WORST OLYMPICS EVER - Paris, 1900

 

I contend that that not since  776 B.C.E., when King Oenomaus was killed in a crack up in an Olympic chariot race, followed by the race winner Pelops throwing competing driver, Myrtilus, off a cliff, has there been a more horrifying Olympic games than the 1900 games in Paris, France.

What could have surpassed such gore and horror, committed in the name of the purity of athletic endeavor? Simply, the Paris games of 1900 when Leon de Lunden from Belgium murdered 21 birds to win the "Live Pigeon Shooting" event.

In order to make the sport even “less sporting” for the birds, the little sacrifices were released one at a time, and each human contestant was allowed to keep blasting away until he missed – twice. Sports historian Andrew Strunk has described the event as “…a rather unpleasant choice. Maimed birds were writhing on the ground, blood and feathers were swirling in the air and women with parasols were weeping…”. In all 300 unlucky pigeons were sacrificed for the Olympic ideal. Just think of it; Dick Cheney could have been an Olympic athlete! If maiming fellow competitors counted, he might have won gold.

Those Paris games of 1900 almost didn’t happen, since the French bureaucracy considered Pierre Fredy Baron de Coubertin (above), who was pushing the modern Olympic concept, as "too English”, what with his alien ideas about exercise producing a healthy mind and body. In fact it wasn’t until Coubertin resigned from the French Athletic Associations that other French sportsmen agreed to back his idea.

Unfortunately, with Coubertin out of the way, and the French Government in charge, things went down hill. Very quickly.  

First the government decided not to award medals for first place, but "valuable artwork" instead. It must have been quite a sight to see Msr. Aumoitte, winner of the “one ball” croquet championship, standing on the victory podium with a Monet hanging around his neck.

Then there was the marathon, where two American runners, Arthur Newton and Dick Grant, lead from the start. But when they reached the finish line together they discovered two heretofore unnoticed French runners, Michel Theato and Emile Champion, rested and waiting for them, and already wearing their winner’s artwork. The Americans pointed out that all the other contestants were splattered with mud while Theato and Champion looked like they had not even broken a sweat. But this being France, the American protests were worst than meaningless.

In fact, because they protested, the Americans were awarded sixth and seventh place, instead of third and fourth. Well, as Albert Camus noted in one of his lighter moments, "Pauvre de moi, du cognito tricherie, ergo se donner la mort”, or, “Please excuse me but I think you cheated so I am now going to commit suicide".  The International Olympic Committee took the American protests under consideration for twelve years, before finally rejecting them; proving once again the Jerry Lewis rule about sports rulings; timing is everything.

The Games of 1900 were the longest in Olympic History, running between 14 May and 28 October, and including such extravagant events as "Cannon Shooting", "Life Saving", "Kite Flying" (above)... 

..."Tug of War" (above)  and "Fire Fighting". 

The Croquet Tournament took 21 weeks to play out in front of a paying audience of exactly one, an elderly Englishman living in Nice, France.

Curiously the strongest protest in that the 1900 Olympics was between two Americans. The born-again Christian coaches from Syracuse University felt that competing on a Sunday would be a sin. So they talked their most athletically gifted student,  Myer Prinstein (above), the world record holder in the long jump, into going along with them. Myer was a nice Jewish boy, and he finally agreed to skip the Sunday competition out of “team spirit”.  Besides, his qualifying jump on Saturday – his actual Sabbath - had been so impressive he thought it would be good enough for the victory. And it almost was. Almost.

That Sunday afternoon (14 July, 1900), while Myer was soaking in the Parisian culture, his Catholic teammate Alvin Kraenzlein (above) broke his own sabbath and beat Myer’s long jump mark by exactly...one centimeter. That Monday, when Myer noticed that Alvin was carrying an extra Van Gough around, he started pounding on Alvin. And Alvin pounded right back. But, since they were both track stars with no upper body strength, nobody got seriously injured.

The nineteen hundred games also featured a controversial final in the “Underwater Swimming” competition. This may sound like a fancy name for drowning, but the drowners...

