T he Encyclopédie of 1765, with its entry on museums, was the first Western source to claim that a collection could honor a nation. By the end of the 18th century, the idea that muse- ums could demonstrate what a state was worth, as well as make an example of the civic virtues of its elites, became widely accepted in educated circles. Museums developed into instruments of modern- ization and marks of modernity as they became some of the most important features to distinguish the West from the rest of the world (see Parnauvel 1855:46). In time, this gave rise to museums in “peripheral Europe” as a part of the process of modernization or, as it was called at the time, “Europeanization,” of the continent. During the second half of the 19th century, museums began to proliferate in Europe. The aware- ness that museums were important fixtures of a well-provided state then spread to other parts of the world and became a means of signaling to the West that one was a reliable political partner, imbued with respect for, and adherence to, western symbols and values (Duncan 1994:279). However, it was not until the 1870s that a worldwide boom in museum creation began to fill in the blank spaces on the cul- tural map (Prösler 1996:24–25). The Glory that was Greece In the 19th century, Western writers used the meta-narrative of the Fall to describe ancient Greeks as “the wisest and the most accomplished people in the world” whose fate made them masters of the known world and who yet gave way to the rising Roman Empire to become and remain for centuries “a mere province of Turkey” (Elizabeth 1837:96–98). Their example was used to argue for the development of civilization. In this manner, Bishop Berkeley’s poem stating that civilization had always rolled on in a great wave from east to west, was glossed by Aubrey de Vere who quoted the old Latin adage that a ser- pent is powerless until he has eaten a serpent. This adage, he said, could be applied to nations: Every nation which has vindicated to itself any true greatness has absorbed, either politically, or morally and intellectually, some nation that had preceded it. The Greek intellect absorbed and assimilated all that was most valuable in the political and philosophic lore of nations fur- ther to the east, except Palestine. Rome in turn absorbed Greece; and Roman law with Teutonic manners (both fused together by the vital heat of Christianity), built up the civilisation of Mediæval Europe. The European common wealth thus inherited all that antiquity and the east had done and thought:—America inherits us. [De Vere 1850, vol. 1:194–195] Attention given to the extant remains of Greek and Roman art developed in the first half of the 15th century when Ciriaco de’ Pizzecolli, known as Cyriac of Ancona (1391–1452), traveled extensively in Greece and Asia Minor, and related his encounters with the decaying remains of classical antiquity (Bodnar 2003:ix–xxii).Within the next century, this enthusiasm spread to Germany, France, and Britain. During the 17th century, the interest in Greece, as Henry Peacham put it, “where sometime there were more Statues standing than men living” 3 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY Vol. 30, No. 1, pp. 3–20, ISSN 0892-8339, online ISSN 1548-1379. © 2007 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals. com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/mua.2007.30.1.3. Constructing Identities on Marbles and Terracotta: Representations of Classical Heritage in Greece and Turkey Boz ˇ idar Jezernik