Time In A Bottle

Imagine that you are lost. Can you imagine that? Probably not, right? Not any more. Pull out the iPhone and you know exactly where you are, presuming Google Maps or your app of choice isn't confusing your location with somewhere else or someone else and there's enough signal. Like that last part is much of an issue any more. 

But it wasn't always that way, right? We do remember those days, don't we? Some of us? Maybe? Not before reliable signal. I mean before phones with us everywhere we go.

So it used to be different. What's the big deal about being lost anyway? I mean so you go down the wrong street and have to turn around and walk or drive back again. What's the problem? Who really needs a nav app? And people used to get around fine with paper maps. I can't quite believe it but I used to drive all over the United States with no cellphone and a road atlas or a series of printed or written directions or both. Hey...it worked. I got everywhere I needed to get and I was rarely, if ever, late. No. Big. Deal.

Now imagine it's the early 1700s and you are on a boat. I don't mean like a rowboat within sight of shore somewhere. I mean like a ship on the open ocean. Do you have any idea where you are on the face of the planet? There's no GPS back then and there's nothing to see but just water, water, everywhere. How the heck do you know where on the ocean you are?

There is insufficient time (and personal understanding of the subject) for me to go into exhaustive detail on this blog about the history of mankind's ability to navigate on open water. But suffice it to say that various methods of moving on and over our planet's large expanses of water have been used over time. Star charts. Ocean charts. The compass (after like the 11th or 12th century). Bird movements (not kidding). And the sun. But the sun and the stars had some limitations. The stars could only help at night (and a cloudless night at that) and the sun could really only help with a latitude determination (meaning where you are up or down the planet) based on the known date. True position determination needs more than just latitude.

You need both latitude and longitude.

Standing either side of the Prime Meridian (0 degrees longitude), Greenwich.

Longitude (meaning where you are relative to the prime meridian or right to left on the planet) was way tougher to determine. And honestly, if you know where you are up-down but not right-left, it's not really that useful in determining exactly where on the open ocean you are. So sure, I'd rather have some clue where I am north-south on the globe but disaster can strike if you don't know where you are in the other direction. And it did. Frequently. Wrecking ships and killing sailors. 

So why is figuring out longitude tougher? Well...it's not. It really is pretty easy and can be done if you know what time it is. We have that on our phones, right? Oh wait a second...

Let's go back to that early 1700s on a boat scenario shall we? At that time in history there were two options for timepieces: clock or pocket watch. Clocks at that time in our history had pendulums and didn't work so well when on the ocean. The waves kind of messed up the pendulum's action. Not an option. And pocket watches? Terribly inaccurate. There's an unverified comment on the pocket watch Wikipedia page (always a dangerous source of information, I know...) that states that pocket watches in the 1700s were fast to the tune of an hour a day. Know how long an ocean trip took back then? More than a few days. And if your watch is an hour fast and you try to plot your position, you could be a time zone off. That's pretty big.

The Octagon Room inside the Flamsteed House, Greenwich.

So, around the turn of the 18th century, some countries decided to try to do something about the issue of figuring out longitude while ocean-bound. In 1714, Britain issued a challenge for anyone to take up: find a way to solve the issue of determining longitude while at sea and there's a reward. It was called the Longitude Act. And some people took that challenge pretty seriously. Hey...there was government cash involved. Like £20,000. That's like about £4 million in today's money.

One of those people was a carpenter and clockmaker from the West Riding of Yorkshire named John Harrison. In 1714, he was 19 years old. And he thought if he could make a clock that worked on a ship, that prize might just be his.

To be clear, here, there were potentially other solutions to the longitude problem, but not necessarily to a clockmaker.

14 years later, John Harrison was hard at work designing and manufacturing a marine clock using two interconnected balances joined by a spring that would substitute for the traditional pendulum on most clocks of the day. It was based on a design that he had used in building incredibly accurate wooden clocks in the past, although wood clearly wouldn't work on board a ship due to expansion concerns. To me, this clock looks like it has two pendulums with large balls on the top which oscillate towards and away from each other (there's a picture below). 

Harrison's first marine clock (now called H1) was the first device or idea of any sort tested to see if it might meet the requirements of the Longitude Act. It was taken for a test drive on a journey to Portugal in 1736, about eight years after Harrison had started working on it but just five years after he actually started building it. Eight years. Designing and building a clock. I assume he had other work to do during this period but you know...

