The winner takes it all
By Manohar Malgonkar

WHEN I went to Berlin, in 1963, it was still a city divided by a wall and embedded deep in the Communist block. It held no attractions for the casual tourist, particularly at the time of the year when I was there — December — when the sidewalks of Kurfurstendam were slippery with ice. I had gone there to be able to make a journey into "East Berlin which was then thought to be a grim outpost of an evil empire. But I stayed an extra day just to visit the Dahlem museum and see the head of Queen Nefertiti.

Queen who?

Nefertiti, the beautiful wife of an Egyptian monarch who lived nearly 3500 years ago.

So what is so special about her head? Is it made of pure gold, like the face mask of some other prehistoric Egyptian king they talk about — Tut, something?

Tutankhamon? No, no. The Nefertiti head is made of clay mixed with powdered limestone, or so they say, and it looks like a plaster cast. And it is quite breathtakingly lifelike. It is not even as though it was found in one of those ancient graves, but in the clutter of an artist’s studio, among similar heads and busts, most of them in pieces. But this one is whole, and it is considered by art critics to be a masterpiece, a one-of-a-kind treasure and thus, in the same class as the statue of Venus of Milo and the painting of Mona Lisa, both of them, be it noted, are kept in the Louvre in Paris.

So what is this national treasure of Egypt doing in a Berlin museum? Surely, its proper place would be the state museum in Cairo?

That’s just it. The story of how Nefertiti’s head ended up in Berlin helps me to make my point that many of the world’s greatest treasures have a way of ending up in the richest museums of the world and also that, in the past , they were just taken away by their finders, or indeed, as in the case of the Nefertiti head, well, sneaked out of the country of its origin — or is stolen the word?

In 1912, a German archaeologist, James Simon, discovered the studio which contained Nefertiti’s head. In those days Egypt was ruled by Britain, and such archaeological digs were allowed to be carried out on the condition that all objects of value that were discovered would be shared equally between the finders and the Egyptian Government. Simon, realising that the Egyptians would never let so precious an object as the Nefertiti head go out of the country, actually managed to smuggle it out to Germany. As soon as the Egyptians come to know of this trickery, they asked the museum authorities in Germany to return Nefertiti’s head, but World War I broke out, and in the chaos that prevailed in Germany, no progress could be made till well into the mid 1930s when some sort of order had returned. That was when, with the museum itself ready to give up the head, Adolph Hitler intervened and ruled that "Nefertiti must, and will always belong to Germany."

The same logic, of finders claiming ownership of archaeological treasures, has enriched the world’s biggest museums.

Visitors to London doing their coach tours are taken past a stone obelisk which stands on the Thames embankment. "Cleopatra’s needle" the coach guide announces, and rattles off the statistics: Sixty-eight and a half feet tall... it once stood at the entrance of the Sun Temple in the Egyptian desert and is 3500 years old. It weighs 180 tons. It was presented (presented?) to the British by Egypt’s King Mehemet in the year 1818. As it was being towed to England a storm broke out and the needle had to be abandoned on the coast of the Bay of Biskay, where it lay for the next sixty years. It was not until 1878, in the reign of Queen Victoria that it was finally brought to London and has been there ever since. As much a British heirloom as the Nefertiti head is German, or, for that matter, the Venus of Milo and Mona Lisa are French.

That the great national and private museums of the western world are crammed with the looted treasures of ex-empires, is a well-known fact, and no one, neither country nor museum, seems to be regretful about the robberies. After all, empires were won by fighting battles against local rulers or warlords. Every battle that was won was a signal for plunder. After victorious soldiers had smashed up whatever they took a dislike to, helped themselves to `whatever took their fancy, the officers got into the act. A committee was appointed to divide the loot in the conquered prince’s treasury to make sure that everything was shared strictly according to protocol, with the ‘king’s portion’ set aside.

For instance when in the year 1801, the Iron Duke won his first major battle, against Tipu Sultan, "about 7 lakh of pagodas worth of jewels were taken... and shawls and rich cloths enough to load 500 camels. The footstool of the throne of Tipu is now preserved in Windsor Castle and so is the golden head of a tiger, the emblem of his empire..." the list goes on toting up other items such as Tipu’s golden howdah... they kept meticulous accounts.

That battle was only one of perhaps 50 or so, and each one was a rich haul for the winners. The very last of these battles was against the Sikhs in the Punjab. The royal share of that particular prize money was the diamond, Koh-i-Noor.

At that it would be wrong to single out the empire-building British. Earlier conquerors too had indulged in wholesale plunder and indeed the prospect of loot was the main purpose of military expeditions such as that of Mohammed of Gazni to the coast of Gujarat. And some seven centuries after the sack of Somnath, we have Nadir Shah’s sack of Delhi Nadir, who had come all the way from Iran and took away thousands of slaves and women and gold and precious stones "valued at between 30 and 70 million sterling," as Murray’s guide reports, to say nothing of the fabled Peacock Throne of the Great Mughals.

So Britain’s empire-builders were only doing what other conquering armies had done before, but, being British and thus, ‘fair-minded,’ they devised rules to be followed by their military commanders. They appointed boards of officers to divide the booty equally, so that even the foot-soldiers were given their share.

Then again, it is not as though all the foreign artefacts contained in Britain’s museums were acquired by victorious armies. Many Britons who were both rich and powerful were also men of good taste. They bought things on their foreign tours either to keep in their own houses or, at times, with a view to being able to sell them to some museum or the other at a handsome profit.

As for instance the famous Elgin Marbles.

They’re called the Elgin Marbles only because they were bought by the 7th Earl of Elgin who, in the second decade of the 19th century, was Britain’s Ambassador to Greece. The marble statuary he bought was from the ruins of the Parthenon in Athens which was built in the 5th century B.C. These particular pieces, once a part of the frieze, were said to have been sculpted by Phidias himself, who was also the architect of the Parthenon. Lord Elgin, we’re told, spent something like £70,000 to acquire the marbles. The British Government, which bought them from him, paid him only £35,000. They‘re regarded as a star attraction of the british Museum.

There was some talk, in the late sixties of this century, when a famous Greek film actress turned politician, (Melina Mercuri?) said that the Greek government would seek to retrieve the Elgin Marbles. But Adolph Hitler had set the precedent. No museum was ever going to return whatever it possessed. Even if one such claim were to be admitted, it would set up a trend, and most of the great museums of Europe and America would be emptied of their treasures.