Library Blog

Living with Ancient Ruins

Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Scholars devote their lives to the study of the legendary sites of Baalbek, Persepolis, Palmyra, and Petra, among others. Here at the Library, I had almost a year to connect the ancient dots, to mount an exhibition that would allow our members and the public at large to appreciate the value of the books in our collection written by earlier travelers to the Levant.Tomb of Cyrus

During those months I lived surrounded by walls of books at my little outpost in the circulation workroom. No risk of damaging desert winds or marauding tribes sweeping through my own pitched tent. But still I guarded them jealously, unwilling to return a single title to the shelves. For each of the narratives was a means of understanding these legendary cities. The Library, I was convinced, had a responsibility to exhibit books that speak to a global cultural legacy now at risk. Another pillar broken, another pediment shattered is a reminder of another irreplaceable loss. We turn to the books to recover the past. These are different times.

In the months before the opening, I spent many hours reading the accounts of such distinguished explorers as Sir Austen Henry Layard, who visited Petra in 1840 and then, in his passionate pursuit of the past, went on to discover the ruins of Nineveh and Nimroud. I followed the exploits of the wildly eccentric Lady Hester Stanhope, niece of Sir William Pitt. She spent much of her adult life in the Levant, certain when she visited Palmyra in 1813 that she was its third-century Queen Zenobia. Lady Hester is a delicious example writ large of the English eccentric transplanted to foreign climes. And then there was Robert Wood, who journeyed to Palmyra in 1751 to document its ruins. His beautiful 1753 folio The Ruins of Palmyra influenced the course of eighteenth-century neo-classical English architecture and engendered a passion among young eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travelers heading east to document its legendary ruins. It was all the rage, this measuring of the past, its glorification, nowhere better captured than by the English artist Thomas Major. In an engraving of the fifth-century B.C. ruins at Paestum, an elegantly decked-out young lord, surrounded by fallen pillars and architraves, documents the vaulting interior of the temple of Poseidon. Romanticism on the move. Paestum engraving by Thomas Major

Of all the writers I discovered and eagerly pursued during those months, there was one who stood out more than all the others: Vita Sackville-West. Known for her flamboyant private life, her books on gardening, and her blissful preserve at Sissinghurst, she has been far less appreciated for her travel books. But in 1926 she reluctantly traveled out to Persia to join her husband, the diplomat Harold Nicolson, who was posted to Tehran. It’s been suggested that, for Vita, travel was definitely middle-class. In any event, the impressions of that trip, Twelve Days: An Account of a Journey across the Bakhtiari Mountains in South-western Persia, were published in 1928 by Doubleday, Doran and Co. They include harsh descriptions of the development of one of Persia’s greatest natural resources, its oilfields, by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. That is all future destruction.

Listen rather to what Sackville-West writes about Persepolis. “The hand of man has never desecrated these ruins, no excavator’s pick has ever rung upon these stones; tumbled and desolate they lie to-day, as they lay after the might of Alexander had pushed them over. The heat of the Persian summers has passed over them and bleached them; they have flushed in the light of many sunrises and bared themselves to the silver of many moons; the wild flowers have sown themselves in the crevices and the lizards scurry over the pavements; but it is a dead world, as befits the sepulcher of an imperial race.”

And on Palmyra, which she and Nicolson also visited: “You come upon Palmyra unexpectedly, if you approach it from the Damascus side, going through a gorge crowned by Turkish forts, and coming out on to a full view of the desert with these surprising ruins standing in the white, pale sand. Lovely in colour, as golden as honey, the vistas of columns and arches give Palmyra a lacy quality: it is a series of frames.”

It is a series of frames that have been disturbed. As of this writing, ISIS has regained control of Palmyra.


Broken Beauty is open to the public in the Peluso Family Exhibition Gallery through August 31, 2017.

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