Harrison's clock worked and it didn't work on the voyage there and back to Lisbon. It lost time on the way there but was used to correctly pinpoint the longitude of the ship on the return trip when the ship's Master's opinion was that the ship was in a different location. Pretty good, right? But not good enough for either Harrison or the Board of Longitude. Another clock would be required. Although it was promising enough that Harrison was paid £500 by the Board to start work on H2.

Nice try. Thanks for the last eight years. Keep going but start over.

H1. Completed 1735. Tested 1736.

If you want to see the H1 clock today that Harrison built 190 years ago or so, you can. It's in the Flamsteed house, the Christoper Wren-designed part of the Royal Observatory that's at the top of the hill in Greenwich, England, just a bit down the Thames to the east of London. H1 sits smack in the middle of an entire exhibit devoted to the Longitude Act. The stories of the ships that were wrecked on hidden reefs or rocks all because they didn't know or couldn't tell exactly where in the ocean or sea or channel or whatever they were floating on are astonishing. It's no wonder that this was such a high priority for more than one European nation to issue a call for solutions.

There is also a really pretty informative interactive display showing why a pendulum clock won't work on a boat that is listing to one side. When the boat is tilted in the exhibit, the clock's pendulum keeps swinging, but the center of the clock where the action of the pendulum advances the time doesn't ever get passed by the pendulum, so it doesn't keep time. 

Harrison's second effort (H2) is in the Royal Observatory as well. And spoiler alert: so is every other clock that Harrison submitted in consideration of the Longitude Act prize. H2 took Harrison just three years to build and it actually seemed like it would work well enough to claim victory over the whole longitude issue. It was tested by Harrison on land enough that he felt pretty confident about this device having a shot at winning the cash money. But he eventually figured out that the device might not survive the tilt of a boat tacking and he couldn't very well tell captains of ships not to tack. I guess he knew what he had done wrong because he suddenly ceased work on the H2 clock version and started on the third iteration of his ideas (H3) in the year 1740. Another three years gone. So we are up to now what...11 years? All in pursuit of a clock that works on a ship?

To me, H2 looks less like a traditional clock than H1. Not a whole lot, but it's definitely less timepiece-like. Maybe that's part of the point of what was going on in Harrison's head. Maybe the answer here would be something that didn't look like a traditional clock. I am pretty confident here that I will never, ever be able to understand how these or any other clocks work, so I'm sure I'm stabbing in the dark here and making the leap that less clock-like means closer to the solution. Maybe it's the architect in me that's speaking here. 

All of these clocks in the Royal Observatory by the way: spectacular condition. I mean these things look better than any object I own in my entire house. And they are almost 200 years old. I realize there are probably people out there paid a lot of money to maintain these things but still...spectacular!!!

H2. Completed 1740. Never tested at sea.

If H1 and H2 represented a pretty good effort at the Longitude Act prize, H3 was, simply put, an incredible science project for sure. Eight years on H1 and three on H2? Child's play. H3? 19 years. 1740 to 1759. 19 years on one clock. Apparently, it was a masterpiece. It moved clock technology forward through the introduction of a bimetal strip for temperature compensation and a special roller bearing that would reduce friction. The design of the clock got Harrison the Copley Medal, the highest award conferred by the Royal Society. By all accounts, it was an act of supreme clock-making genius and craftsmanship, well worth the 19 years that Harrison labored over the thing. 

But it didn't win him the Longitude Act money. It wasn't accurate enough. He knew it as soon as it was done. They didn't even test it on a ship. Skipped the whole thing.

Can you imagine working on something for almost two decades to get to a specific goal only to abandon it because what you had invented and built wasn't good enough? Harrison turned 66 in 1759. He'd been working on this problem for over 30 years and he still hadn't solved it, including after spending 19 whole years on his third try.

H3 sits in the same room in the Flamsteed House as H1 and H2. Like both of its predecessors, it is in immaculate condition. It's just gorgeous. But it does not look like a clock. Not really. Not the way I think of a clock with a 1-12 dial with an hour, minute and maybe a second hand on it. I realize that H1, H2 and H3 all look primarily like really well put together bronze boxes but with each iteration, I feel they are getting further and further away from being clock-like. It's pretty obvious (with the benefit of 200 plus years of history) that something interesting is going on here.

So...30 plus years in working on a problem and he still doesn't have it licked. Thinking about quitting? Not our guy John Harrison. He kept going.

