A Tale of Two Spoons How Ancient Artefacts Still Shape Our Present.
Transcriber: Amanda Zhu
Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
Let me take you to ancient Greece
2,500 years ago.
Imagine a formation of soldiers
on the verge of battle,
wearing forged armor and helmets
and tightly holding on
to their spears and shields.
When they hear the command,
they sprint,
charging towards their ruthless enemies
and believing with full conviction
that they will come out victorious.
Later that day, there are commanders
and other men of status with long togas
gather together and celebrate
on reclining furniture.
They are fed grapes,
they drink wine,
and they’re entertained
by women and young boys
while discussing philosophy
and democracy into the dusk.
I doubt what I’ve just described
was difficult for anyone to conjure up,
because these are
some of the most repeated scenes
from our collective perception
of the ancient world.
You may have been reminded
of childhood characters, movies, books,
or memorable field trips to the museum
where you got to see
the armor and the vessels
that these Grecians were using.
And these images in your head
are more than just visualizations
of a remote past.
They’re also the beginning
of a cultural narrative that still defines
what it means to belong to the West.
Now, if I were to mention
the names of some other peoples
living at the same time
and within the same world
as these Grecians,
such as the Thracian peoples, the Lidyans,
the Dacians or the Scythians,
I doubt you will have ever heard of them,
let alone consider them
part of your cultural lineage.
Now, why is that?
And also, why does it matter
thousands of years later?
Well, personally,
I got into ancient history
because I was determined
to find a hack into the West.
I’m from Iran,
and I grew up in the United Arab Emirates.
And when I was younger,
I had this naive belief
that if I became an expert
in ancient Greco-Roman history,
aka the cradle of Western civilization,
I would sincerely gain an insight
into what made the West
so commanding and successful
for such a long period of time.
And in that process,
I’d about my place in the world.
Well, I did get there eventually,
just not in the way I was expecting,
because the kinds of questions
that came naturally to me in my studies
led my professor
to pull me to the side one day
and say,
“Saba, you are not interested in history.
You are interested in historiography.”
And that changed the way
I looked at everything.
So historiography is a field
that examines the act
of writing history itself.
It looks at the larger context
that a history was written in
and asks questions like,
“Who was the historian?
What was their position
in and view of their world?
And what access to historical
materials did they have?
And how did the narratives they write
affect society, and vice versa?”
And what looking through this lens reveals
is how we came to our current perception
of the ancient world.
This occurred relatively recently
through the 19th and 20th centuries,
at a time when Europe
was in an exciting period
of modernizing and nation building,
all while enjoying the height
of colonial imperialism.
What the early archaeologists
and historians had access to
was very sparse factual information
of the ancient world,
and what fueled them
was more a passion than method.
This led to the writing
of ancient narratives
that involved a lot
of filling in the blanks.
And not surprisingly,
over time, those blanks were filled in
with the ideologies of the era.
And that included
a rather binary perspective
that celebrated ideas
like democracy over despotism,
rationality over savagery,
man over nature,
and the West over the East.
And I wish I could tell you
that coming into the 21st century,
we were able to leave
these binary constructs behind,
but the truth is
that they have become deeply embedded
in how we tell the story of our origins,
from inside our museums
to our education systems
and from there to our popular culture.
There was this one
particular moment in my research
that really crystallized
this issue for me,
where I saw both the problem exposed
and also a potential way
out of that problem at the same time.
And I’d love to tell you the story
of the two ancient spoons
that brought me there.
One day back in 2011,
this beautiful 2,500-year-old spoon
went up for sale
at a Christie’s auction house
in London.
I saw it through the catalog entry
that had the label
“An Achaemenid silver kyathos.”
It’s a mouthful.
So, “kyathos” is an ancient term
for something like a ladle,
so we’ll call it a spoon.
And Achaemenid is a reference
to the First Persian Empire.
Now, there was really nothing particular
about the spoon at first
until my eyes wandered
to the auctioneer’s notes.
They refer to the existence
of another virtually identical spoon
that was owned by the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York.
The only difference with this spoon
was that it was labeled as being Greek.
So this perked my interest.
Here we had two
virtually identical spoons,
probably made in the same workshop
or even by the same hands,
and two very established authorities today
slotting them into opposing origins.
Did they belong to the Greek tradition,
or were they a part
of their enemies heritage,
the Persian’s?
Now, it isn’t that uncommon
for experts to disagree.
After all, the farther back we go,
the blurrier things get.
