Flames engulfed the National Museum of Brazil the night of Sunday, Aug. 2, endangering over 20 million treasures of Latin America and beyond.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), as well as French and Egyptian officials, have offered financial and technical assistance towards the museum reparations.
The museum was home to important artifacts from cultures around the world, and Egypt has already expressed concern over the fate of the museum’s Egyptian relics. One such relic is the mummy of Sha-Amun-In-Su, which was given to Dom Pedro II by Egyptian Viceroy Ismail Pasha during a visit to the Middle East.
Other well-known artifacts that may have been damaged or destroyed by the fire include the skeletal remains of a dinosaur called Maxakalisaurus tapai and a skull called Luzia which was discovered during an excavation in 1975 in the city of Belo Horizonte.
Tests conducted in the mid-1990s determined the skull to be among the oldest fossils in the Americas. One of the few artifacts that officials can confirm survived the fire is Bendego, the largest meteorite ever found in Brazil.
The cause of the fire is still under investigation but many have already pointed fingers at the years of government neglect that left the facilities unsafe and underfunded. From museum directors to protestors who showed up to demonstrate as the museum burned, many stated that the museum had been so underfunded that staff members had taken to using crowdfunding to open new exhibitions and maintain old ones.
Roberto Leher, rector of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, which is associated with the museum, indicated to the Associated Press that it was well known that the museum building had been in desperate need of repair.
The museum had recently secured nearly $5 million for a renovation, including a fire-prevention upgrade, but the money had not yet been expended.
This is not the first time in history that a country has faced the threat of cultural catastrophe.
During World War II, many countries that fell to the Third Reich suffered what art scholar Lynn H. Nichols called “the rape of Europa.”
Hitler ordered the Nazis to plunder Europe’s great works of art and store the treasures in underground hiding places across Germany and Austria. Hitler intended to display these artifacts as part of his own curated collection in his Fuhrermuseum in Linz, Austria. While stealing treasures from Italy, France and Belgium, the Nazis were instructed to destroy important pieces created by Jewish artists and artifacts of Jewish culture.
If not for the creation of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives (MFAA) section of the Allied forces, it is likely that much of the culture of Europe would have been lost forever. This specialized group of art scholars, museum curators and directors, archivists and educators worked diligently throughout the war to recover and return each affected nation’s national treasures.
The damage to the National Museum of Brazil is particularly devastating because there is no way to recover the artifacts that have been destroyed by the fire. Museums are meant to serve as a form of cultural preservation and conservation.
A tragedy such as the fire means that years of Latin American cultural history are lost for good.
An editorial published in the Globo newspaper summed up the effects of the fire best:
“The size of the catastrophe is vast: It struck the national memory, through the loss of the important historical collection; it affected the sciences, interrupting research; and it represents a cultural loss impossible to quantify. We only know that it is enormous.”
