Another review of the new children’s book by Anthony Horowitz, about a plot to return the Parthenon Marbles from the British Museum to Athens.

Scorpia Rising (Alex Rider)
Author: Anthony Horowitz
Publisher: Walker
ISBN: 1406310492

From:
Guardian

Scorpia Rising by Anthony Horowitz – review

Sunday 8 May 2011 11.00 BST

‘The detail is amazing, he drags you straight into the room’

The finale of the enthralling Alex Rider series, comes with a bang, and this time, the majority of the book is from the bad guy’s point of view. Alex returns this time with SCORPIA, the evil criminal organisation, on his tail. Jack Starbright, his new guardian is with him this time as Alex goes to Cairo, in Egypt, with him and Mr Smithers, Horowitz’s version of James Bond’s Q; the gadget man. At the beginning, we see the arch-villain: Zeljan Kurst, meeting a dying Greek millionaire in the British Museum. I recently visited the Museum myself and the detail is amazing, he drags you straight into the room. This book will see, a major twist, Smither’s final shocking gadget, and a new side of Alan Blunt. I would recommend this, to anyone between the ages of 10 to 13, because it’s a bit violent for under 10′s.

The British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles have published a tribute to the journalist & author Christopher Hitchens, who was a long standing supporter of the campaign to return the Elgin Marbles to Athens.

From:
Sourcewire

Tribute to the late Christopher Hitchens from the BCRPM
Friday, 16 December 2011

The British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles (BCRPM) today paid tribute to the late Christopher Hitchens who died earlier this week, for his keen support for the return of the Parthenon Marbles to Greece.

Eleni Cubitt, Honorary Secretary for the Committee said: “We are all deeply saddened by the news of Christopher’s death and we send our sincere condolences to his family at this time. Christopher’s contribution and belief in our cause was a great strength to me personally and he will be sorely missed as one of our key supporters.”
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Following Christopher Hitchens death, Stephen Fry talks about why he now thinks that the time is now right for the Parthenon Marbles in the British Museum to return to Athens.

From:
StephenFry.com

A Modest Proposal
By Stephen Fry
December 19th, 2011

Greece is the Word

I have a modest proposal that might simultaneously celebrate the life of Christopher Hitchens, strengthen Britain’s low stock in Europe and allow us to help a dear friend in terrible trouble.

Perhaps the most beautiful and famous monument in the world is the Doric masterpiece atop the citadel, or Acropolis, of Athens. It is called the Parthenon, the Virgin Temple dedicated to Pallas Athene, the goddess of wisdom who gave the Greek capital its name.
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A few weeks ago, France announced that they would return various Māori heads taken from New Zealand. This article looks at some of the other well-known disputes over artefacts.

From:
Daily Telegraph

Famous disputes over ownership of ancient artefacts
10:30AM BST 09 May 2011

Elgin Marbles

France has agreed to return more than one dozen Maori heads taken from new Zealand more than a century ago. Here are some other ongoing disputes between nations over prized ancient artefacts:

Probably the most famous, and one of the longest running, disputes over ownership of ancient artefacts is the battle between Britain and Greece over the Elgin Marbles.
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This article has an interesting ending – when art works are returned mainly for the purpose of being re-sold, it can often mean that the gains are not without losses. This contrasts of course to cases such as that of the Parthenon Marbles (& many other high profile cases), where the intention is to display them in the country where they were originally created, rather than to use them as a method of financial compensation.

From:
Guardian

Online database of art looted by Nazis points to a more complex history
Jonathan Jones
Thursday 5 May 2011 17.02 BST

Hitler’s looting of artworks was not exceptional. The quest to find them is really an expression of revulsion at his true crimes

A troubling detail caught my eye in the new online archive of documents relating to art works looted by the Nazis. At the first meeting of the British Committee on the Preservation and Restitution of Works of Art in 1944, the critic Kenneth Clark “drew attention to the reported destruction of churches such as San Francesco at Arezzo”, which, he said, “suggested that our bombing was not always accurate”.
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The Agrigento Youth statue that was loaned to the Getty as part of a artefact exchange to resolve a dispute with Italy has now been returned to Italy.

From:
Getty blogs

Agrigento Youth Returns to Italy on a Pedestal—A Very High-Tech One
By Annelisa Stephan on April 15, 2011

Centuries ago, a marble sculpture known as the Agrigento Youth took a violent fall, losing his nose and parts of his arms and legs. The cause? Likely an earthquake.

The statue, loaned to us by the Museo Archeologico Regionale in Agrigento as part of our partnership with the Sicilian Ministry of Culture and Sicilian Identity, begins his journey from the Getty Villa back to Sicily at the end of this month. But this time he’ll be protected from tumbles, thanks to a high-tech mechanism concealed in his base.
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Despite what institutions such as the British Museum might claim, repatriation has become an important part of the role of most international museums.

From:
The Epoch Times

Museums Gain New Relevance in the Modern World
By Shar Adams
Created: Apr 11, 2011

Every one has heard of blockbuster movies and sell-out theatre performances but we do not usually relate blockbuster exhibitions to museums. We can now, the dusty shelves and creaking floorboards of the C20 museums fast becoming a thing of the past.

