The Parthenon Marbles, known also as the Elgin Marbles (pronounced with a hard), are a collection of classical Greek marble sculptures (mostly by Phidias and his pupils), inscriptions and architectural members that originally were part of the Parthenon marbles and other buildings on the Acropolis of Athens. Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1799-1803, had obtained a controversial permission from the Ottoman authorities to remove pieces from the Acropolis.