If you are feeling bad for Harrison at this point, by the way, I guess that's understandable. But he was receiving some payment from the Longitude Board for his efforts. Thought the completion of H3, Harrison had taken home £3,000 in payment for his efforts. I know it's not 30 years worth of effort but it's not nothing. Still...three clocks and only one sea test? That is kind of brutal.

H3. Completed 1759. Never tested at sea.

So what happens after you work for 30 years on a single problem without solving the issue? Well, in John Harrison's case, he just went ahead and solved it. He did it with H4. And H4 looks nothing like H1 through H3. Nothing. 

While he'd been working away on his sea clocks, John Harrison had continued to make clocks un-related to the Longitude Act. In the early 1750s, he had commissioned a watch maker to assemble a pocket watch for him that would continue to run while being wound but also would work consistently under different temperature conditions. And apparently, these innovations for this watch inspired Harrison to make something completely unlike his previous sea clocks and decidedly more pocket-watch-y. Although it's a pretty darned large pocket watch and is really nothing like a pocket watch at all.

I've claimed extreme ignorance of the inner workings of timepieces once in this post and here I'm going to do it again. I have no ability to explain how H4 works other than reading what's on the Royal Observatory's website and writing that H4 in pretty much all ways resembled a full size clock more than a something you would carry in your waistcoat pocket and the fact that it ticked five times a second allowed it to be more accurate and more resilient than any other portable watch created to date in human history.

The enclosed mechanism of H4 (minus the outer case that made it watch-like) is on display in the Royal Observatory. It looks like something out a science fiction movie. It is simultaneously space-ace and absolutely beautifully crafted as if worked on by an Arts and Crafts movement master (note the capital A and capital C there; not an accident). If this thing had popped in in one of the Dune movies (the 21st century ones, not the Dino De Laurentiis one), it would not have looked in the least bit out of place. It's stunningly gorgeous. 

H4. The winner.

H4 was ready for a sea test in 1761, just two years after Harrison stopped working on his 19-year long H3 project. It passed that sea test to Jamaica and it passed a second sea test (this time under competition with other Longitude Act competitors that had gone the non-sea clock route to win the prize) to Barbados in 1764 where it was declared accurate within the constraints of the Longitude Act. Harrison had won.

The end of this story isn't as tidy as that. There were disputes as to payment or whether full payment should be conferred. The Royal Astronomer (Nevil Maskelyne, if you must know) was especially determined to not let Harrison win the prize and kept debating and refuting the effectiveness of H4 for at least two years after the Barbados test. According to the Royal Observatory, Harrison was eventually paid everything that was owed to him but it may have been by Parliament and not the Longitude Board. The description next to H4 says that H4 is "arguably the most important timepiece ever made." Not too shabby for 32 or 33 or years of work, right?

H4 was not the last clock Harrison produced in his life. He apparently was still tinkering with his last clock design when he died in 1776. That's some serious dedication.

John Harrison. Front and center.

There is a lot to see at the Royal Observatory that is not related to John Harrison or the Longitude Act. I'm not sure I can adequately describe everything that they have on display up there at the top of the hill in Greenwich but Wren's building, telescopes and planetary observation history might top my list if pressed. We didn't go to see any of that stuff. We were strictly focused on Harrison's clocks, which (full disclosure) I had already seen in person but which will endlessly fascinate me. It's as much the story as the history.

If you want to go do the same thing (and only the same thing) as we did on this trip, I'd suggest you not ask any of the museum staff "where are the clocks?" We did and our question was answered with a question: "which clocks?"

Yes, there are many, many clocks at the Royal Observatory and fewer than ten of them were designed and built by John Harrison (there are more than four Harrison clocks at the Observatory although I don't know how many; I'm guessing not more than ten). Asking where are the clocks ain't going to cut it at this cultural attraction.

There are some other things to see that are at least partially relevant to longitude and the accuracy of timekeeping. First (and I realize it's a huge tourist trap type thing), the Prime Meridian (or zero degrees longitude) passes through Greenwich in recognition of the Royal Observatory's role in defining longitude. There's a literal line you can straddle with one foot in each of the eastern and western hemispheres. Of course we did this. How could we not? I stood in two hemispheres in Ecuador; I had to do it here in Greenwich.

