Two Things

Eagle & Child goes tech, and a biblical fake

Coffee this Friday, November 17, at the usual time and place. (No coffee next Friday, November 24, the day after Thanksgiving.)

(1) Davos-linked tech institute buys the Eagle & Child: The Oxford pub built in 1650 and famous as a meeting place for the Inklings has been purchased by the Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT). EIT is an 8-year-old research-and-development organization founded by Oracle chairman and software billionaire Larry Ellison, with a focus on healthcare, food security, and climate change. Its CEO is Dr. David Agus, who “serves in leadership roles at the World Economic Forum and is co-chairman of the Global Health Security Consortium.” The purchase came after EIT recently broke ground on its new 30,000-square-meter research campus at Oxford, which promises to “push the boundaries of invention” and boost the UK’s technology sector. While the Eagle & Child is a “Grade II listed” building, which requires local-authority approval for renovations and changes, EIT’s major investment in the Oxford campus and its association with influential figures like Tony Blair raise doubts about whether local authorities will be able to preserve the pub’s local and historic character. The proposed renovations already sound, shall we say, tech-y:

The refurbished pub will provide separate meeting spaces for Ellison Scholars and EIT staff and faculty members, as well as being a general recreation space for members of the public. A restaurant will be added to the existing pub space to improve its food offerings.

Ironic, isn’t it, that this should be the fate of a centuries-old pub where Tolkien wrote and refined an epic tale about the dangers of modern technology and the lust for power? In his best Saruman impression, EIT’s Agus has pledged to “safeguard this treasured pub’s future and continue its legacy as a place for brilliant people to come together, including for our Ellison Scholars.”

(2) How to spot a biblical fake: The piece in question is part of the Merrill Collection at the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East. It depicts either an unidentified goddess, possible Astarte, or the pregnant woman of Revelation “clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet.”

But it may not matter which. Boston University religion prof Jonathan Klawans thinks it’s a fake:

While the relief we see is complete, it looks as if it was cut out from a larger stone background. Yet the effort expended by the sculptor to squeeze the relief into the extant stone is evident in the inscription: The lettering is spaced unevenly, tighter on the right.… Even more suspiciously, the goddess’s left “hand” (if that’s what it can be called) looks painfully contorted … [as if] it was more recently carved to fit a particular piece of pre-cut limestone.

To this rather decisive argument, I add one more: the object’s curiously ambiguous uniqueness. We look at it and ask, what is it? Is it Christian or “Astartian”? What purpose could it have served? When we recall that the object has no known provenance and was acquired by a collector at a place and time awash with forgeries, suspicion rightly grows. When we process the fact that the object has no known analogue among authentic finds, our suspicion grows more…. To my mind, Harvard’s Astarte is most certainly a fake. And kudos to them for putting it on display. I wish more institutions would put their fakes out to be seen now and then (or at least post them online, perhaps permanently).