At first glance it seems self-evident that valuable artifacts that were looted as spoils of war or plundered by our colonial ancestors should be sent back to where they came from. No one would argue with the notion that art stolen by the Nazis from countries they occupied during World War Two should be restored to its rightful owners, so why not treasures snatched by colonial powers? Repatriating the cultural heritage of nations that were robbed is part of a long process of restorative justice for past wrongs that Western powers are approaching in a variety of ways. Morally, it has to be the right thing to do.
But where do you draw the line? In the mists of antiquity, original ownership can be difficult to establish. Many items found in Rome had been stolen elsewhere in the vast Roman Empire, and the same is true for other ancient empires round the world. Country boundaries have changed umpteen times over millennia, and the civilization that created an artifact may no longer exist.
Take the “Horses of Saint Mark”, for example. This set of four bronze equestrian statues is believed to have been created by Byzantine sculptors in the 2nd or 3rd century AD. It is likely they were displayed on the Hippodrome in Constantinople until 1204, when they were looted by Venetian forces. The horses were transported to Venice and installed on the façade of Saint Mark’s Basilica, where they kicked their heels until 1797, at which point arch-plunderer Napoleon Bonaparte took a fancy to them and brought them to Paris to decorate his Arc de Triomphe. After Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo in 1815, the horses were returned to Venice, but should they now be relocated to Istanbul? Or to Greece, since Byzantium was the Eastern extension of the Roman Empire, covering much of that present-day country?
British Secretary of State for Culture Oliver Dowden said in March 2021: “Once you start pulling on this thread where do you actually end up? Would we [the UK] insist on having the Bayeux Tapestry back [from France]? American institutions are packed full of British artefacts. Japan has loads of Chinese and Korean artefacts. … I think it is just impossible to go back and disentangle all these things.”
This is one argument that Western museums offer for hanging onto their encyclopaedic world collections. Another is that they have the resources to protect antiquities from decay, with expert knowledge of preservation and restoration techniques, as well as governments that are stable enough to provide security, but the countries of origin might not. After all, look what Isis did to Palmyra…
The Earl of Elgin used a version of this argument in 1801 when he decided to appropriate a set of Classical Greek marbles from the Parthenon and transport them back to Britain. At the time, Athens was under Ottoman rule and the Parthenon had been severely damaged in successive wars and earthquakes, so he claimed the marbles would be safer with him. According to Lord Elgin, he had a firman giving the permission of the Ottoman sultan to remove them—but if such a document existed, its legality is hotly disputed today. He originally planned to use them to decorate his home, but eventually sold them to the British Museum, where they still reside. The ‘Elgin Marbles’ have become the subject of one of the world’s most vociferous repatriation campaigns, with George and Amal Clooney joining countless Greek politicians to demand their return, so far to no avail.
Several British universities have returned Empire-plundered items to their countries of origin but state-funded institutions, including the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum—developed to showcase the wonders of Empire—claim it is prohibited under government legislation for them to return artifacts. Besides, they argue, encyclopedic museums like theirs offer an insight into world cultures that broadens our understanding and thus fulfills an invaluable function. Many more people will see artifacts in the British Museum, which has 5.9 million visitors annually, then would see them in India or Egypt. As a compromise, they are willing to lend certain artifacts to their countries of origin for time-limited exhibitions; for example, Nigeria can borrow some of the Benin Bronzes for its new Benin Royal Museum. It’s an offer that has been compared to the thief lending back his swag.
French President Emmanuel Macron takes a different view: “I cannot accept that a large part of the cultural heritage of several African countries is in France,” he said in 2017. “There are historical explanations for this but there is no valid, lasting and unconditional justification.” Instead, he thinks we should be supporting Africa, India, and other ex-colonial lands to build their own museums, and has established inquiries to begin the process of returning artifacts.
More than two centuries earlier, Macron’s predecessor, Napoleon Bonaparte, was behind the popularization of archaeology, after his scientists discovered the Rosetta Stone and the Valley of the Kings during their invasion of Egypt. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, ancient tomb raiding was a pursuit carried out on a grand scale by amateurs and professionals alike, and the rules about ownership of burial goods were often conveniently fluid.