...er, swimmers, were actually awarded 2 points for each meter they swam under water and one point for each second they were able to remain submerged. But despite having stayed under for far longer than anyone else, Peder Lykkeberg of Denmark was disqualified because it was alleged that he “swam in circles”. Just read the rules, I say.

Also in the river (during this Olympics all the water sports were held in the river Seine, which was not nearly as clean a sewer then it is today), were the exciting finals of the “Swimming Obstacle Course”. 

This involved swimming, of course, but also pole climbing, more swimming, boat boarding and de-boarding, more swimming, followed by swimming under a boat, followed by more swimming.

The winner was Freddy Lane (above, center) from Australia,  in 2:38. Freddy climbed over the stern of the boat as opposed to clambering across the boat's wider middle. For his efforts Freddie received a 50 pound bronze horse. I presume the equestrian winners received statues of fish. Oddly enough neither of these water events were repeated at any future Olympics.

But the sport from the 1900 Paris games  I am most glad having missed was the "Equestrian Long Jump". Now, try to picture this: four spindly legs holding up a big muscular body, and with a human wearing riding garb and hat balanced on their back. Horse and rider gallop up to the jump line and then fling themselves into the air - not over anything, just up and forward. As far as the horse can go..

The winner in 1900 was a British stallion named “Extra Dry”(above), with a soaring leap of 20 feet and one quarter of an inch. Can you imagine the excitement that must have gripped the crowd, watching this equestrian suicidal display? A horse leaping twenty feet and one quarter of an inch; that’s just nine feet short of the current human long jump record. And we've only got two legs.

It makes me wonder if the X Games are really all that original.

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QUEEN OF DENIAL Chapter Six

 

I know the bust of Nefertiti is not sentient. At its core it is limestone, the compressed bodies of billions of single celled living creatures that once had some chemical level of awareness. But I have imagination enough to dream of a universe where any life, once having been sparked, survives in some sense.  And I can dream of what it must have been like for cold stone to have the sculptor's warm hands cut and file and shape and soften its surface, combining in some small way his imagination, his life, and some small portion of the breath of a Queen of the Nile and thus impart that shadow of life into cold stone.

In Thutmose's universe his stone and plaster image of Neferetiti became one of the five parts that made up the living woman; Ib, (her emotional heart), Sheut (her ever present shadow), Ren (her living name), Ba (her personality) and Ka (what we would call her soul). It is thought her left eye was left unfinished in order to prevent the capture of Nefertiti's Ka by the stone. But could it not be that the stone and plaster image had its own Ka, or heart or shadow? And if so, what must have it been like to have slowly emerged from the darkness of nonexistence, to be born into existence slowly, and to have then been loved and admired for decades, before being abruptly thrown to the floor, abused and defiled, and then abandoned and forgotten -  buried in sands for 3, 000 long dark lonely years.

And then the light returned. Meticulously, the sand was brushed away, and once again warm human flesh touched her surface, lifted her up, and human eyes fell upon her shape and color, and human imaginations beheld her image, as a visitor from eons past. And then, in what must have seemed like a startlingly violent instant, she was traveling, whisked 2,000 miles from the place of her creation, into a new temple, a temple dedicated not to a god, but to the Ka of humanity, to that one part of humanity that no other creature on Earth has ever possessed but humans: our imagination. It seems that the bust of Nefertiti has enjoyed a most eventful Akh, or afterlife. She does indeed, live again.

When they first brought her to the Neuss (New) Museum, on Museum Island in the Spree River in Berlin, Germany, it was a re-dedication. The building had been erected in the 1840's, and was, like the Pharaoh’s new capital, a technological innovation – at the time. Instead of plaster, the New Museum was built with concrete poured over iron supporting rods with a brick exterior. The first floor contained Egyptian and German collections, and plaster casts of Greek and Roman sculptures (below). 

But the arrival of the Queen inspired changes. The central Greek courtyard was given a glass roof, and converted into space to display Ludwig Borchardt's collections from Akanetan, referred to by its modern Arabic name of Armarna. And it was here (below) that Nefertiti found her new throne. But it  did not prove to be a permanent abode.