But I decided to keep
looking into it anyway,
and I’m glad I did,
because by the end of it,
I had a completely different understanding
of what I was looking at.
I discovered that back in the 80s
in New York,
the Metropolitan Museum
was battling a lawsuit
that had a group of over 300 artifacts,
including that twin spoon
at the center of it.
The lawsuit was brought against them
by the Turkish government.
Turkey was accusing the Met
of knowingly buying looted artifacts
that had been smuggled
out of their country
and then misrepresenting them
as being Greek to cover up the fact.
They had evidence to prove
that these artifacts
came from the burial mounds
of a people who lived a long time ago
in western Anatolia,
and more importantly,
who did not identify
as either Greek or Persian.
We know these people today
as the Lidyans.
Thousands of years ago,
the Lidyans were a people who lived
on land that was rich with gold deposits,
and this brought them attention.
They first enjoyed a few centuries
of their own statehood
growing into this rich and proud culture
with plenty of interaction
with the rest of the ancient world.
And then one day, they were attacked,
conquered and colonized
by the Persian Empire to their east,
and a few centuries later,
by Alexander the Great
that came charging from the West.
Now, each time that the Lydians
were taken over,
we can assume that their way of life
changed permanently,
and there was a transfer
of people, power and culture.
But with that said, the Lydians are known
throughout all this time
to have remained both ethnically -
and many also argue, through language -
distinguishable from their
neighbors to either side.
In the ancient world,
they were widely attributed
with the invention of coin minting,
so we can thank currency
in our modern world to them.
And you may have also heard
the fable of King Midas
with the golden touch
that warns of the dangers
of having too many riches.
Well, it also originated
from that region long ago.
But unfortunately for the Lydians today,
they just don’t have a place
in our collective perception
of the ancient world,
because they confuse the binary narrative.
It took Turkey six years
to settle the lawsuit
with the Metropolitan Museum
and bring that group of artifacts,
including the one spoon,
back home.
But it never affected the bigger picture,
because over 20 years later,
the spoon that I had first noticed
in the auction catalog
ended up having a really successful sale
with the same inaccurate label
of being Persian and having a Greek twin.
To me, it’s clear
that our institutions and experts
find it easier to label these spoons
as being either Persian or Greek
because putting forward
what they know they are
is both more ambiguous and complex.
And that’s never been good for business.
And as we see our
archaeological tools advance -
oh, sorry.
But the truth is
that we will never pinpoint
who made these spoons.
But it just as easily could have been,
let’s say, a Lydian artisan,
having been trained in the Persian arts,
creating work to the tastes
of Grecian aristocrats
who had been living in Lydia
for generations.
Now,
that seems like a lot more exciting
and relevant attribution to me.
But a truth that I’ve had
to accept about our present
is that the more complex
a world seems to become,
the more we seem to tightly hold on
to a black and white understanding of it,
whether that’s about today
or thousands of years ago.
And as I see us continue
to advance our archaeological tools
and even 3D digitize our artifacts
into complex collections online,
we may feel like we’re moving forward -
and in some ways we are -
but in my opinion,
we just keep moving farther away
from what history essentially is:
collective storytelling.
And I cannot stress enough
how important the start of a story is
because it sets the stage
for the rest of the events to unfold in.
If we instead revisit the ancient world
through what remains
and refill those blanks
with a new frame of mind,
not in order to narrate epic tales
of grand divisions and good over bad,
but to tell stories of syncretism,
that means the layering
of different peoples and cultures
to continuously transform us
into something new.
Well, then in a generation or two,
we might even have a chance
at slowly unraveling
some of the worst prejudices
built into our collective identity,
those that affect how we feel
around unfamiliar and foreign people.
It’s been a long time
since I stopped trying
to find my place in the world
by fitting into an established narrative.
My experience with the Lydian spoons
helped me see myself for what I am -
a culturally syncretic person
that often confuses the categories.
I’m a proud Iranian raised in the UAE
through a mixed bag of Arab,
Indian and British cultures.
Moreover, today I have
Canadian citizenship,
but I’ve made my home
here in the Netherlands
with my Italian partner.
It hasn’t been the easiest ride,
but I know that I am not
one in a million by far.
My generation, our generation,
and the next ones
are the most culturally syncretic people
to have ever existed.
So, it seems simple to me.
I ask our institutions and I ask you,
“Shouldn’t that be the perspective
from which we revisit and retell
the story of us,
starting from the very beginning?”
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers)