Egypt

Finders, keepers

boston.com (Drake Bennett)
Printable version

An interesting if somewhat divisive look at the subject of repatriation. It does not refer specifically to Egypt, but the topic is completely relevant given the SCA's mission to recover objects from a number of foreign museums (as highlighted by some of today's other posts).

Along with Italy, the governments of Greece, Guatemala, El Salvador, Peru, Turkey, China, and Cambodia, among others, have pushed to reclaim prized artifacts from collections around the world.

They have tightened their laws governing the export of antiquities or intensified the enforcement of existing laws and international agreements; they have made impassioned public cases on the world stage.

These governments argue that to allow such objects to remain abroad as trophies only encourages the continued pillage of their national patrimony. Their position has won broad moral support and increasingly become the norm among academic archeologists, who see ancient objects as historic artifacts inseparable from their place of discovery. It has forced major concessions from great museums around the world, including the MFA, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The British Museum is under persistent pressure to return the Elgin Marbles, its famous set of sculptures from the Parthenon.

But as one museum after another negotiates deals, and prosecutors all over the world target the commercial trade in ancient objects, some prominent scholars are drawing a line in the sand, saying that objects belong where they are - that the movement is based on a false reading of history, and, if allowed to progress, could do serious damage to the world's cultural inheritance.

"What's at stake," says James Cuno, the director of the Art Institute of Chicago, "is the world's right to broad and general access to its ancient heritage."

See the above page for the full story.

- Whose Heritage?
Egypt Today (Michael Kaput) Forget bailouts. Part of the possible solution to Greece’s economic woes is 2,500 years old and sits in the British Museum. It makes sense to Daniel Korski, who wrote a March 4 article, “Why we should give the Elgin Marbles...

- New Book: Whose Culture?
Princeton University Press The international controversy over who "owns" antiquities has pitted museums against archaeologists and source countries where ancient artifacts are found. In his book Who Owns Antiquity?, James Cuno argued that antiquities...

- New Book: Loot
Sharon Waxman Loot: The Battle over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World by Sharon Waxman Why are the Elgin Marbles in London, and not on the Acropolis? Why do there seem to be as many mummies in French museums as there are in Egypt? Why are so many...

- Repatriating Disputed Antiquities
http://www.archaeology.org/0611/etc/president.htmlAn article by Jane C. Waldbaum, President of the Archaeological Institute of America on the Archaeology Magazine website: "By repatriating disputed antiquities, museums will be able to bring even more...

- Egypt Holds Talks In International Repatriation
As part of the international publicity campaign to retrieve artifacts from museums around the world Egypt is set to host a conference on the subject, invited are thirty countries from around the world but apparently only sixteen can make it. Included...

Egypt