Campaigners in Armenia want the British Museum to return a statue of the goddess Anahit. It is unclear from the article, exactly how the statue came to leave Armenia in the the first place & ended up in the British Museum. It is however, clear, as in many such cases, that the sentimental value of the statue is worth far more to Armenians than it is to the general public who see it in the British Museum.

From:
The Armenian Reporter

Campaign for Anahit’s return to Armenia from British Museum
Published: Monday April 09, 2012

I am a Pre-Med student at the University of California, Irvine studying Biological Sciences. I was born and raised in Yerevan, Armenia. As a child I was taken to every major museum in Yerevan. This has contributed immensely to who I have become today and why I decided to undertake this time-consuming initiative.

I studied in the United Kingdom for some time and my constant visits to the museums led me to the discovery that the fragments of the iconic statue of the goddess Anahit whose image symbolized so much of my childhood (and history) were just sitting there confined within the few sentences of description. Reminiscing the postal stamps, 5000 Dram notes, Agathangelos, Navasard and all the Anahits that I have met throughout my life, I promised myself that upon my return to the States I would do everything in my abilities to have her repatriated to Armenia.
Read the rest of this entry »

Clearly, the British Museum is called that, because it’s a national museum, located within Britain. But beyond that, there’s not a lot of logic to the name.

It has been pointed out many times in the past, by many different people, that the British Museum is not really very British. That is to say, that not much of the stuff on display is actually from Britain. You have to really look to spot the exhibits from Britain, amongst all the artefacts taken from other places around the world. In this sense, it is more a museum of British imperialism, than it is one of modern Britain.

From my point of view, many of the artefacts there are legitimately acquired – however, the vague descriptions on the information panels next to them give you little idea of the real stories behind the acquisition of many of the items in their collection.

From:
Dawn

A pilgrim’s progress
From the Newspaper | M.J. Akbar | 2 days ago

THE British Museum should, in all propriety, be renamed the British Empire Museum. The largest repository of human genius is a magnificent tribute to three centuries of commercial and political power.

The Empire and its diaspora had three overlapping shores: lands that were directly ruled; regions under domination (hence Dominions) and an arc of grip sanctified by treaty (as in the Indian or Malaysian princely states) or justified by gunboat diplomacy (as in China).
Read the rest of this entry »

Following their requests for the return of the Samsat Stele, Turkey is blocking the planned loan of an artefact to the UK. The author of this article, feels that they should be focussing first on protecting the heritage that they already have in their country, before trying to retrieve items such as this. I still can’t understand though, why when we want an artefact to stay in the UK, this is completely acceptable, but when someone else asks for their (in many cases stolen) artefact to be returned, it is decried as “cultural nationalism.”

From:
New York Times

April 11, 2012, 9:33 am
Treasure Hunters
By ANDREW FINKEL

ISTANBUL — “Hajj: journey to the heart of Islam,” the British Museum’s recreation of Islam’s holy pilgrimage, has attracted much praise and a dash of controversy, as Huma Yusuf recently wrote on Latitude. Meanwhile, another interesting story related to the exhibit has percolated down to Turkey, the successor state to the empire that ruled over Mecca and Medina for centuries and once controlled the major pilgrimage routes.

Turkey was founded in the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, and its great museums – the Topkapi Palace and the Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum – hold many of the important historical artifacts associated with the Hajj.
Read the rest of this entry »

Getty Curator James Cuno has long been one of the biggest proponents of the Universal Museum concept, despite many arguments against this ideology. Fro this current lecture, it appears that Cuno has done little to revise his viewpoint since publishing his book on the subject in 2008.

From:
Zocalo Public Square

Enlighten Up
Getty Chief James Cuno Defends the Encyclopedic Museum

For Getty Trust president and CEO James Cuno, the starting point for understanding the importance of the museum is “the promise it holds to promoting tolerance and understanding difference in the world.” In his talk to a packed house at the Petersen Automotive Museum, Cuno took on the critics of museums, particularly critics of encyclopedic museums, who hold that museums are relics of imperialism or institutions that uphold hegemony. On the contrary, said Cuno, the encyclopedic museum is “an argument against essentialized national differences.” This is also the case Cuno makes in his latest book, Museums Matter: In Praise of the Encyclopedic Museum.