Today well considered and relevant exhibitions can be found in museums with artifacts from the past cleverly displayed to interact with multi media, digital displays and even live performances.
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A museum in the Netherlands is returning a fragment from the Acropolis that was taken by a Dutch tourist as a souvenir fifty years ago. This is a similar sort of case to a fragment from the Colosseum in Rome, that was returned from the USA in 2009. The Museum of Antiquities in Leiden wants other museums to follow their example – unfortunately most seem intent on taking a less enlightened approach to the issue.

From:
RNW

Piece of Acropolis returned after 50 years
Published on 11 April 2011 – 11:09am

The Museum of Antiquities in the Dutch city of Leiden will return to Greece a small marble fragment of the Acropolis: the ancient fortress and temple complex in the capital Athens.

Newspaper de Volkskrant reports that the piece of marble, probably part of a cornerstone located just above one of the Acropolis’ columns, was taken by a Dutch tourist more than fifty years ago.
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The Getty’s Aphrodite has now returned to Morgantina in Sicily following pressure from Italy.

From:
SAFE

Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Returning archeological artifacts to local communities: the example of the Morgantina Aphrodite

Aidone is a tranquil, rural town in central Sicily (Italy) that recently has become subject of the attention of international news, having checkmated – so to say – two of the most famous and powerful cultural institution in the world, the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the unscrupulous collecting practice for which the obsession with “owning” an unique artifact overshadows due legal end ethical questions about provenance before the acquisition.

Aidone and its Archaeological Museum are now home of the so much disputed Morgantina Silver Trove, 16 Hellenistic silver-gilt items returned by the MET in 2010, and the Morgantina Aphrodite, the statue repatriated by the Getty in March 2011, both illegally excavated and exported from the ancient Greek site of Morgantina, the nearby archaeological centre, in the 1980’s. The Museum exhibits re-contextualize the artifacts according to the site’s history, as retraced by the various field excavations (Princeton University, University of Illinois, University of Virginia, along with the Italian Ministry of Culture) involved in researching and studying this ancient Greek colony.
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More coverage of Neil MacGregor’s comments in an Australian Press article.

From:
Greek Reporter

British Museum’s Director Refuses to Return Parthenon Marbles
Posted on 31 March 2011 by Anastasia Miskedaki

The director of the British Museum was interviewed by the Australian newspaper “The Sydney Morning Herald” where he eliminated all possibilities of the return of the Parthenon marbles to Greece. Mr. Macgregor, states characteristically about the marbles: “These historical objects are worthy when they are exhibited in a whole, so, as a narrator of the whole human history, I think it is obligatory to find the best way for the marbles to be visited, as they cannot be embodied in Parthenon.” As he also said, in the two-page interview included in the Spectrum insert of the newspaper, the museum is willing to lend the marbles to Greece but the Greek government doesn’t even negotiate this possibility. When the new museum of the Acropolis was inaugurated, the British Museum was once more willing to lend the marbles, on a condition that the Greek government would recognize the rights of their possession to the British Museum. This proposition was straightly declined from the Greek government.

Neil MacGregor talks about how the Parthenon Marbles can be part of a story in London & a different one in Athens. What he seems to completely miss is the fact that they were designed were part of one complete story, not the contrived justification of their expropriation that he thinks they now embody. Would anyone consider that splitting the pages of a book between two locations made more sense than having all the surviving pages in a single library?

The story of the marbles in the British Museum, is merely a small & inconvenient footnote at the end of a long life on the acropolis – claiming that it somehow now forms a new (equally important) story seems slightly ridiculous.

From:
The Australian

An object lesson in civilisations
March 29, 2011 12:00AM

NEIL MacGregor, director of the British Museum in London, had an unlikely popular success with his BBC Radio 4 series A History of the World in 100 Objects, followed by an engaging if sizeable tome of the same name. Bite-sized discussions about chiselled rocks, old coins and ancient scrolls, no matter how well researched, are not your usual hit-makers.

MacGregor tapped into a revival of interest in history, a thirst for cultural context at a time when we seem to value things being faster, smaller and disposable while, simultaneously, contemporary life is ever more frenetic and unexamined.
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More coverage of the return of a disputed statue from the Getty’s collection to Sicily.

Los Angeles Times

Getty ships Aphrodite statue to Sicily
The iconic statue, bought in 1988, is among 40 objects of disputed origin repatriated.
March 23, 2011|By Jason Felch, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

The J. Paul Getty Museum’s iconic statue of Aphrodite was quietly escorted back to Sicily by Italian police last week, ending a decades-long dispute over an object whose craftsmanship, importance and controversial origins have been likened to the Parthenon marbles in the British Museum.

The 7-foot tall, 1,300-pound statue of limestone and marble was painstakingly taken off display at the Getty Villa and disassembled in December. Last week, it was locked in shipping crates with an Italian diplomatic seal and loaded aboard an Alitalia flight to Rome, where it arrived on Thursday. From there it traveled with an armed police escort by ship and truck to the small hilltop town of Aidone, Sicily, where it arrived Saturday to waiting crowds.
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