Ancient/Now - September 27th

The Culture Wars of 2023 and the Museo Egizio in Turin

Italian politician calls for Museo Egizio director to be “kicked out”

Museo Egizio, Turin. (Source)

Culture wars are the norm in the United States, and they usually take form in places where public funding is active. Since Americans have already dissolved so much public museum funding (!) and because our museums are increasingly funded by private endowments, our culture wars have headed to institutions of higher learning. Florida saw the takeover of the New College’s Board of Governors this past year; programs considered “woke” like Gender Studies was axed; professors were denied tenure and/or fired; loyalist Republican administrators were hired into key positions. Florida also saw the creation of a Christian backed alternative to the SAT college board exam, called the Classic Learning Test of CLT, stocked with analysis of Bible excerpts and texts from the Western (read: White) canon, like Dickens, Homer’s Odyssey, and selections of Cicero. All of this change serves Florida Governor Ron DeSantis who is fighting what he calls “woke indoctrination.” And we haven’t even gotten to the culture wars in Texas.

Or Italy, for that matter, which recently welcomed its own Right wing government intent on killing inclusion and acceptance. This last week various news outlets reported that a right-wing Italian politician, Andrea Crippa, is calling for Christian Greco, the director of the Museo Egizio in Turin, to be “kicked out” for offering discounted tickets to Arabic speaking visitors in February 2018. Greco offered those tickets to promote dialogue between cultures and to acknowledge Europe’s colonization and theft of Egypt’s cultural treasures.

I mean think about it: it’s a strange thing that one of the largest collections of ancient Egyptian objects finds itself in northern Italy. A quick scan of Brian Fagan’s Rape of the Nile will school you in early 19th century treasure hunters like Giovanni Belzoni and Bernardo Drovetti who identified and took priceless statues and architecture out of Egypt without local consent—without care of context or record keeping—hauled them aboard ships, and sold them to the highest bidder, many of them ending up in Turin. With a past like that, cultural corrections are imperative, and Greco is meeting the challenge by reaching out to Middle Eastern museum visitors, many of them Egyptian.

Italian politician Andrea Crippa, however, denounced the discount tickets to Arabic speakers as a gesture made in an “ideological and racist manner against Italians and Christians.” It’s a loud anti-Muslim, nationalist screed, what Americans might understand as a Speak-English! sort of outcry.

But let’s look at Christian Greco’s track record. Maybe these Italian politicians are upset the museum is not drawing visitors. The Guardian writes,

Under Greco’s leadership, ticket sales at the museum have boomed, with more than 900,000 visitors to the site in 2022, up by 6.3% from pre-pandemic levels, and constant queues outside.

It seems lots of people are banging down the doors of the Museo Egizio; it’s a popular place. Indeed, Greco has revamped the entire museum, creating beautifully curated galleries that educate the public about ancient Egypt in a new way, welcoming visitors who want to learn about the ancient past, not just consume the positivist stories of mysteries and magic. The tomb of Kha and Merit has not only been carefully redisplayed, but the tomb’s objects are being painstakingly studied by material and social scientists, tracking the source of metals, woods, paints, stones and plasters. In-depth exploration of the outer coffin of Butehamen—in cooperation with crack scientific laboratories at the Vatican Museums—has recently revealed that this early 21st Dynasty coffin was made from a reused 18th Dynasty coffin. (You know how I love coffin reuse.)

The Museo Egizio is a space of ongoing curiosity and scientific discovery. It also draws visitors from all over the world—from Europe, the UK, North and South America, Japan, Australia, China, Korea, the Middle East, and, yes, also from Egypt, an Arabic speaking, North African country from which the Museo Egizio holdings come. Perhaps such globalized fame is a threat to an isolationist, hyper-nationalist Italy-First government. Seems even Greco’s PhD training in the Netherlands and past work abroad is a problem with this Right Wing government:

In an interview with La Stampa on Thursday, Greco, an Italian who previously worked abroad, defended his track record, saying that “political interference only exists in Italy.”

“In Italy political interference is excessive, it ruins the equilibrium and is a problem that has always existed,” he added. “During my seven years of working abroad, I never saw a politician.”

In short, Greco is saying that his previous museum work in the Netherlands did not suffer such culture wars and that all such political intervention is coming from the right wing Italian government led by Giorgia Meloni. (The Netherlands has its own Right Wing, of course, but it doesn’t seem as interested in antiquity, at least not yet.) Italy has reached the point at which cultural institutions are being weaponized. This type of political harassment is an overt effort to influence and exert control over scholars and cultural institutions, and it cannot be tolerated. Christian Greco’s leadership of the Museo Egizio has been marked with extraordinary success, and he has demonstrated courage in resisting political forces that thrive on damaging social and cultural divisions in Italy.

These culture wars are going to get worse, not better. We are entering into a time in which cultural things—museums, universities, the books we have access to, the things we are allowed to write—are all under reinvestigation for what they do, whom they serve, how they work, how they are funded. Museums and universities in the United States have been White supremacist patriarchal machines for a long time; when they were, they sure as hell were better funded. Now that women and non-binary people and immigrants are allowed into these places, *poof*, angry people shout that they are not going to let their state funding go to woke agendas.

Such culture wars have been going on forever. You think Akhenaten didn’t weaponize his new religion of sun worship against political-priestly competitors? Or that Ramses II’s semi-disastrous Kadesh campaign wasn’t turned into the *best war ever*?

History is more relevant than ever. And it is as misused as it ever was. This is why museums like the Museo Egizio must endure ongoing and careful reflection about the nature of their inclusion, the diversity of their audience, and their growing role in manufacturing what we know as human history. We can either run back to a mythical past in which only some of us had/have prosperity-gospel-power, or we can move forward with thoughtful reflection trying to craft inclusive museum spaces for a diverse public and open to criticism of past collection practices.

If you would like to express your support for Christian Greco, you can sign this change.org petition.

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What else were we reading this week?

The Ancient Rules of Beauty: Creating a Female Identity in a Man’s World

The Sistrum: Echoes of Egypt in Minoan Civilization

New discoveries off Egyptian coast reveal ‘treasures and secrets’

Animal sacrifices and astral tombs: The mysteries still emerging from the Saudi deserts

Ancient Logs Offer Earliest Example of Human Woodworking

Archaeologists Are Using Modern Tools to Learn About Visitors to an Ancient Egyptian Temple

Provenance of a Museum’s Greek Exhibit Is Questioned, Fueling a Debate

Ancient DNA from a Cuneiform Brick

New Indo-European language discovered during excavation in Turkey

Construction Workers Plow a Shortcut Through the Great Wall of China

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One more thing…

HT to podcast patron @Noir88 for this Cunk on Earth meme!