On the Restitution of fragments
 

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Is language a museum of words? We have an image of the museum and how we have entered it as a tourist perhaps or with a school trip to study, even to draw artefacts. Like a library it feels quintessentially a collection for public use. Could a library at home, of records, photos, CDs or books be considered a type of family museum?

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History is a personal subject. A memory and a place of relics for example in my childhood home there was a book of the archeological fInds of Leonard and Katharine Woolley but I can’t recall reading about Ennigaldi-Nanna’s Museum in Ur which they discovered in 1925. Located just 150 metres from the famous Ziggurat of Ur this museum was discovered amongst the debris: slowly sifted and read. The years had collected but somehow these artefacts had not moved from their curated positions. A permanent display like the Bayeux Tapestry.

 

The Woolley crew discovered dozens of artefacts, neatly arranged side by side, whose ages varied by centuries. So while philosophy may be old it may not pre date the curatorial discipline of display and labelling objects? The record which makes apparent what a thing is. Indeed the archeologists only deduced that these things were curated as museum pieces, because they were accompanied by clay drums written in three different languages, including Sumerian.

 

The coniform text crisply indented and easily legible begins to tell or curate stories which belong with these objects. The languages or three codes deployed to fix the object on display in a specific temporality. So since at least 530 BCE there have been archeologists and curators of items preserved through time in order to ‘illustrate’ the history of a dynasty or its genealogy. We also note this princess was also a priestess and these displays were sacred.

 

We remind our readers of Shamhat, a priestess of the fertility goddess Ishtar, who has sex as part of her temple duties. She seduces Enkidu and using her “love-arts” distinguishes him from wild animals. In the epic she lays down with him as instructed:

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There he is, Shamhat! Show your breasts,
spread your legs so he may see your charms.
Do not be afraid — take in his scent.
He will see you and come to you.
Spread your clothing so that he may lie on top of you,
and treat the man to the work of a woman.
His lust will caress and embrace you.

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This encounter leaves Enkidu with wobbly legs which is no surprise as it may be the first erotic performance captured in an epic verse. Enkidu for six days and seven nights, erect, had sex with Shamhat. The fragments survived. Some untranslated and others found wandering and retold surfacing for example in the story of Adam and Eve. Those Jews in Exodus from Egypt, carrying with them traditions which became a type of museum, the house or origins to which before the science of archeology all truth was forced to defer.

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Is this the story of the museum in our times? It must be explained that the British have some knowledge of the Museum. The British Museum holds claim to being the world’s first national museum?

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The Ashmolean homepage declares. “It came into existence in 1682, when the wealthy antiquary Elias Ashmole gifted his collection to the University. It opened as Britain’s first public museum, and the world’s first university museum, in 1683.” The ‘museum’ is increasingly corporate in the ways it manages the business of collection, curation and display. In an increasingly privatised public realm it is one of the few spaces provisionally free and run for the public benefit.

 

However these spaces; mediators of ‘sacred’ legacies and tangible and intangible heritage are increasingly vulnerable to accusations their possessions whether looted or merely displaced should be returned to those with a proper claim, such artefacts which are declared as cut off from their contextual mornings and significance.

 

This accusation that Museums might appear as merely pirate vessels at anchor is echoed on the second paragraph of the Ashmolean story announced on its website. “Though the collection has evolved considerably, the founding principle remains: that knowledge of humanity across cultures and across times is important to society. A laudable intention, but the uncomfortable truth is that much of the collection was inevitably selected and obtained as a result of colonial power.”

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This question of the restitution of remains carries with it a complexity of ethics and historicity. The question simply of the ‘national’ and how or by whom it might be inherited?

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Who speaks for this provisional entity and territory and for whom does it speak? Which fragments should remain in exile and which should return?

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Could some fragments; such as that square inch of fabric cut from the back of Bayeux; not speak more eloquently about the impact of Fascist History as an exile in Germany where its presence needs to be accounted for?

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This object which has no apparent quality or capacity to speak of the past, somehow given a super eloquence through the disruption of its relationship to a place of origin. A place —- we in here —- now—- calling for an Uber for example, to provide an historical mapping, might say; not France or England but instead a place contingent to a battlefield. Where can these fragments take us-surely it is not back in time like boxes moving across France on the orders of the SS?

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To that moment when Churchill stood in front of the Tapestry in Paris and marvelled at its ancient texture?

