Selective vandalism

Martin Gayford For a while something puzzled me about the sacking and pillaging of the Baghdad museum. The looting was not hard to comprehend — after all everything movable and of any value was being removed at the time. But why the wanton destruction? Why, to put it at its simplest, spend one's time belabouring an Assyrian sculpture with a hammer when you could be half-inching a saleable air-conditioning unit?

Then the answer came to me: archaeology is always, and particularly under regimes such as Saddam Hussein's, an intensely political matter. Indeed, the expresident of Iraq was quite typical of tyrants and dictators in taking a close — not to say sinister — interest in the artefacts of the remote past.

Let's take another, less topical, example. Most of us on visits to Rome will sooner or later end up spending a bit of time hanging around Piazza Argentina. As it appears at the moment, this is one of the dreariest spots in the mediaeval and Renaissance heart of the city (not far, in fact, from Piazza Navona and the Four Rivers fountain).

It is essentially a large open-air bus terminus, arranged around an excavated area in the centre of the square. At the bottom of this can be seen — though few ever bother to peer at them through the diesel fumes — the decayed stumps of a few temples from the era of Republican Rome.

Almost nobody now realises that this urban area was specifically created by II Duce to display these valuable relics and several picturesque mediaeval and Renaissance streets were demolished in the process. The Via della Conciliazione, punched through the atmospheric old district of the Borgo to celebrate his concordat with the papacy, is another example of Mussolini's selective vandalism.

He regarded his own creation as La Terza Roma (the third Rome), the previous two being ancient Rome, and the city of the Popes. But he was much more interested in the first of these, as being a suitably expansionist and imperial precedent for his own fascist capital. This is the fundamental reason why archaeology tends to be such a political matter: everybody tends to choose the past they find most satisfactory, then venerate it. The remnants of other, less significant periods are forgotten or even actively destroyed.

It is not only tyrannical and dictatorial regimes that do this. Modern Greece has been neither, except for the brief period of the Colonels' rule. But as we now see it the Parthenon. perhaps the most venerated archaeological site in the world, is the product of nearly two centuries of systematic demolition, erasure and reconstruction.

All that the visitor can now see,' as Mary Beard puts it in her excellent short book The Parthenon, 'is what the archaeologists of the 19th century chose to leave behind.' Namely, 'a handful of monuments with a fifth-century BC pedigree, standing in splendid (or uncomfortable) isolation, stripped of as much of their later history as possible'.

Among the vestiges of unsuitable periods thus removed were a Turkish minaret that used to protrude from the Parthenon itself, a Renaissance palace once built into the Propylaia and a mediaeval Florentine tower. The last of those, of course, is exactly the kind of thing that in Tuscany would itself be carefully restored and perhaps stripped of accretions from less-venerated periods.

In Greece, one gets the impression that even Roman remains — near-sacred in Rome — are not regarded as particularly interesting (coming from rather a dullish era of foreign occupation). Meanwhile, in Turkish Cyprus Byzantine churches — lovingly preserved and restored in Greece — have been looted and vandalised. In Turkey itself, Armenian churches crumble. Then there is the case — not admittedly strictly archaeological — of the neglect and destruction of Georgian buildings in Eire.

One man's monument is another man's irritating eye-sore. The point is, obviously, that the past tells us who we are — so we choose the most flattering option available. That is doubtless why the subject has such an attraction for tyrants and dictatorships. Nothing makes that clearer than the bizarre and horrifying history of Soviet archaeology.

The father of the subject, as far as postrevolution Russia was concerned, was an eccentric scholar named Nikolai Marr. The son of an 80-year-old Scottish gardener and a Georgian peasant woman, Marr claimed to have discovered a new group of languages, spoken in the ancient Caucasus which he named Japhetic (after Japheth, the third son of Noah).

It has been suggested that his interest in linguistics was the product of an odd family life, as his aged father spoke no Georgian and his mother no English. In any case, Marr's Japhetic languages were complete fiction, but as a corollary he came up with an account of the development of prehistoric societies that sounds uncannily close to dialectical materialism.

As a result, after the revolution, he was appointed director of the new Academy of the History of Material Culture. ('Material Culture', by the way, is what new wave Marxist art historians like to call what used to be described as art.) In the following years, Soviet archaeology was devoted to demonstrating that the remote past had progressed along correct ideological lines.

Terms such as 'stone age' and 'bronze age' were condemned as bourgeois. The fate of scholars who failed to toe the line was grim. One was sent to a Siberian labour camp. where he died for 'writing long drawn-out reports on things he had excavated'.

After 1935. matters relaxed somewhat, although the party called for archaeologists to show that the Slays had inhabited European Russia from the most ancient times, which unfortunately they had not.

A huge excavation of a site on the lower Don, largely conducted by political prisoners, instead discovered an 8th-century fortress of the Khazars — who spoke Turkish and converted to Judaism, and whose artefacts were consequently not exhibited. Finally. in 1950, Stalin himself suddenly denounced Marr — luckily for the latter long after his death — and a fresh archaeological purge of 'Marrism' ensued.

It is in this context that we should consider the archaeological obsessions of Saddam. Consider his naming of Republican Guard regiments after Nebuchadnezzar and Hammurabi, his hideous rebuilding of ancient Babylon with bricks stamped with his own name. He wanted to be seen as the successor of Ur, Assyria and the Babylonians.

How would all that appear to a Kurd for example, or a Marsh Arab, whose own historic environment and way of life had been subject to a vindictive and murderous attack? It doesn't excuse the destruction, of course, but I think it does help to explain it.