The Middle Eastern origins of the Statue of Liberty
It’s perhaps the most iconic American landmark — the giant copper statue, turned green with age, holding aloft its lamp of liberty from the harbor of New York City. The Statue of Liberty is accompanied by a plaque with the full sonnet “New Colossus” by American poet Emma Lazarus, a poem which ends with these famous words:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
The message of that poem has not been heeded of late, with a slew of U.S. politicians rushing to clamp down on Syrian refugee arrivals. But it would perhaps surprise some of the country’s would-be guardians that this statue, this great symbol of American freedom, has its origins in the Middle East.
The statue’s designer, the French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, had initially dreamed up the project of erecting such a “colossus” during a trip to Egypt in his early 20s. He marveled at its many epic ancient sites, while in the company of a number of European Orientalist painters: “We are filled with profound emotion in the presence of these colossal witnesses, centuries old, of a past that to us is almost infinite, at whose feet so many generations, so many million existences, so many human glories, have rolled in the dust,” he wrote.
The opportunity to fashion something new out of this vision of antiquity arose during the 1860s, while French builders worked on the Suez Canal. Bartholdi approached the ruler of Egypt, Isma’il Pasha, with a proposal: a huge new colossus at the mouth of the canal of a robed woman holding up something looking like a torch.
Source: www.washingtonpost.com