The question of the fragment became national news in the UK in April 2025. There was no mummer of that brutal fact that it was no longer scheduled to make a movement across the channel. There was no mention of Brexit and the bodged negotiations, no there was a general silence on that issue. The History of the English Speaking People Vol I by Winston Churchill was published in 1956 and on its dust jack is a fragment of the Bayeux Tapestry. Curiously the volume has a sub title which is; The Birth of Britain. Churchill as might be expected wrote history with a magnificent air of one whose voice mobilised a resistance to a shocking conquest.

 

Not unlike the grandeur of tone in which Freud speaks in Moses and Monotheism; one could add as both tended towards a bold narrative projections rather than forensic precision. I turned to Freud in consideration of the question of castration and the whole or fragmented body of King Harold because Churchill did not speak in any detail of this.

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The story has somehow made it into the press that academics are disputing the numbers of penises displayed in the tapestry. Before you can say scissors we are reading that Sarah Larratt Keefer, "Body Language: a Graphic Commentary by the Horses of the Bayeux Tapestry,”is a scholarly consideration of how the endowments of the horses are displaced metaphors of their riders’ virility and the gendering of their mounts is symbolic. The penis of the knights and the horses are embroidered to a similar plan. (https://www.themedievalmonk.com/ )

 

Dr Christopher Monk has the details which are chased between the margin and the main stage, but demands we recognise a penis he has found cannot be mistaken for a scabbard as there are numerous examples of those in the work to look at for comparison. Instead he calmly notes like the crouching figure famous for his full frontal nudity this new penis is comprised of testicles, shaft and a glans or head. This is the same model used for the horses which are numerously depicted with what could be mistaken for circumcised members.

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We fall through references to “Keefer's comments about specific borrowings of horses from Prudentius' Psychomachia and the Old English Hexateuch, both manuscripts associated with Canterbury” her inteextual readings are; “a bit strained” when she implies that the original manuscript contexts may have informed the beholders' viewing of the Tapestry horses” claims one disgruntled voice before wondering if that pun was deliberate; we note in Freud’s last published work in his lifetime, a work written while Churchill was considering the tropes of British identity as layered and composited through intersections of DNA, mythology, legals systems and modes of warfare. When speaking of castration in those final remarks Freud does not return to the flight of Isis to find the parts of Osiris which she must reassemble.

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The re-assemblage after castration which made possible their son Horus who in turn has his hands cut off by his mother for tossing off his brother Set. Freud does remind his readers that although the incest taboo is widespread, in Egypt amongst the pharaohs it was expected that they took their sisters as queens, hence Isis and Osiris: a tradition he argues exists as a symptom in the breeding patterns of the royal families of Europe. He also notes circumcision was perhaps one of the means by which other cultures differentiated themselves from the Jews.

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The Egyptian custom became that of the people who followed Moses out of Egypt. Freud pauses and returns to the cut and the transition of bodies and memories across borders and times. “When I speak of an old tradition still alive in a people, of the formation of a national character, it is such an inherited tradition, and not one carried on by word of mouth, that I have in mind.” (Sigmund Freud; Moses and Monotheism P127 Vintage Books New York 1958).

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There is a mixing of parts of a penis and the penis parted entirely from a male; the tradition not forgotten but whose continuation propagates a type of tribal memory, a piece, part, or remainder which seems to speak at least to Freud. As he also notes what Moses took out of Egypt, apart from the tradition of circumcision was the new religion of monotheism. He does not go so far as some contemporaries and ask if Moses was not in fact Akhenaton the exiled Pharaoh? What proceeds across the Red Sea and into the Bible are fragments, inherited traditions, lines of escape, rules on conjugation and the ‘accursed’ share of cultures which share borders and beliefs.

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We gallop backwards then after the chariots have been submerged and the stories of the Old Testament, succeeded by those of the new and we arrive at the production of a tapestry covered it seems in neatly embroidered penises. The Sun is a nexus of knowledge in a league of its own and announced: “Willy The Conqueror, Extra penis ‘found’ on iconic Bayeux Tapestry by expert – but is all as it seems?”

