Rebuilding the Distant Past
Every picture you see of the Parthenon, the most spectacular surviving temple of the ancient world, shows things there looking pretty scrubby, what with huge broken pieces of marble and other stone strewn all over the place, and seemingly still no roof on the thing.
Civilization is supposed to be characterized by order, among other things, and all our lives we are told that that particular building was the crowning glory of the birth of civilization, architecturally speaking.. So, with all our enormous modern capabilities, why hasn't the Parthenon long ago been brought back to what it was at that birth and for a long time afterward? Why does crowning achievement have to look so constantly incomplete and decrepit? And what is technology as far advanced as ours for, if not for a cause like that?
Well, it seems that the good people of none other than Nashville, Tennessee, have already done just that, and a long time ago, too, such as in 1897, when for an exposition they built an exact replica of the Parthenon.
But that is not Athens, Greece,is it? Where everything happened. That is not high up on the Acropolis, from where you can see for many miles in all directions, and even to the beautiful seas over which so many storied figures came and went, making history and mythology.
No, instead it's in Nashville, in Tennessee, the home of rock and roll, or rockabilly, or country music, or Elvis Presley, or entities like that. It's not where Pericles, the great building, orator, and leader walked and talked, and, for all we know, may even have delivered a few knee-wobbling licks on his lyre as well.
However, we read that the people who are living in Greece now actually are rebuilding the Parthenon, and, as much as possible, from its original stone and not of the concrete that the Nashvillians used to rebuild theirs in 1920 from its original wood. The trouble, though, is that the modern Greeks have been at it for the past 30 years, and they're saying it's such a job that it might take an additional 30 years.
Two 30's equal 60 years.
Yet, without an electric motor, a gas engine, or a steel cable anywhere to be seen, it took the ancient Athenians just nine years to put up the Parthenon, and most likely less than that to put it back up a little later, after some Persian dummies, wantonly destructive and with no sense of proportion, as military types almost always are outside their own territory, demolished it.
I appreciate that the modern Greeks have better things to do, such as maintaining themselves in that rocky land. And the Parthenon is not really all their responsibility anyway. It is so renowned that true possession of it escaped from the Pelops long ago, and it now belongs to all the world.
So look at Dubai and Las Vegas to see just two of the most flagrant examples of modern architectural fancy run amuck and for no good purpose, yet built at costs that ought to dwarf what it should take to bring the Parthenon back to its full glory of a mere 2,500 years ago.
Civilization is supposed to be characterized by order, among other things, and all our lives we are told that that particular building was the crowning glory of the birth of civilization, architecturally speaking.. So, with all our enormous modern capabilities, why hasn't the Parthenon long ago been brought back to what it was at that birth and for a long time afterward? Why does crowning achievement have to look so constantly incomplete and decrepit? And what is technology as far advanced as ours for, if not for a cause like that?
Well, it seems that the good people of none other than Nashville, Tennessee, have already done just that, and a long time ago, too, such as in 1897, when for an exposition they built an exact replica of the Parthenon.
But that is not Athens, Greece,is it? Where everything happened. That is not high up on the Acropolis, from where you can see for many miles in all directions, and even to the beautiful seas over which so many storied figures came and went, making history and mythology.
No, instead it's in Nashville, in Tennessee, the home of rock and roll, or rockabilly, or country music, or Elvis Presley, or entities like that. It's not where Pericles, the great building, orator, and leader walked and talked, and, for all we know, may even have delivered a few knee-wobbling licks on his lyre as well.
However, we read that the people who are living in Greece now actually are rebuilding the Parthenon, and, as much as possible, from its original stone and not of the concrete that the Nashvillians used to rebuild theirs in 1920 from its original wood. The trouble, though, is that the modern Greeks have been at it for the past 30 years, and they're saying it's such a job that it might take an additional 30 years.
Two 30's equal 60 years.
Yet, without an electric motor, a gas engine, or a steel cable anywhere to be seen, it took the ancient Athenians just nine years to put up the Parthenon, and most likely less than that to put it back up a little later, after some Persian dummies, wantonly destructive and with no sense of proportion, as military types almost always are outside their own territory, demolished it.
