Internationally recognised art and literary critic, writer and cultural producer. Published in ELLE, Glamour, Esquire and Cosmopolitan; member of the Union of Writers.
The past, it seems, is having a very good year. From beneath the sands of Egypt and the dust of a Roman villa, it offers up its treasures with a theatrical flourish. We are presented with a lost city, a surprise Rembrandt, an amethyst ring that promises to cure a hangover. It is a dazzling haul. Our media dutifully reports these moments with a breathless, wide-eyed wonder. But what is it that we are truly discovering here?
The thesis is a simple, perhaps a melancholy one. The great archaeological and artistic discoveries of our age are no longer primarily about the past. They are about us. Their true cultural function is to serve as raw material for the voracious, 24-hour narrative machine of the present. In the churning gears of this machine, the complex, alien, and often troubling nature of history is ground down, processed, and repackaged into a series of neat, comforting, and instantly shareable fables. We are not uncovering the past; we are strip-mining it for stories that make us feel better about today.
By placing these three remarkable finds side-by-side – a quotidian object, a masterpiece of art, an entire metropolis – we can see this process at work. They represent the three dominant genres of our convenient new history: the quirky life-hack, the lucky lottery ticket, and the blockbuster fantasy.
A Past Fit for the Feed
Let us begin with the ring. Found in the ruins of a Byzantine winery in Israel, this gold and amethyst artefact was immediately framed by a single, irresistible narrative hook: it was a ring to prevent hangovers. The story wrote itself. Here was an object that collapsed a millennium and a half of history into a relatable, modern-day problem. It is history as a BuzzFeed article, a charming bit of trivia that allows us to feel a flash of connection with our ancient counterparts. Look, they were just like us! They, too, dreaded the morning after a night of heavy drinking.
This framing is not wrong, exactly, but it is a radical act of simplification. The ring was found amongst the remains of a vast industrial complex, a testament to the sophisticated economy and global trade of the late Roman and Byzantine world. The amethyst’s supposed power was tied into a complex web of classical beliefs about magic, medicine, and spiritual protection. It speaks of a worldview utterly alien to our own. But that is not the story we are told. We are told the simple, funny story. The complex history of trade, faith, and empire is relegated to the footnotes. The ring becomes a charming gadget, a historical curiosity that asks nothing of us intellectually or emotionally. It is history made perfectly shareable, a bit of fluff to populate a social media feed between celebrity gossip and political outrage.
Then we have the Rembrandt. The story of The Adoration of the Magi, lost for centuries and rediscovered when it fell off a wall in a private home, is pure narrative gold. This is the second genre: history as the lucky lottery ticket. It is a story beloved by the British public, honed to perfection by decades of programmes like Antiques Roadshow and Fake or Fortune?. It is the fantasy of forgotten treasure, of accidental, life-changing wealth. The headlines focused not on the painting’s artistic merit, its place in Rembrandt’s early oeuvre, or the religious world it depicts, but on its valuation: a cool $15 million.
The painting ceases to be a work of art and becomes, first and foremost, an asset. Its discovery is framed as a financial event. The media narrative invites us not to contemplate the sublime, but to imagine the thrill of such a discovery, to fantasise about the forgotten masterpiece languishing in our own lofts. I confess, I am as susceptible as anyone to this particular romance. I once spent an entire afternoon lost in a digital rabbit hole about a Viking hoard found with a metal detector in a muddy field in Somerset. The allure is undeniable. But it is an allure that subtly shifts the value of the past from the cultural and historical to the purely monetary. The object’s story becomes secondary to its price tag.
An Escape to a Better Yesterday
Finally, we come to the grandest discovery of all: the 3,000-year-old city of Aten, unearthed near Luxor. This is history as the blockbuster epic. The language used to describe it – “lost city,” “rare glimpse,” “fabled,” “golden” – is the language of a Hollywood movie trailer. It offers us the ultimate form of historical escapism: a perfectly preserved world, a snapshot of life in a golden age, emerging from the sand as if by magic. It is a story of magnificent scale and reassuring completeness.
But this, too, is a convenient fiction. An archaeological site is not a lost world; it is a ruin. It is a place of fragments, of absences, of tantalisingly incomplete evidence that must be painstakingly, and often contentiously, interpreted. The real story of Aten is a slow, difficult, and deeply academic one. The story we are sold, however, is one of instant revelation. It is a story that caters to our desire for grand, simple narratives in an age of bewildering complexity. It is easier to imagine a whole city rising from the sands than it is to confront the messy, fragmented, and often disappointing reality of our own time.
The counter-argument, of course, is that this popularisation is a good thing. It makes history accessible, sparks curiosity in a public that might otherwise be indifferent. A quirky headline about a hangover ring might lead someone to read more about the Byzantine Empire. This is the defence of the museum education officer, and it is not without merit. But the cost of this accessibility is a profound loss of context and a flattening of meaning.
It is the difference between a conversation with a stranger from a foreign land and looking at a caricature of them. The caricature might be amusing and memorable, but it tells you nothing of substance about who they really are. By turning history into a series of easily digestible stories, we are not engaging with the past. We are talking to ourselves, about ourselves, using the past as a ventriloquist’s dummy.
Perhaps I’m mistaken, but this desperate need for convenient history is a symptom of our own cultural anxiety. In a chaotic present, the past becomes a source of order and reassurance. We look to it for simple moral lessons, for quirky anecdotes, for fantasies of sudden wealth and lost golden ages. The media, in its relentless pursuit of engagement, is only too happy to oblige. It is a perfectly symbiotic relationship.
The process is like a chef at a fast-food chain who is given the rarest, most exquisite ingredients – truffles, saffron, wagyu beef – and proceeds to grind them all down and process them into the same, vaguely savoury, universally palatable patty. The original flavour is lost. The unique texture is gone. But it is easy to sell, and it requires no effort on the part of the consumer. This is what we are doing to the past. We are turning it into fast food for the soul. And we are losing our taste for anything else.