In January of 1933 a new Pharaoh came to town.  Adolf Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany. His new Reich minister, Herman Goring, began looking for a way to quickly and cheaply improve Germany's diplomatic standing in the world. At the time Egypt was nominally ruled by the debauched King Fariouk Fouad, but the real power behind his throne was Britain. And it occurred to Goring that returning the pilfered bust of Nefertiti on the occasion of his coronation, might cause the King to look favorably upon German diplomatic entreaties.  Letters were exchanged with the offer. But when Hitler got wind of the idea he killed it because he was convinced Nefertiti looked to be a member of his mythical “Aryan master race”  And that was, as far as I can tell, the last good thing Hitler did for Germany until he shot himself.

Adolf confidently started the Second World War on September 1^st, 1939, and even though Goring had assured citizens that Berlin would never be bombed, in an abundance of precaution Nefertiti was boxed up and temporarily locked away in the vault of the Prussian Governmental Bank. Then, on the night of 25 August, 1940, 70 obsolete British bombers dropped 21 tons of bombs on Berlin, hitting empty fields and damaging some houses. The worst injuries were some cuts and bruises, and the bombers never came near to hitting the airport, which has their target. 

The biggest causality was Hitler's equilibrium. He ordered the construction of three massive anti-aircraft gun towers in the center of  the city. The largest (above) was built in the Tiergarten park, adjacent to the Berlin Zoo. It was 7 stories tall to allow the guns clear fields of fire. The walls were of reinforced concrete 26 feet thick, the ceilings were 16 feet thick. It was so large it could shelter 5,000 civilians, and many of Germany's most valuable artistic treasures, including Nefertiti, were moved there in the fall of 1941. And there she stayed, hidden again, as safe as if she were still buried in the Egyptian sands, for another four and a half years, until the Soviet armies approached Berlin.

On 6 March, 1945,  Nefertiti made yet another trip, this one of 200 miles southwest to the rolling hills of the Thuringian Forest, where she was left for safe keeping 2,100 feet below ground level in a salt mine under the village of Merkers-Kieselbach. Late in March she was joined by 100 heavy woolen coats, 100 tons of gold bars, 550 bags of German currency (above) and 27 Rembrandt paintings. Two weeks later the entire cache was captured by soldiers of the 3rd American Army under General George S. Patton. Within days the entire treasure was transferred another 100 miles southwest to a bank vault in Frankfurt. There was so much loot that it took 2 convoys of 17 heavy trucks each. Being capitalists, the Americans shipped the gold first.

After Germany surrendered on 5 May, 1945, the Queen of the Nile was moved to Wiesbaden, Germany, on the north bank of the Rhine River. Here they brought her out into the light again to be examined by experts, and the public was even allowed to gaze upon her face. There she remained, transferred into German control, until 1956, when she was moved to the Dahelem museum in the American sector of Berlin. She could not return to Museum Island because the Neuse had been blasted to ruin during the war (above), and besides, the island was in East Berlin, the zone controlled by the Soviets.  When the East Germans demanded she be handed over, the West Germans decided to transfer her to the Egyptian museum in the Charlottenburg neighborhood of Berlin. And there the Queen stayed for almost forty years - a human life time, but a blink of the single eye to Nefertiti. Then in 1989, the East German government collapsed.  In October of 1990 Germany was officially one nation again, and Berlin one city, and it became a matter of national pride for the Germans to return their Egyptian queen to her German throne.

In 2005 the German government began a 295 million Euro rebuilding of the Neuse, under a plan drawn up by English Architect David Chipperfield. And in 2009 the Queen once again held court in the Neuse Museum in the German capital. Her journey from the banks of the Nile to and from the banks of the Spree and to and from various bank vaults has been described as both “adventurous and beyond comparison”, and earning her the number two spot on Time Magazine's list of “Top ten plundered Artifacts”.  Egypt still wants her back, and Germany still intends upon keeping her.  And while one identity is barely 200 years old and the other goes back 4,500 years, both countries view Nefertiti as a national icon.