Cuno pointed to the first encyclopedic museum, the British Museum, which was founded in 1753, as an example not of patriotism or nationalism but of an interest in cultures and art from around the globe. Neil MacGregor, the museum’s current director, likes to say that what surprises people most about the British Museum is that there are so few British things in it.
Read the rest of this entry »

A criticism that is often levelled at country which focus on preserving their ancient heritage is a lack of attention to the more recent items of historical importance. In Greece for instance, when the country got independence, the bulk of the Ottoman, Venetian & Byzantine remains were removed from the Acropolis, in an attempt to revert it to how it had been in the time of Pericles. This is despite the fact that the more recent remains are still often of importance in telling the country’s history. There are no right or wrong answers in this sort of debate – but all the options need to be considered, before decision can be made.

In this case though, where the argument is protection, versus no protection, it seems that the answer is clearly that more effort needs to be spent on preserving this heritage.

From:
Al Jazeera

Who should save Egypt’s archives?
Egyptian government institutions have failed to safeguard its ‘modern’ cultural heritage, focusing only on the ancient.
Last Modified: 25 Jan 2012 09:58

Oxford, United Kingdom – It has sometimes been claimed that, like human rights and democracy, the protection of Egypt’s cultural heritage cannot be left to the Egyptians. Corruption, poverty and ignorance, Egypt’s critics maintain, pose a serious threat to the preservation of artefacts of “global importance”.

Egypt’s own Antiquities Council, of course, claims otherwise. Attempting to demonstrate its commitment to safeguarding “national heritage”, erstwhile director Zahi Hawass waged a mildly successful international campaign to repatriate what “rightly belongs” to Egypt. In one case, a mummy returned from Atlanta, Georgia, was given a farcical state-funeral, serenaded by singing schoolchildren and marching military bagpipers.
Read the rest of this entry »

The St Louis Art Museum claimed in 2010, when asked about the return of requests for the return of the Lady Ka-Nefer-Nefer mummy mask, that “we would do the right thing … if there was something that refuted the legitimacy of the provenance“.

The courts have now ruled that they can keep the mask – although a lot of questions have to be asked, about how something that was know to have previously been on display on another museum & then went missing, can be considered an entirely legitimate purchase without first discussing the matter with the original owners.

David Gill has a lot more commentary on the case on his Looting Matters website.

From:
Washington Post

Federal judge rules 3,200-year-old Egyptian mummy mask can remain at St. Louis Art Museum
By Associated Press, Published: April 5

ST. LOUIS — A St. Louis museum can keep hold of a 3,200-year-old mummy’s mask, a federal judge has ruled, saying the U.S. government failed to prove that the Egyptian relic was ever stolen.

Prosecutors said the funeral mask of Lady Ka-Nefer-Nefer went missing from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo about 40 years ago and that it should be returned to its country of origin. The St. Louis Art Museum said it researched the provenance of the mask and legitimately purchased it in 1998 from a New York art dealer.
Read the rest of this entry »

As part of their ongoing campaign for the restitution of looted artefacts, Turkey has written to the British Museum asking for the return of the Samsat Stele, a stone tablet that is over two thousand years old.

From:
Today’s Zaman

Turkey requests return of Samsat Stele from Britain
9 April 2012 / TODAY’S ZAMAN, İSTANBUL

The Turkish government has requested from Britain the return of a stone tablet dating back to the first century.

The Samsat Stele, which is currently held at the British Museum, is a stone tablet dating back to the first century B.C. portraying Commagenian King Antiochos I Epiphanes greeting Greek god Zeus’s son Herakles. The hole in the center of the Samat Stele, which is made of basalt, reflects its later use as an oil press.
Read the rest of this entry »

A humorous look (which raises a lot of important issues) about whether the Parthenon Sculptures should be returned to Greece & some of the implications that such a move might have if it did take place.

From:
Huffington Post

Losing Our Marbles: Should Britain Return the Elgin Marbles to Greece?
Posted: 4/04/2012 00:00

The unwritten rules of decorum state it is impolite to discuss sex, politics or religion at dinner parties. I would like to add one more topic to that list – cultural repatriation. As discursive stink-bombs go it’s not often a headline act, but there are few controversies more likely to invoke a full-on food fight during the middle of the cheese course than the concept of returning archaeological heritage to various peoples around the globe. Now, just months from the Olympics, the campaign is being stepped up once more for the return of the Elgin Marbles to the Greek nation, and another messy argument seems inevitable.

