Not Coming Home

by Alex Palmer

It wasn’t until I stood in a small Greek museum this August that I realised why cultural restitution is so significant. Pinned to the wall on one of the explanatory notes was a table showing the number of ancient coins excavated on the island, and where they are now. Twenty-one of them are in the British Museum— a higher number than are left on the island itself. Some slightly fuzzy photo prints tried to make up for the real deal, leaving the islanders to try and piece together their historical and cultural background from some artefacts they will probably never see, locked up in a drawer some 1350 miles away.

This desire for repatriation of significant artefacts is not a new phenomenon. In 1812, Lord Byron launched a scathing attack on Lord Elgin’s earlier removal of sculptures from the Parthenon in Athens. Elgin had, at the start of the 18th century, sawed and hacked the pinnacle of Classical Greek sculpture from the remains of the Temple and shipped the sculptures back to Britain, where they reside to this day in a fairly dingy gallery— the roof even leaks.

Compare this to the purpose-built Acropolis Museum— shiny and new, with state-of-the-art climate control, and, most importantly, reserved space for the Elgin Marbles. There they could be kept reunited with the remaining sculptures in Athens as they were intended to be viewed, within eyeshot of the Acropolis and where the light would fall on them much the same as it did nearly 2,500 years ago at its construction. No, says the British Museum.

It is certainly a thorny issue. No one after all likes admitting that they probably shouldn’t have those 200 metal sculptures and plaques they ‘acquired’ after the British Empire looted and sacked the city of Benin in 1897, or those two spiritually significant Moai ‘acquired’ from Rapa Nui in 1869, or the... you get the picture. Empires certainly have a large and uncomfortable role in many museum collections throughout the world, for as new nations rose and the old imperial powers fell throughout the twentieth century, the looters and the looted became (fairly) equal states on a global stage and the museums of the looters held onto what they took from nations once under their control. Now the museums, from London to Berlin, largely aren’t giving it back.

There are some legitimate reasons for this, of course. The British Museum for instance is bound legally by the British Museum Act 1963 (isn’t this a fun-filled article), which forbids it from disposing of its holdings. In 2005 a ruling regarding this act decreed that even Nazi looted art could not be repatriated to its rightful owners. What the act does not prevent the Museum from doing is lending out its collections - it could, say, send the Benin Bronzes back to Nigeria for the foreseeable future.

Loans already form an important part of interaction between museum collections and the formation of special exhibitions. It stands to reason that this could and likely would continue with repatriated items. Giving back items of cultural significance would probably not ‘empty the world’s great museums’ as the popular argument goes- instead perhaps allowing for more flexible lending structures.

There almost couldn’t be a starker difference between how recently traded artefacts with ‘uncertain’ provenances are treated when compared with items sitting in museum collections for decades or centuries. Whilst it is no great wonder that “I knew little about collecting” are not the words you want to hear from a man involved in purchasing thousands of ancient artefacts from the Middle East, David Green (the founder of the US arts & craft store Hobby Lobby and chairman of the evangelical Christian Museum of the Bible), said just that.

What followed was a lengthy court battle, which the museum lost- eventually leading to the return of some 15,000 papyri and cuneiform tablets to Iraq and Egypt. This is what repatriation can look like if not for the barriers and circuitous arguments thrown in its path: a comparatively simple way of returning ill-gotten and disputed objects to their cultural homelands.

The Louvre, the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art may all proclaim themselves to be “universal museums”, full of collections from around the globe and visible to all throughout the world, but I am sure this comes as scant consolation to those left with precious little of their own cultural and historical heritage in their wake, despite how relatively easy it would be to give back even a few significant items.