Early archaeologists felt a sense of entitlement to their finds: without their expertise and investment, they said, the tombs could not have been tracked down and the treasure could not have been removed from the ground without damage. Heinrich Schliemann clearly saw it as a case of ‘finders keepers’ when he uncovered a cache of gold during his excavations at Troy in 1871–73. He smuggled it back to Germany, but the theft was discovered after his wife was seen at a party wearing some of the jewelry. Berlin museums acquired most of the hoard, but it was snatched by the Red Army after they occupied the city in 1945, and is now on display in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. Will Russia offer to return the treasure to Turkey any time soon? Seems unlikely.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, archaeologists who applied to dig in Egypt were granted concessions by a Ministry of Works based in Cairo. They tended to be awarded half of whatever they dug up, while the Egyptian government kept the other half. The situation became more complex after the First World War, when Egypt was seeking independence from its British protectorate status and the government was becoming more possessive of its extraordinarily rich heritage. In 1918 when Howard Carter, backed by his aristocratic sponsor Lord Carnarvon, negotiated a concession in the Valley of the Kings, he assumed they would be entitled to half of any finds, despite the deal containing some fine print.
In 1922 Carter made the greatest archaeological discovery of all time: the magnificent tomb of Tutankhamun, which had lain undisturbed for three millennia. Under the terms of the concession he was supposed to wait and open it with Egyptian experts present but, according to many reports, Carter, Lord Carnarvon and his daughter, Lady Evelyn Herbert, broke in before the Egyptians arrived. They made their way through the cluttered antechamber and chipped a hole in the wall through to the burial chamber where Tutankhamun’s extraordinary solid gold catafalque was encased in a gold and faience shrine. Did they remove anything? Human nature being what it is, they are bound to have.
The following month, during a party outside the tomb, Carter handed Tutankhamun ‘souvenirs’ to guests. When he died in 1939, several artefacts from the tomb were found amongst his possessions, and it is almost certain that some pieces now reside in museums in France, Britain, and the United States, as well as in the hands of private collectors. Carter was probably more respectful of the tomb contents than any of his predecessors would have been, but that wasn’t enough.
In 1924, an Egyptian court found that Carter had broken the terms of his concession and locked him out of the tomb. When he negotiated his return the following year, it was on the understanding that Egypt owned all the tomb contents, and Lord Carnarvon’s widow was awarded compensation to cover the investment her late husband had made in the excavation. The Egyptians hadn’t managed to hang onto the Rosetta Stone, but they were determined to keep Tutankhamun.
The Egyptian Museum in Cairo was built in 1901 and became home to the world’s largest collection of Egyptian antiquities, with a new museum at Giza due to open soon. But you don’t need to visit Cairo to see Tutankhamun relics. Since the 1960s, exhibitions of selected items have been allowed out of Egypt on enormously popular world tours: one at the Metropolitan Museum in New York between 1976 and 1979 was seen by more than 8 million people, and 1.42 million saw the treasures in Paris in 2019. Could such tours not provide a model for a future in which broader cultural understanding is fomented worldwide, through a mixture of new museums in the countries of origin, to which plundered artifacts are returned, and touring exhibitions that reach the widest possible audience?
Some experts have called for a set of international guidelines on ownership of artifacts, like the Washington Principles that addressed the restitution of works of art confiscated by the Nazis. It is a process that requires careful, time-consuming research into the provenance of works, and decisions usually have to be made on a case-by-case basis because of that tricky question about where you draw the line. Some institutions have already started this process; the ones that haven’t are looking increasingly out of touch with the modern age.
The discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, and the Egyptian government’s subsequent insistence that artifacts belong to the owner of the land in which they are found, was an important turning point in relations between Western powers and their former colonies. Howard Carter, Lord Carnarvon, and Lady Evelyn Herbert knew at the time that their find was phenomenal, but they could have had no idea that the repercussions would still be causing controversy a whole century later. If they were alive today, would they agree with returning the Elgin Marbles, the Rosetta Stone, the Benin Bronzes, and thousands more artifacts to their countries of origin? Perhaps they would—give or take the odd sneaky souvenir…
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