If you think about it, its a crazy situation, because she isn't really the queen of the Nile. She is limestone and plaster and paint, an image of a one time queen of a long dead empire that culturally has little in common with either of today's nations. And if, like Pinocchio, she were to arise tomorrow morning, as a real woman, she would be a very confused lady, no matter which city appeared before her eye. So far she has not had the afterlife she envisioned. And it may get stranger yet.

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QUEEN OF DENIAL Chapter Five

 

I call it the $390 million lunch. It was held alfresco on the banks of the Nile, late morning, Monday, 20 January, 1913. The host of this cannibal's soiree was the "tactless and brusque” archeologist Ludwig Borchardt (above), 50 year old special attache of the German Embassy in Cairo and director of the German Oriental Society, which had just finished its sixth season of excavations of the abandoned capital city of Akanaten.  

He looked a bit like a doofis, but Borchardt (above) had spent two years cataloging the Egyptian Museum, and was the first to realize the Great Pyramids of Giza were not merely tombs, but a necropolis complex.  He had even studied the best forgers in the Cairo market.  No one knew ancient Egypt better than Ludwig Borchardt, and he was hungry for more. 

His main course this day was Gustave Lefebvre (above),  a 33 year old Frenchman fluent in classical Greek, who had studied in Athens, was an expert in Ancient Greek and Egyptian literature and had been working in Egypt since 1902. Lefebvre was no slouch. Nevertheless, Borchardt was about to him eat him for lunch.

The meal began with a feast, the best that could be supplied to distinguished Europeans in the age of imperialism, complete with copious quantities of good French wine.  And after the calf had been fatted, Bourchardt led his victim first into the hot office tent to read the carefully inventoried list of finds, and then into the larger darker tent where the finds were laid out in open boxes, as dictated under the Egyptian “Partage” law.  

For 30 years every foreign expedition had been required to divide its finds "à moitié exacte" – into two financially equal shares - from which the Egyptian Museum would take their choice. In 1912 the law was strengthened to also allow the Museum to retain any particular item from the expedition's share. It was a first attempt to stem the wholesale European theft of Egyptian heritage, which had been going on for over three hundred years.

Except the new law said the division was supposed to be held at the museum on Wasim Hasan street in downtown Cairo, not in the field.  And there were no Egyptians in authority at the Egyptian Museum, -  there had never been.  No Egyptians were qualified.  Since the French invaded in 1798, and the British replaced them in the 1882, Egyptian history had been yet another resource to be exploited by the patriarchal European colonialist. Their excuse was they meant well.

But even with the best of intentions, the most valuable bits and pieces of Egyptian history ended up being owned by the Germans, the English, the French and the Italians. If they could have boxed up the pyramids brick by brick and shipped them home, they would have. What was about to happen here at Arkanaten would be a good example.

Just after lunch, back on 6 December, 1912,  Ludwig Borchardt received a note from Ahmed al-Sabussi, one of his Egyptian foremen, informing him that a “flesh-colored neck with red bands painted into it” had been uncovered at a building then identified as P47.2, room 19. Later it would be determined to have been the studio of Thutmose, when an ivory horse blinker was found in a courtyard rubbish pit inscribed with his name and his occupation - “sculptor”. 

Ludwig (above), sensing something, important, raced to the site and was presented with the now completely uncovered bust. The instant he looked at it, Borchardt knew it was Nefertiti because of her flat topped crown, and he knew it was extraordinary. He wrote in his diary, “You cannot describe it with words. You must see it....Colors as if just applied. Work is outstanding.” They even took the time to take photographs.

Borchardt noted that the bust was missing its left eye, and offered a reward of £5 if it could be found. (It would not be) Then, because it was getting dark, he ordered Professor Herman Ranke (above, left) to guard it overnight.  Ranke later boasted, that night he slept next to the beautiful Nefertiti. In the morning Borchardt had the queen moved to his own tent, and he kept her there, out of sight, until Gustave Lefebvre arrived in January to oversee the division of spoils – er, artifacts.

