discovers the tomb of Seti I, son of Ramesses the Great, rulers of Egypt in the 13th century BC.
By 1821, Belzoni is exhibiting casts of this tomb and those of seven others in a gallery in London’s Piccadilly. Hugely popular, the show is packed with visitors and Belzoni’s book about it becomes an international bestseller.
Back to time line1843
LEPSIUS and GIZA
As archaeological science becomes more sophisticated, so the plunder escalates. The German professor Richard Lepsius, one of the world's greatest Egyptologists, ships 60 bargeloads of antiquities out of Egypt.
He builds the Egyptian collection in Berlin, and is helped by the fact that a Frenchman, François Champollion, has worked out the meaning of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics in 1822. For the first time, an ancient language has been deciphered, and what were once mysterious monuments could now be understood.
Armed with this new knowledge, Egyptologists such as Lepsius turn the study of ancient civilisation into an academic industry.
Back to time line1880
MARIETTE and the MUSEUM OF CAIRO
After Belzoni's popular books and exhibitions, every collector and every European government wants a piece of ancient Egypt.
Frenchman Auguste Mariette begins his professional life in Egypt as an antiquities buyer for the Louvre but becomes the father of the national museum, the forerunner of today's Cairo Museum.
Whenever he sees archaeological riches being sold or carried away, he intervenes and confiscates them. On one occasion, he chases a local potentate, who has seized some ancient jewellery from an excavation at Thebes, by boat and forces him to hand back the jewellery.
Mariette also does a lot of digging at many sites in Memphis, Sakkara and Thebes.
Employed by Said Pasha, the ruler of Egypt, Mariette establishes a museum of antiquities just outside Cairo.
In 1900, Mariette's collection is transferred to a new museum building, designed by the French architect Marcel Dourgnon, in Cairo. Egypt has begun to reclaim its own past.
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