Hello my name is Jamie Fraser, I'm curator for the
ancient Levant and Anatolia here at the British Museum and welcome to my corner!
Although my day job is curator for the ancient Levant and Anatolia, what I'm working on at
the moment is an exhibition called Luxury and Power: Persia to Greece. And I'm really excited
that this exhibition is being hosted here at the British Museum because what it allows us to do
is to take a concept, in this case the concept of luxury and how that enmeshes with concepts
of power and expressions of power, and look at that concept as it spreads across cultures and
across communities and across time throughout the whole Middle East and Southeast Europe. And
we're really looking at two cultural groups: on the one hand we've got Achaemenid Persia,
this is ancient Persia ruled by a dynasty of kings called the Achaemenid Kings. And on the
other we've got Greece, and particularly Athens in the 5th and 4th centuries BC. Now we know a
lot about this period because these two groups were at war, known as the Greek-Persian Wars,
which ran for about 50 years in the first half of the 5th century BC. And a lot of what we know
about this, we know because we're looking at it through the eyes of ancient Greek writers.
And that means our historical sources have inherently built into them some sort of bias,
because the ancient Greek writers of course are writing about the Persians who are their
kind of self-declared “nemesis”. When we're looking at a concept like luxury, what we're
able to do is go beyond these historical tropes and look at the way objects are enmeshed within
these various societies, and looking at how these entities exist on a different level
beyond what our historians tell us. We're getting new eyes into looking at these ancient cultures.
And the role of luxury is central to this. And I'm going to explain how this overlaps
with concepts of power and concepts of political officers by comparing
contrasting two of my favourite objects that are in this exhibition. One here on my left which is
made in Achaemenid period Iran, ancient Iran, and the other one which is made in
5th century Athens in Greece. Both of them are very similar and both of them are very different.
So if we take the first one, this is an object of supreme luxury. What it is is a rhyton and
a rhyton is a wine pourer. It comes from the Greek word ῥυτόν meaning “to flow” and it's because it's
a vessel through which wine would flow out. Now this is an object of supreme luxury
on many different levels and the first one is its materials. It's made of silver with
gold sheet applied to the outside and you can see from the silver horn. And then fixed on
the front an animal shape attachment called a proton. And this has been cast in the shape of
a griffin and then fixed on the front. A griffin is a sort of fantastical, mythological creature
that's kind of half lion, half eagle. You can see the lions’ claws stretched out with the
beak and the head of an eagle. This has also been given horns coming across the top. What
you're seeing is remarkable details incredibly rendered feathers the detail of the horns with
the golden tips and there would have been inlaid a precious gem or a jewel or perhaps even glass
in a pendant hanging around the griffin's torso. And we're only seeing kind of half of it because
there's a groove running along the back of the griffon into which gold,
probably gold sheet or foil, would have been wedged as a main across the griffin's back which
would have perhaps moved or at least caught the light in a really dynamic kind of way.
So it's a luxury because of its materials and luxury because of its artisanship but it's a
luxury for more than that. It's a luxury for the way it's used as well. So we've come into the
basement of the British Museum to try to give you a re-enactment of being at one of these feasts.
We have a rhyton here, it's got the Ibex head of a famous version in New York. This is a replica.
I'm going to demonstrate to you with the finest bowl that we could get from the British Museum
staff canteen, exactly how this would have gone about. Now you have to imagine that we're in a
tent or a sort of a marquee associated with the Persian king - a moment of absolute critical kind
of social prestige with all the aristocrats and the dignitaries gathered around. And the king
would be reclining on his couch. So you have to imagine my splendid Hugh Jackman physique draped
on a reclining couch for reclining dining and the king would summon in his most virile, most manly,
youngest strapping servants. Inward bounds the servant
who would then fill the rhyton, while the king had his thumb over the spout to stop it.
And then holding the bowl balanced on
three fingers the king would unstop the rhyton and let the wine flow.
I think you have to imagine the torch light flickering off the
gold, flickering off the silver flickering, off the wine itself.
The king no doubt demonstrating his ability to drink with such skill far more dexterously
than I've just done there. And I think when you look at that I always think of a line by
Coco Chanel the French fashion designer. She said that ‘luxury begins where necessity ends’
and if you need a vessel to pour wine this is far eclipsed necessity. This is something
that is celebrating your authority to command the finest resources and to reach for the best
craftsmen across your empire as the Persian king could. The king bestows prestige upon
an object like this because he is using it and so there's that wonderful duality, this relationship
between the user and luxury where they're both receiving and bestowing prestige upon the other.
So this is a wonderful example of luxury in an empire where the king held absolute authority.
Which brings us to our second object which looks very, very different. Now this was made in Greece
probably in Athens sometime between about 500-470 BC. Those who know your classical Greek history
know that of course the Persian kings pushed into the Greek Islands and then the Greek mainland
itself to try to take Greece as part of their empire. And this is what we know as the Greek
Persian Wars. This is a conflict that happened over the course of about 50 years with sort of
short sharp punctuated flares of violence. Greece at the time has recently developed a
political system that later writers would call a democracy; demos = people, kratos = power ‘people
power’. Part of being a good democratic citizen in Athens was to celebrate the discipline and
the self-restraint and your civic mindedness in comparison to the threat from the East;
the supposedly despotic decadent totalitarian East, which threatened the freedom of the Athenian
peoples. Luxury particularly in its eastern forms is seen as dangerous, something that calls back to
pre-democratic times in Greece, and something that could betray your sympathies to the Persian east.