First thing’s first, why are they the Elgin Marbles? Well, here lies our first trip hazard – we do not refer to them as the Parthenon Marbles (the building they were intended for) or the Phidian Marbles (the sculptor who crafted them), but instead they have taken the name of the aristocrat who nabbed them from Greece. As far as I am aware, lumps of rock are unaffected by Stockholm Syndrome, so it’s not the Marbles themselves who are identifying with their kidnapper. No, it’s the British people who have dubbed them Elgin’s Marbles, in gratitude for the Lord’s generosity in selling them, at a reduced price, to the nation in 1816. So, already Britain has committed an act of appropriation through nominative rebranding. The name implies they were Elgin’s to sell in the first place.
Read the rest of this entry »

More coverage of the problems facing Greece’s ancient sites, as a result of the country’s continuing financial difficulties. Unfortunately, it seems at the moment that the end of these problems is a long way off, so the issues are not going to disappear quickly, although help from other countries in blocking sales of looted artefacts helps to limit the market for such items.

From:
Agence France Presse

Amid debt crisis, archaeology Greece’s Achilles heel
By Isabel Malsang (AFP)

ATHENS — Faced with massive public debt, Greece is finding that its fabled antiquity heritage is proving a growing burden — with licensed digs postponed, illegal ones proliferating, museum staff trimmed and valuable pieces stolen.

“Greece’s historic remains have become our curse,” whispered an archaeologist at a recent media event organised to protest spending cuts imposed on the country for the past two years as a condition for European Union and International Monetary Fund loans.
Read the rest of this entry »

As well as eighteen artefacts in the Metropolitan Museum, Turkey is requesting the return of many other disputed artefacts in other museums across the USA.

From:
Los Angeles Times

Turkey asks U.S. museums for return of antiquities
By Jason Felch, Los Angeles Times
March 30, 2012, 8:48 p.m.

The government of Turkey is asking American museums to return dozens of artifacts that were allegedly looted from the country’s archaeological sites, opening a new front in the search for antiquities smuggled out of their original countries through an illicit trade.

The J. Paul Getty Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Cleveland Museum of Art and Harvard University’s Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection are among the institutions that the Turkish government has contacted, officials say.
Read the rest of this entry »

This article appears as a response to the previous article in the Guardian. There are many things that make the Parthenon Sculptures a special case – the fact that they form part of a greater whole & that they were designed to be seen in a specific context, not as an object could be easily relocated are just a couple of them. This is not to deny that other cases have merit to them as well – each case should be judged alone, as they are so different. The differences are not just in the objects themselves, but in their cultural significance, where they were taken from, when they were taken, the circumstances surrounding their removal etc.

In cases such as the Parthenon Marbles, Greece has previously made clear offers that if the sculptures were returned, they would provide Britain with other temporary exhibitions of similar value (a very hard thing to assess). Temporary exhibitions are the main thing that draws people back on return visits to the British Museum, so surely having these regularly arranged for them would result in win-win situation for the museum?

From:
Guardian

Are the Parthenon marbles really so special?
Mike Pitts
Monday 2 April 2012 20.30 BST

The British Museum has had only one request to return something from its vast collections that it regards as official. The Greek government has asked the British government if it can have the Parthenon marbles back. Stephen Fry also thinks the issue of these sculptures is unique. In December last year, in a blog picked up over the weekend by a restitution lobby group, Fry wrote: “The Parthenon affair is a special case.”

Which it is. That stunning building embodies the culture that gave us democracy, the Olympic Games and all that classical stuff we used to be taught at school. It inspired the Renaissance and Byron, and now the many who would like to see the bits in the British Museum – about half the surviving sculptures – given back to Greece.
Read the rest of this entry »

For reasons that are unclear to me, Britain has never ratified the 1954 Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. This is despite declaring in 2004 that they would ratify the convention. The only reason I have ever been given was that it conflicted in some places with existing laws in Britain, that would need to be amended first.

From:
Independent

Letters: Back the world ban on looting
Friday 30 March 2012

The March 2003 invasion of Iraq by a coalition led by the US and the UK failed to prevent the immediate and appalling looting of museums, libraries, archives and art galleries, followed by years of looting of archaeological sites across the country.

On 14 May 2004, the UK Government announced its intention to ratify the 1954 Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, and its protocols of 1954 and 1999. Today, on the ninth anniversary of the invasion, it has still to honour this commitment. This is despite all-party support for ratification and recently reiterated support for ratification from the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. The USA ratified the Convention in 2009. This leaves the UK as arguably the most significant military power, and certainly the only power with extensive military involvements abroad, not to have ratified it.
Read the rest of this entry »