Second, there is a big red ball on the top of Flamsteed House. It was installed there in 1833 and was dropped at 1 pm each day so that ships on the river in sight of the Observatory could re-set their watches each day. I know I already wrote about the inaccuracy of personal timekeeping devices but it is still astonishing to me that there would be a bunch of ships' captains on the river side of Greenwich watching a red ball drop to re-set their chronometers but I guess it happened. Like every day. The Observatory still observes this tradition today and we happened to be exiting the building at about 1 so we stuck around and watched. I fell like I'm closer to history for doing this.

The Acropolis Marbles

This post is about one room in a museum. I promise it's not that simplistic. Let's get right to it...

Actually...let me say one more thing first. 

I debated using an apostrophe after the word "Acropolis" in the title of this post. I think it's correct but ultimately, I think it looks better without. I do, however, think that there should be an apostrophe. Sometimes you can't have it all. It's not the first time I've bent the rules of grammar or punctuation based on how I think things should look. Oxford comma. That's all I really need to say on that subject. NOW, let's get right to it...

Last fall we visited Greece. Or maybe more accurately, last fall we visited Athens. As an architect, a trip to Athens was a long time coming for one reason and one reason alone: the Acropolis, the hilltop site in the center of the city which includes the most perfect Greek Doric temple of all time, the Parthenon. Look, the Greeks pretty much invented architecture. Finally laying eyes on one of their masterpieces (if not THE masterpiece) was super exciting.

Our whole experience at the Acropolis was incredible. I mean it really was as impressive as I'd been promised for decades. Our understanding and appreciation of the 2,500 or so year old temples on top of the hill was only enhanced by our visit to the Acropolis Museum right after we descended back down to Athens proper. But our visit to this site wasn't really complete, and that's because a good portion of the sculpture and carvings that used to be on the Parthenon are neither on the building itself nor are they in the Acropolis Museum. 

Now, this is not some huge mystery regarding what happened to them. It's not like they are lost or locked away somewhere. Everyone knows where they are. They are in the British Museum in the middle of London. So after visiting Greece and not seeing them there where they started out, and this year finding ourselves in England and more specifically London, we couldn't not go see these things and make last fall's trip to Greece more complete. 

Make sense? It made perfect sense to us.

Let's address the most obvious question about what I've written so far, shall I? Why is a part of the Parthenon in London and not in Athens where the rest of the mostly intact ancient temple is? It's a simple question, right? Maybe there's a simple answer. And I think there is. The simple answer is that they were removed from their original location by Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin, in the early 1800s. The truth, from at least one side of the table, would be argued as more nuanced than I've just described. So, not being one to mince words (or facts, in this case) let's just dig into that whole history for a minute.

Greece has not existed continuously as a country (or even as a collection of truly independent city-states) since the time of the Parthenon. It's evolved or devolved from a relatively successful series of independent cities to quite a bit less than that before pulling things together and establishing an independent nation. In between the Parthenon times and now (and like most places on this planet of ours) parts of modern day Greece at one time were under foreign control. In the early 1800s when this part of the story takes please, the city of Athens happened to be part of the Ottoman Empire. 

Now two plus centuries ago, much like today, nations appointed ambassadors to other nations to provide a personal touch in maintaining diplomatic relations. In the year 1800, the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire was one Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin. And I guess this appointment caused Bruce (I'm going to switch back and forth between Bruce and Elgin in this post when referring to the man) to turn his attention to the carvings that once adorned (or still did adorn in some cases) the Parthenon on the northern side of Athens' Acropolis. He decided he would use part of his time in his new post having some folks under his employment makes some plaster casts and drawings of the remaining sculpture still hanging around the site. For posterity, I'd imagine.

Elgin approached the British government to see if they'd like to cover the cost of his idea and the answer was apparently a hard no. So he decided to do it himself. He hired himself a crew and they started working. To make long story short and I'm sure I'm skipping a ton of details, at some point, this effort switched from making plaster casts and drawings to just removing the items from Athens entirely and bringing them to London where they just became the property of Lord Elgin. I know, I know, I skipped a lot of the story.

For his part, Elgin claimed to have the permission of the Ottoman Empire to abscond with some of their treasures and even produced a signed document from the Ottomans endorsing the removal. Apparently, the Ottoman Empire have never publicly confirmed the legitimacy of the document but Bruce had his story. 

The treasures of the Parthenon are not, today, in the possession of the descendants of Lord Elgin. They are (as I've already mentioned) in the British Museum. How did the British museum get them? Well...they bought them in August of 1816 for tidy sum of £35,000. 