But luxury is sticky. I think people wherever we are, whenever we are have always sought ways to
gain a sort of social edge, to celebrate social prestige and social standing. So imagine for
example that you were a soldier who was fighting against the Persian forces at the Battle of
Plataea. This is a land battle; we're talking 479 BC; and Herodotus describes to us the moment that
the Greek forces captured the command tent of the Persian leader, which ultimately was the
command tent of the Persian king. It's the closest thing that you could do to capturing a palace.
And Herodotus, with the narrator's true flare, recounts the astonishment, the amazement of these
humble Greek soldiers seeing the sumptuousness of a military tent covered in remarkable textiles,
with silver and gold drinking vessels, golden jewellery. The audacity of people to campaign
with such luxury astonished the Greeks. And yet all that booty that was captured
during the Greek Persian Wars comes back into places like Athens. So you have here a society
which on the one hand is deeply suspicious of the ostentatiousness of Eastern luxury such
as this rhyton here, yet on the other has taken into its society remarkable objects
of astonishing luxury on a scale that it hasn't ever really seen before. And it
causes a sort of practical and philosophical problem; how do you deal with this stuff?
At a practical level the way you deal with it is to make something that's private and ostentatious
public. It goes into public repositories - temple repositories - really for the glory of the Gods.
For the collective wealth of the city. But it has that gravity, it's affected the relationship
between Athenians and what they consider luxury and how they consider it to operate.
And that's where this object comes in. Certain experimental potters working in the Kerameikos;
the sort of the ceramic making district of ancient Athens; respond to these Eastern forms of drinking
vessels, these kind of golden gilt silver vessels, but they turn them into something
different that is acceptable in Athenian society. Something that doesn't threaten
the political order. That in fact reconfirms the political order, and yet is something new.
Something innovative. And something of a novelty. And you see that in animal-headed drinking cups.
And if you look at this one you can see that this is a red figure cup that's made sometime between
500-470 BC, and it is the head of a bird. And these animal-headed drinking cups really have
their genesis in the animal headed rhytons from the East. But rather than making it a rhyton,
although some potters experiment with rhytons early on it doesn't really catch on.
So they give it a handle and they turn it into a cup, so that the vessel can
be drunk from as you would normally do. But it affirms being Greek in a couple of ways.
The first one is that rather than being made for show, these are made for drinking at events
called symposium. So this is where Athenian citizens, men, come together to drink and to
feast in somebody's house or in perhaps a specialized building or residence reserved
for the symposium. An MC or a Master of Ceremonies is elected at the beginning of
the night by those who are participating. Couches are arranged along the sides of the room so that
no one is preeminent more than the other. So the concept of a rhyton; where the king is holding it;
showing off his ability to command these resources in front of everybody else, this is anathema. This
is completely opposite to the way a symposium operates, which is all about celebrating the
equality of the participants who were there. And this drinking mug, rather than demarking
one individual is preeminent among the others is really part of that that communal feast affirming
an identity within a city state at the same time. But what I love about this mug, what I love about
a lot of these mugs, is that these potters have taken the idea of something from the East and
they're playing around with it. They're turning it into something that's quite imaginative and it's
quite transformative. On the one hand, if you pick this mug up and you bring it to your face to drink
in a way you turn yourself into the animal that they represent. And in this case,
in the middle of that dining party brought up in front of everyone is the face of a bird probably
a bird of prey. And you can see the hooked beak the angry raised ridges above the eyes
delicately rendered and the feathers all coming down his head and its neck. Probably an eagle,
possibly a vulture or a falcon. And that face of the bird becomes the face of the drinker, as they
get further and further merrily along the way of the symposium evening. Blurring perhaps the line
between what makes us people and what makes us animals, the deeper into the wine crater you go.
But there's something else going on here as well, because at the end of the evening,
when the vessel is sat down on its flat base like this,
the whole vessel transforms and instead of being the head of a bird
it looks like a bird that's now perching on a roost. The beak becomes the hooded head,
the eyebrows and the eye ridges become the wings - the shoulders of the wings.
The feathers around the head become the feathers of the body, and can you see
these delicate lines right around the base of the vessel they almost serve as the long
tail feathers for the bird itself. This is a vessel that's dynamic,
that's animated, that changes upon the way it’s used, changes upon the perspective that you have.
It owes its genesis to the objects of supreme luxury of the Achaemenid Court refracted into
the democratic symposium of 5th century Athens and heavily burnished on the imagination of certain
Greek potters working in the 5th century BC. Something that's completely different
to what you get in Achaemenid Persia, but something that owes its genesis to that moment.
And I find that that relationship between these two objects says an awful lot about
the relationship between two cultures. That our history can say how they were at war,
how they were enemies, how they rejected any sort of cultural influence from the other. And yet when
we look at the objects they leave behind, and when we twist them around slightly; blur our eyes and
look at them in slightly different ways, suddenly these different disparate ancient worlds become
inherently connected, entwined and twisted where you can't understand one object from
one culture without understanding the object or an object from another.
And I think that's why museums like the British Museum are really important, because we're able
to take these sorts of objects and pull back and look at them across a larger landscape. Across
space and time to try and get these different sort of perspectives. And that's what we're trying to
do in this exhibition, Luxury and Power: Persia To Greece. I hope to see you there.