Let's all have tickets to the universal museum

The visitors pouring through the doors of the British Museum represent the triumph of an idea born in the white intellectual heat of the Enlightenment - as valuable today as it was 250 years ago when the museum first opened, but now under attack, despite its fabulous success, as never before.

The British Museum is the greatest universal museum in the world. On my first visit there, as a teenager, I remember feeling physically overwhelmed by the sheer scale and variety of the artefacts, art and ideas on display: Mesopotamian relics, Roman statuary, pharaonic carvings, Viking burial treasures.

I wandered, blinking, from room to room. The museum was not trying to tell me something; it seemed to be offering to tell me everything.

That, of course, is why six million people visited the museum last year, from all over the world, free. We flock to the blockbuster exhibitions; but we also come to explore, to fall into unexpected conversations with distant, ancient, foreign peoples.

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And that, of course, was exactly what the museum's creators imagined when it was founded by Act of Parliament in 1753: a great cornucopia of different civilisations, an encyclopaedic storehouse of universal knowledge, displaying the great cultures side by side, with equal veneration, to enlighten not just an elite, but the world.

That simple, brilliant idea is now under assault from the concept of “cultural property”, part of a worldwide struggle over ownership of the past. In the past half-century, but gathering pace in recent years, so-called “source countries” have successfully begun to reclaim and repatriate artefacts from museums around the world.

The governments of Italy, Greece, Egypt, China, Cambodia and other geographical homes of ancient civilisations argue that antiquities in foreign museums are national property, vital components of national identity that should be returned “home” as a matter of moral urgency.

Zahi Hawass, of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, insists that objects from Ancient Egypt are “icons of our Egyptian identity [that] should be in the Motherland”. The Greek Government is even more blunt: “Whatever is Greek, wherever in the world, we want back.” Some of the great museums around the world have returned disputed items of questionable provenance. The pressure to surrender the Elgin Marbles grows ever more intense. Some 68 artefacts, including the magnificent 6th-century mixing vessel known as the Euphronios krater, have now been returned to Italy from American museums. Italy displayed the retrieved artefacts at a self-congratulatory exhibition entitled Nostoi, Greek for “homecomings”.