I appreciate that the modern Greeks have better things to do, such as maintaining themselves in that rocky land. And the Parthenon is not really all their responsibility anyway. It is so renowned that true possession of it escaped from the Pelops long ago, and it now belongs to all the world.
So look at Dubai and Las Vegas to see just two of the most flagrant examples of modern architectural fancy run amuck and for no good purpose, yet built at costs that ought to dwarf what it should take to bring the Parthenon back to its full glory of a mere 2,500 years ago.
And we wouldn't need the gold, silver, and ivory statue of Athena that once stood inside either -- unless the more twisted of us, with no sense of proportion, insisted. The Nashvillians have already been unable to avoid that mistake, and they put a lot of work and good research into it, too -- though not the gold, silver, and ivory. But from here there was something a little too bizarre-looking about that thing, or at least about the artist guesses based on verbal descriptions, which are the only images we have of it. A goddess deserves better.
But I've heard that acid rain and air pollution in Athens and also in Rome, where it would be even more engrossing to wander around in the Colosseum complete with its canvas roof just as it was in gladiator days -- but minus the spectators and the spectacles -- are doing a number on all the ancient stone. So the rebuilders, if they actually exist, need to get busy.
The Great Pyramid outside Cairo need not be included. Bringing that back from its present rat-gnawed state would just be a waste of time, as was the case when it and all the other pyramids were built, a series of the greatest make-work projects ever to be inflicted on men -- that is, unless the present inhabitants of Egypt likewise have nothing better to do, and after all it was their ancestors who stripped so much of the casings off those things to begin with -- too lazy to go to the trouble that the ancients -- or maybe extra-terrestrials -- took.
But the Parthenon and the Colosseum are something else -- minus, of course, anything resembling the devotions in the one and the obscenities that went on for so unmercifully long a time in the other.
But I've heard that acid rain and air pollution in Athens and also in Rome, where it would be even more engrossing to wander around in the Colosseum complete with its canvas roof just as it was in gladiator days -- but minus the spectators and the spectacles -- are doing a number on all the ancient stone. So the rebuilders, if they actually exist, need to get busy.
The Great Pyramid outside Cairo need not be included. Bringing that back from its present rat-gnawed state would just be a waste of time, as was the case when it and all the other pyramids were built, a series of the greatest make-work projects ever to be inflicted on men -- that is, unless the present inhabitants of Egypt likewise have nothing better to do, and after all it was their ancestors who stripped so much of the casings off those things to begin with -- too lazy to go to the trouble that the ancients -- or maybe extra-terrestrials -- took.
But the Parthenon and the Colosseum are something else -- minus, of course, anything resembling the devotions in the one and the obscenities that went on for so unmercifully long a time in the other.
(The pics are from the Wikipedia or a related place. I have never crossed the Atlantic, and have had no occasion to go to or through Nashville either.)
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 7:00 AM
2 Comments:
I like the idea of rebuilding the distant past. In fact, I like the idea so much, that I would extend it to include the Giza Pyramids. And not just Giza either; the Temple of Solomon should be rebuilt (somewhere less contentious than Jerusalem, of course), as should the Great Library and Great Lighthouse of Alexandria, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Bamiyan Buddhas destroyed recently by the Taliban. The full span of the Great Wall, the full glory of Angkor Wat and Borobudur, the full weight of Stonehenge and Gobekli Tepe, the full grandeur of the cities of Cahokia, Machu Picchu, and Chichen Itza should, in my opinion, be restored at least in part, as monuments of the past for future generations.
The Temple of Artemis that stood at Ephesus, the statue of Zeus that sat at Olympia, the triple temple of Uppsala to Thor, Odin, and Freyr, in my opinion, should be restored to the ranks of the Ise Grand Shrine of Japan, which has been rebuilt every 20 years for at least fourteen centuries, and which will likely continue to serve as a marker of human history for as long as human society survives in Japan.
And in future decades, when the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, the Mall of Washington, the Statue of Crazy Horse, the Cristo Redentor, and the Sydney Opera House have faded into the backdrop of a world yet to be imagined, I believe that those future people should preserve their past, our present. Not for any utility or inherent meaning of the structures per se, but in order to preserve the vanishing and precious knowledge of how our ancestors thought and moved.
Well said. Build them again. It will make for a better tourist attraction. Perhaps the polytheism could be restored as well for followers.
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