Destruction of cultural heritage
The disruptive change in political and social order in the next few decades due to mass migration and collapsing populations will be dangerous for cultural heritage and collective memory. Let us consider a few examples of this from ancient and more recent history.
The historian al-Biruni was a witness to the devastation caused during the conquest of northwest India by Mahmud of Ghazni (r. 998–1030): “Fire and sword, havoc and destruction, marked his course everywhere. Gandhar which was styled the Garden of the North was left at his death a weird and desolate waste. Its rich fields and fruitful gardens, together with the canals which watered them (the course of which is still partially traceable in the western part of the plain), had all disappeared. Its numerous stone built cities, monasteries, and topes with their valuable and revered monuments and sculptures, were sacked, fired, razed to the ground, and utterly destroyed as habitations.” This destructive process was repeated elsewhere in India later and targeted temples and universities.
The conquistadors in the New World boldly spoke of their desire for gold that caused the destruction of Mayan, Aztec, and Inca art and temples. This resulted in a torrent of gold and, by 1660, 180 tons of solid gold and 16,000 tons of silver arrived through Spanish ports.
A 1967 Cultural Revolution propaganda poster in China proclaimed: “Smash the Old World. Establish the New World.” The youthful Red Guards turned against their own parents, grandparents, and teachers and vowed to “energetically destroy all the old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits of the exploiting classes.” In Beijing an estimated two-thirds of the heritage of the city was destroyed and temples and statues were looted and burnt there and elsewhere.
In many ways, this was a repeat of the Taiping Rebellion eighty-four years earlier when Hong Xiuquan, who believed he was the younger brother to Jesus Christ, set out to destroy idols and burn Confucian and Buddhist books in a frenzy that is believed to have led to an estimated 20 to 30 million dead.
The sixth-century Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan were destroyed rather suddenly in 2001 by the Taliban and the ISIS destroyed the ancient city of Nimrud in 2015. The Taleban and the ISIS may have done their wrecking and carnage in a crude manner, whereas the removal of ancient statues in the contemporary West and the suppression of traditional cultures, languages, and arts during the colonization era has been a deliberate and slower process.
A number of monuments and memorials have been vandalized, destroyed or removed in the United States. More than 140 Confederate monuments have been vandalized or removed from public land as have been statues of other figures such as Christopher Columbus, Kit Carson, George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, and Francis Scott Key. An 1833 statue of Thomas Jefferson that’s been in New York City Hall for more than century was removed from the City Council chambers in November 2021 even though Jefferson is celebrated as one of the most significant people in the creation of the United States.
Classical European Art
The principal source on ancient European art is Pliny the Elder’s first century encyclopedia. There were so many life-size bronzes that Pliny mentioned 3,000 statues related to theatre, 3,000 statues in Rhodes, and a similar number at Athens, Olympia, and Delphi.
The images of gods and goddesses were to invoke wonder and forge a connection with the divine and the mystery of life. It made faith visible and accessible to the devout, and made the ceremony sacred. It is through giving up material possessions and a part of one’s psychological self that the sacrificial rite becomes sacred. Giving gifts at the temple sets up a process that leads to grace. Sacred images of gods and goddesses appealed to the deeper sensibility of the individual.
The images were considered living. The museum as we know it today is an idea of the 18th century where old images could be safe from the dangerous hammers of the believer who wishes to break them.
Metal images into pots and marble turned into lime
The artistic objects of Rome before the triumph of Christianity included: 423 temples, 77 ivory and 80 gilded bronze statues of gods, 22 equestrian statues, 36 triumphal arches, 3,785 bronze statues, and innumerable marble statues.
The intolerant minority is generally able to impose its will on the majority. Pre-Christian Roman empire was interested in good governance and not in imposing religious orthodoxy. Christianity used what the eighteenth century historian Edward Gibbon called bullying and intimidation to force its view on the general population, and once it had access to state power, it used its zealotry to destroy art and raze temples.
Catherine Nixey in The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World argues that the Church promoted belief that the Greco-Roman religions harbored demons, and this rhetoric was used against the enemies of the church even as pagan Senators argued for tolerance.
In 391, CE Emperor Theodosius issued decrees, making the worship of images illegal even though the Christians were only an estimated one-fifth of the population. Visits to the temples were forbidden, the pagan holidays were abolished, and the sacred fire in the Temple of Vesta in the Roman Forum was extinguished. Theodosius issued a comprehensive law that prohibited any public pagan ritual, the temples were razed to the ground, and the images of their gods molten into pots and utensils for the use of the church.
After the temples had been destroyed, the ancient glories of Rome became a gigantic and convenient quarry. The age of the builder was replaced by the age of the lime burner, as marble, cooked in an oven, became mortar for new construction. Statues of Greek marble were particularly desirable for they produced high quality lime. Converting marble statues into lime became so big that a district of Rome was named “Lime-pit.” Fragments of the most beautiful statues that survived because they were used as building materials now find pride of place in museums.
How to protect heritage
The ancients were not unlike us and the havoc they caused happened under states of heightened passion or from a belief system that made murder and ruination a duty. Old and new ideologies can command similar belief, and destruction of heritage art could conceivably happen in the future.
To give just one example, the Vigeland Park in Oslo consists of 200 nude sculptures in bronze, granite, and wrought iron. It is conceivable that a new cultural group that attains majority in Oslo in the future will consider nude representations offensive and call for the destruction of the Park.
Should an attempt be made now to protect valuable art in the West before it suffers serious harm? For an example of forethought that saved valuable heritage, consider that over a thousand years ago before Khotan fell to Islam in 1006, its last kings Viśa’ Sangrāma and Viśa’ Sagemayi arranged for books to be sealed in Cave 17 of the Mogao Caves, where they lay safe until their discovery in 1900.
Meanwhile, the destruction of books and art was celebrated by the Karakhanid Turkic Muslim writer Mahmud al-Kashgari in the short poem [see the book by Moriyasu for details]:
kälginläyü aqtïmïz
kändlär üzä čïqtïmïz
furxan ävin yïqtïmïz
burxan üzä sïčtïmïzWe came down on them like a flood,
We went out among their cities,
We tore down the idol-temples,
We shat on the Buddha’s head!
Has the time come to think about protecting Europe’s artistic heritage from any conflict that may take place in the future?
References
Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD. 2012.
Fritz Graf, Laying down the law in Ferragosto: The Roman visit of Theodosius in summer 389. Journal of Early Christian Studies. 22 (2): 219–242, 2014.
Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. 2018.
Takao Moriyasu, Die Geschichte des uigurischen Manichäismus an der Seidenstrasse. Otto Harrassowitz Verlag. 2004.
The coming religious war in Europe
Vigeland Park, Oslo.