Isn't it kind of sketchy for the British government to purchase some artwork that clearly originated at the site of another nation's national treasures and that were removed under some circumstances that appeared to be less than wholly legitimate? Apparently, the answer to that question was "yes" and to avoid the appearance of impropriety, in February 1816, the House of Commons conducted an investigation into whether the pieces of the Parthenon were removed legally or not. Today, there are questions about the document Elgin claimed was issued to him by the Turks and (assuming that document was genuine) whether removal of sculptures and carvings from the site are covered by that document. But in early 1816, apparently it was good enough for the House of Commons. Purchase approved! 

Today, all of the treasures gathered by Elgin sit in a special room on the west side of the British Museum. The room is dumbbell shaped and you enter the room at the center of the "handle" and are greeted by a carved sign that reads "These galleries designed to contain the Parthenon sculptures were given by Lord Duveen of Millbank 1939", although 1939 is written out in Roman numerals. These things are a big deal to the Museum. They are very valuable and important, even though they have absolutely nothing to do with anything to do with Great Britain or the British Empire other than some dude who was British removed them from their original location and sold them to the Museum.

Dionysus. Perhaps drinking wine at one time? Maybe?

The entire current "Elgin Marbles" collection includes three series of sculptures: (1) statuary from the east and west pediments of the Parthenon (the pediments are the triangular pieces at each end of the building); (2) 15 metopes or carved panels from the outside of the building which were located just above the perimeter columns; and (3) a good portion of the frieze that was installed on the exterior of the interior cella. The cella basically formed the two rooms of the temple, one of which housed the long lost statue of Athena. 

Of all the sculptures and carvings in the collection, the metopes (which show a battle between a group of centaurs and a peoples known as Lapiths at the wedding of Pirithous and Hippodamia) and the frieze (which shows a celebration procession for a festival honoring Athena) are clearly the best preserved of the artifacts in the room. They are actually largely intact, particularly the many panels of the frieze (there is about half of the total length of the frieze from the Parthenon in the British Museum) which are generally two-dimensional carved panels and have little to be knocked off because of the complete lack of three dimensional objects in space. If they are damaged, they are often broken at the corners.

The centaurs and Lapiths on the metopes are less intact, mostly a product of arms or legs or heads of centaurs and Lapiths being carved in the round away from the panels. In some cases, the heads are out there. Just not in London. Or Athens either. One of the description cards next to one of the metopes informed us that the missing head of the Lapith about to be hit with a pitcher by a centaur is in a museum in Copenhagen. Why? Why does some museum in Copenhagen need a part of that panel?

As a bit of an aside here, the centaurs and Lapiths are fighting because at the wedding that both groups were invited to, the centaurs tried to kidnap some of the Lapith women. Don't invite centaurs to your wedding is a lesson learned here for me.

Headless metope. Want to see the heads? Go to Copenhagen.

The most important and most visible, but also the least well preserved, sculptures in the Museum are the figures from the pediments at the ends of the Parthenon. These things are in some cases little more than fragments. Dionysus reclining among the figures that used to occupy the east pediment is probably the most intact, just missing his right arm and his left hand. I'm assuming at least one of those missing hands was holding a cup of wine. Heck, maybe even both were. 

I assume the reason that these particular sculptures are in such poor condition is that they could fall off or be knocked off the building and the result of such a fall would pretty much shatter the statues to bits upon impact. I remember seeing an animation in the Parthenon Museum last year showing Christians up on the pediments throwing the heathen god statues to the ground and smashing them. For some reason that animation stuck with me. Maybe learning in museums does work after all. 

The biggest thing that struck me about seeing the marbles from the pediments, though, was not their condition or their lack of completeness. It was the fact that they were carved on the back sides. Here are these figures that were installed way above ground level 2,500 or so years ago and the back sides will never, ever be seen. I mean, never. They have to know that, right? Yet the hems and folds of what the gods and titans and whomever else was wearing up there a long way from anyone being able to see anything really are detailed in stone by some stone carver who spent their time embellishing a piece of marble in a way nobody was ever intended to see. It's impressive. 

Or maybe they knew one day some English lord would swipe what they carved from where they were supposed to be and stick them in some museum where someone like me would marvel at the attention to detail. I guess we'll never know which of those versions of the story is true.

The back side of the east pediment statuary.

So let me just say this one small but pretty important thing about this whole setup: these things would have a whole lot more meaning back in Athens in the Acropolis Museum which sits directly at the bottom of the Acropolis and in sight of the actual, still there in place, Parthenon.

