Digital archaeologist Roger Michel and his team are scanning the Parthenon Marbles at the British Museum in an effort to create 3D replicas and increase the likelihood that the real ones will be returned to Greece.
Michel and his digital archaeology team operate a high-tech workshop in Central Italy, where they are recreating the Parthenon Marbles with their digital 3D printing equipment. Michel and the team plan to create exact 3D replicas of the marbles and donate them to the British Museum in exchange for the return of the originals to Greece.
Attaining 3D scans of Parthenon Marbles
The British Museum had previously rejected an official request from Michel’s team to attain the 3D scans of the Parthenon Marbles, so the team took it upon themselves to get them in a clandestine manner.
“We read the regulations for the museum and [they say] specifically [that] ‘visitors may use 3D scanning equipment in the museum and they may use the product of those 3D scans for any non-commercial purpose,’” Michel told ABC iview’s Stuff the British Stole.
“Boom, we’re done,” he said. “So we went in…and made scans of all the Parthenon sculptures.” Michel claims that the replacement sculptures would allow the museum to show people how they originally appeared. “These things were brightly painted with skin tones and garish colors,” he told ABC News.
In addition to the support received from Greeks at home and abroad who want the Marbles repatriated, the scheme has the full backing of British actor and long-time advocate for the return of the sculptures, Stephen Fry.
“Yes, it’s important in a museum to have the real thing, but we live in an age in which…we now are able to reproduce, so they are exact copies,” Fry told Stuff the British Stole.
“That’s a question of human decision about what the value is,” he said. “But for the Athenians, there is a sacredness about these marbles and it belongs to those people, the Greeks who have suffered over the hundreds of years of occupation.”
3D Parthenon Marble replicas could solve long dispute
In 2022, when Michel first approached The British Museum with the idea, it was clear the institution was not on board. Since then, it has raised the prospect of a “Parthenon partnership” with Greece which may see the marbles displayed in both Athens and London.
However, recent comments have resurfaced questions over the legitimacy of England’s claim to the marbles in the first place. The sculptures, which originally formed part of the friezes along the facade of the Parthenon in Athens, were removed by Thomas Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin, who arrived in Greece in the early 19th century.
During that time, Greece was an occupied region of the Ottoman Empire, and Lord Elgin was the British ambassador to the Ottoman sultan.
The museum has always claimed that Lord Elgin was given a permit, known as a “firman,” to legally remove the marbles, many of which were damaged in the process.
Earlier this month during a UNESCO meeting in Paris, the head of the Turkish Culture Ministry’s anti-smuggling committee, Zeynep Boz, stated that the firman has never been found.
“Turkey is the country that would have the archived document pertaining to things that were sold legally at that time,” she told the Associated Press. “Historians have for years searched the Ottoman archives and have not been able to find a ‘firman’ proving that the sale was legal, as…is being claimed.”