ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines two stories which take behind certain sacred objects to their problematic excavation, collection, ownership and exhibition. The first concerns the so-called 'Elgin marbles' or the Parthenon frieze; the second the Memnon's head. They stand only yards from each other in the British Museum, their respective rooms representing two different kinds of ancient culture, the one Greek, the other Egyptian. Their stories are of 'djins and gentlemen', giants and dwarfs, athletes and artists. Both tales negotiate the fraught boundaries of polite and popular culture in early nineteenth-century British society; both challenge the claim that aesthetic objects can be appreciated and enjoyed in a situation of cultural purity, whether those objects are lapidary or verbal. To uncover the archaeological expeditions, institutional wrangles and artistic appropriations which surround sublime Romantic objects is not to offer a progressive narrative or to chart the route back to their original discovery.