Are the statues and carvings in the special room in the British Museum impressive in their own right? Sure they are. They look incredible for being 2,500 years old. Even to me, and let's just assume I know nothing about the quality of ancient Greek sculpture, they look like pretty darned impressive specimens of sculpture from the fifth century B.C.

But can they be understood the same in London as they can be in Athens? Not to me, they can't. Maybe there are people out there a lot smarter about this stuff than me but there's no emotional connection, no sense of understanding the place from which these things were created. Our trip to the British Museum to see the Parthenon marbles was not my first viewing of these sculptures. I'd been twice before to the Museum to see these masterpieces. The meaning of these panels and figures didn't hit home until I actually set foot in Athens and went to see the place where they started out for myself. It would just be a lot more meaningful to have them back where they started. Why deny people who have made the pilgrimage to the Acropolis the opportunity to see all of it? Why make people go to London after they have been to Athens to really understand the whole picture?

And to be a completist, I guess you'd at least have to go to Copenhagen as well to see the heads of some of the Lapiths and centaurs from the metopes. And maybe some other places too. Why aren't they all in one spot??

I will say that we went through something like my past British Museum experiences a couple of years ago. Knowing that one day we'd want to visit the ancient site of Ephesus in present day Turkey, we went to see the sculpture from that site that is housed in the Ephosos Museum in Vienna since we happened to be in Vienna to visit a few Christmas markets. My reaction to what we saw in that museum was the same as my first two viewings of the Parthenon sculptures at the British Museum. Cool ancient sculptures, but lacking any emotional attachment because I haven't actually been to the site they were swiped from. I guess I'll have to likely go back to Vienna if we ever make it to Ephesus. Oh well...I suppose we might have missed a thing or two in Vienna.

Let's not kid ourselves. These things are not going back to Greece any time soon. And it's not because the Museum had a special room built to house them back about a century ago. These works are valuable. They are prestigious. They bring people to the building to spend money (although admittedly, admission is free or at least optional which most people interpret as free). The British Museum has a very long and detailed explanation about the legality of their possession of their works on their website along with a standard disclaimer about a willingness to loan items out to other institutions in accordance with their standard loan procedures. 

All of that hasn't stopped the Greeks from trying to get them returned. They have made formal requests either directly to the British government or through UNESCO all the way back to 1836 and as recently as 2013 and there have been talks between the two countries ongoing up to the year 2022 but with absolutely no change in the ownership status. It's never going to happen.

The British side of the argument seems to center on three issues. First, they were obtained legally. Second, they are in better condition now as a result of their being in the United Kingdom for the last two plus centuries than they might have been had they remained in Athens. And third, if Britain started turning over antiquities based on an "it's better to have them in the place they were made originally" doctrine, then they would have to return a lot of stuff in their museums.

Here's my take. 

For me, legal or illegal ownership means nothing. Who cares? I know I said these artifacts are super valuable but they are way more valuable to everyone visiting Athens than they ever will be in London. If you want to say something about this, go to London then go Athens and then go back to London and tell me where they are more valuable. Until you have been to both, you don't really know.

I also don't care about what might have happened if they had remained in Athens. There's no proof that they would have been lost or destroyed or stolen by someone else and there is some evidence that cleaning methods used by the British Museum might have damaged some of the metopes and panels of the frieze. Where an item is better protected from damage is not an argument for thievery. 

I get the third point. However, I don't think giving the Acropolis Marbles back would cause some landslide of return of objects from all sorts of museums to their original locations. It certainly doesn't have to. One exception does not make a rule. There would have to be a way to rationalize keeping artifacts in museums that are in a different spot than the items originated.

Surely there must be a way to reunite these sculptures and carvings with the building they were removed from. Can't the United Kingdom and Greece find a way to work out a fair and equitable form of compensation even if it's exchange or rotation of artifacts with a huge and sincere acknowledgment to Britain for keeping them safe in times of strife or war in Greece? I'm not holding my breath. All I know is that people who visit the Parthenon in Athens would be better off being able to see these works of art at the site where they were originally installed. Travel is about discovery. It would be helpful for a monument as important as the Acropolis that the discovery be able to occur there and not on the other side of the continent.

That's all I have on this one. This third viewing (for me) of these marbles was the best and most important. But only because I understood where they came from based on our visit to Athens last year.

Lapiths and centaurs: still battling it out at the wedding. Just don't invite them...