In the office tent Lefebvre noted that atop the left hand column of the inventory were listed ten stone artifacts, including a rare limestone colored “folding alter” a sort of  TV tray (above),  a duplicate of one  already the prize of a Berlin museum. Midway down the right hand column of 25 plaster busts, was listed “a colored gypsum bust of a princess of the royal family”. In fact it was Nefertiti. In addition, the Frenchman was shown a photograph of each artifact, although Bruno Guterbock, secretary of the Society, who was present, admitted the photo of Nefertiti was “not exactly the most advantageous.” Borchardt himself later confessed the picture was composed so as hide her beauty, but also“ to refute, if necessary, any later talk...about concealment.”  The slight of hand, worked. The affable Lefebvre accepted the Germans had divided the finds into “approximate equivalency”. In fact, it seemed more than fair. The Egyptians got all the stone artifacts while the Germans were keeping only the cheaper plaster ones.

Then they went into the larger, darker storage tent, where all the boxes were sitting, open, available for inspection. Guterbock was now very nervous. He had warned Borchardt about his “"obfuscation of the material.” The box containing Nefertiti was in a back row, open as all the crates were, her blue crown hidden beneath a black wig. But if Lefebvre should bother to lift the two and a half foot tall statue he would know immediately it was far too heavy to be made of plaster. Borchardt assured his secretary that if caught he would simply say it was all a mistake. But, as the German had anticipated, after a “superficial examination” of the artifacts, Lefebvre approved of the German division of the spoils, thanked his host, and headed back to Cairo.  If the lady was a fake, Borchardt was going to a lot of trouble to get her out of Egypt in secret,

Within hours the lady began a 2,000 mile journey to Berlin, Germany. There she was presented to the man who had paid for her excavation, the cotton importer and clothing exporter, Henri James Simon (above). He was the sixth richest man in Germany, a self described Prussian Jew, known as the only collector who brought more objects out of Egypt than Napoleon. And he donated them all to German museums. However, the bust of Nefertiti was so beautiful that Simon held onto her for a year, in part at the urging of Borchardt.  Even after the rest of the expedition's hoard went on public display in the Berlin Museum in 1914, the lady was kept hidden.  At the end of June that year the Archduke Franz Joseph Ferdinand of Austria and his wife were gunned down in Sarajevo, Serbia. Within a month all of Europe was sucked into war, and for four years archeology became an unaffordable luxury.

The war ruined Simon.. The British blockade cut him off from his cotton and his customers. In 1917 he donated everything he still held to the Berlin Museum.  And in 1924 “she who comes in beauty” went on public display for the first time, even though Borchardt strongly advised against it. The queen of the Nile was an instant hit, producing headlines around the world, and long lines to gaze upon her face. The Europeans running the Egyptian Museum were offended and demanded the lady back. When it was clear there was no legal option, they canceled all German Egyptian digs in 1925. They later relented on that, but they never stopped asking that Nefertiti be returned.

For a long time there had been doubts about the authenticity of the limestone folding table top or altar which Borchardt had used to entice and distract Gustave Lefebvre. The hieroglyphic for truth (Maat) was misspelled in four separate places on the panel, and in the carvings Akhenaten is shown as left-handed, unlike every other depiction of him (above). And then in 2008 Italian scientists examined the the panel under ultraviolet light, and apparently what had looked like a patina of 3,000 years of weathering was merely a darker base color of paint. Even though the actual paper was never released for peer review, respected Egyptologist Rudolf Krauss, a curator at the Berlin Museum from 1982 to 2007, declared publicly that the altar was a fake perpetrated by Borchardt.  Fellow Berlin curator, Dietrich Wildung, called the altar rubbish, and Christian Loeben, director of the Egyptian collection at the August Kestner Museum in Hanover, Germany called it an absolute forgery. But without the full paper, detailing methodology and results, it is impossible to speak with certainty.

If Borchardt was enough of a scoundrel to have faked the altar, can we trust he did not also fake the bust of Queen Nefertiti? The insurance companies have decided to avoid difficult questions like that, and merely set a price on the head of a Queen of the Nile. That figure is now at $390 million.

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