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When the Sun is not hacking personal data it is creating puns. These verbal jokes are often used to inflict injury on public figures, a type of psychic humiliation and punishment which we could trace back to public acts that defile the body such as castration. The Waltham Chronicle claimed Harold’s penis was hacked off as a trophy after his face was mutilated and his intestines pulled from his body. A rapture in blood that replays the type of orgy favoured by the Vikings, The Blood Eagle sacrifice for example as described by Winston Churchill. We experience flashbacks to theories that altered states in battle were not purely a Viking phenomena nor should we forget etymology and pharmacology were extensively explored in the 1970 publication

 

The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross by John Allegro. The work of Allegro also gained recognition and consideration by proponents of experiential psychedelia. That relic then which was saved in part, but not those parts which have not been documented; or this small piece cut off as a trophy or to test a theory or induce hallucinations; a genealogy of blood lines and Teutonic fantasies not passed on by word of mouth but somehow traveling without a passport; backwards and forwards across a border; between a parergon and the work itself, the visible erection or erections which seem implausible to depictions of circumcised cocks. The foreskin becomes invisible in the erect or excited member but how could the Nazis be sure what they were seeing?

Is the Tapestry a Fascinus or fascinum, a Roman or Gaulish memory parading across this fabric stitched to resemble a mosaic?

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The soft power of the Tapestry; a power of fascination, the craft and camouflage of culture and memory. A folding which is not unlike a labia or petal which under magnification appears as flows of energetic pattern, clusters of colour and figuration. This is not Trajan’s Column of three dimensional men and animals realistically cut so we can see the details of decapitated heads. It can be rolled up and hidden in the boot of a car or in a church vault, a flexible and nomadic tradition which reads differently depending on where it is displayed. It has escaped.

 

Cut.

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It cannot be taken off to fully reveal the sex of its makers or the symbolic function of the phallus. The phallus or it parts will not be laid to rest but restituted in its full and priapic display in the labour of violent conquest, castration and cutting off. Please move on. They have undressed the men of history and left heirs to pitiful savagery for all to see.

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There is nothing to be seen here just a scene of assimilation.

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Nothing to be returned as there is no pure site of origin, no body which can clearly claim this fragment as their own. No body modified through an inherited tradition or otherwise. The Museum label is not for reading aloud in public. The audience is its own witness to the ethics of a war of perception and the ordering of people and places. There are treaties and treatise on what defines a nation and its heritage but these are contingent narratives to a type of peace and reparations.

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After the invasion of Iraq the machine says: “Yes, allied troops caused significant damage to the ancient city of Babylon. US-led forces used the site as a military base, resulting in widespread damage to archaeological areas, including trenches dug through ancient deposits, flattened areas covered with gravel, and damage to key structures like the Ishtar Gate and the Processional Way. The British Museum reported that the damage was so extensive that some areas had been chemically treated.”

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War continues to play out through the symbolic control of remnants. In 2022 American archaeologists were helping repair the damage done by ISIS in 2015. In Mosul they discovered ancient rock carvings believed to be more than 2,700 years old. An archer leasing an arrow into a future in which salt is eroding what remains of the historic architecture. Time is measured according to epochs, sedimented fields of data. What remains and what is eroded through transitions of empires and climate? In the Temple of Ishtar, the Sumerian goddess of love and war, the base of the walls are crumbling. In the depths of the thick wall, salt accumulates until it crystallises, cracking the bricks and causing them to break apart. The world is a museum where the climate control is failing and there is no insurance policy to safeguard the past.

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What can museums expect in terms of policy and philosophy in the future? If politics is war by other means we can expect borders and perspectives will continue to define the parergon. Items looted or found, their provenance is haunted.

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In the name of the Bayeux Tapestry we can say that stitches, dyes, design and this proliferation of priapic members are English in origin but that is illusionary, the stitches and threads of DNA are as much Roman, Danish, Norwegian, Saxon or those hybrid pirates the Vikings as they remember decorative forms; waves of design or trends carried by invaders. Churchill suggests these migrants or invaders defined themselves in the landscape in opposition to the Celts and Iberians who perhaps were the older inhabitants and priests of Albion. After the end of the last Ice Age everyone who arrived on the island came in boats. That is how we were connected to France before the airports and the channel tunnel.

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The tapestry held at Bayeux is a cultural hostage. It is held there as that is where its majority remains but its memory is free to move across the border, The fabric of its narrative is and remains untold. Its seed still rides in those priapic members fashioned by those who used their hands in artisan types of labour.

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Fin