International Association for the Reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures

The New Acropolis Museum celebrated its first birthday on 20th June. With over two million visitors in this time, it has rapidly become one of the destinations on the must see list for tourists in Athens. It has raised awareness of the Parthenon Marbles significantly, as the casts of them in the Parthenon Gallery now make it very clear how many of the sculptures are in the British Museum.

From:
Athens News Agency

06/23/2010
New Acropolis Museum celebrates first anniversary

More than two million people have visited the new Museum of the Acropolis during its first year of operation, according to figures presented by the museum to mark the first anniversary since it first opened to the public on June 20, 2009.

The museum’s board chairman Prof. Demetris Pandermalis said the museum received a total of 2,010,641 visitors in that time, had set research and scientific goals, made progress in the area of conservation and also in educational programmes.

He also announced the launch of the museum’s first touring exhibition “Pericles Xanthippos” on June 20. This uses archaeological finds such as inscriptions, coins and other artifacts to illustrate and explore the life of the famous ancient Athenian statesman, the man who led Athens during its ‘Golden Age’ and who conceived the idea of building the Parthenon. The exhibition will run until January 31, 2011.

The Acropolis Museum is the first public museum in the country that operates as a public-sector legal entity and its aim is to cover its costs with its own revenues as much as possible. It currently employs a staff of 200, some of whom are contract workers and civil servants detached from the culture ministry. It currently covers its public utility bills on its own and gets financial assistance from the Organisation for the Building of the New Acropolis Museum (OANMA).

Once a presidential degree on the operation of the museum is completed, following delays caused by the change of ministers and government, this will allow the museum to address the issue of hiring managerial staff and the position of the director will be proclaimed.

Pandermalis also referred to the museum’s medical unit and in-house doctor, noting that this had dealt with 377 incidents from November 1, 2009 until May 31, 2010, of which 67 percent were visitors to the museum.

The ticket will remain at 5 euros in 2011, by decision of the museum’s board, while it has also allowed the lease of the restaurant and cafe area on terms decided by the museum management.

Much has been made in the past of the British Museum’s links with other countries such as China (when it suits them). This helps them to backup their Universal Museum argument, implying that through numerous cultural links it is in fact a museum of the world & not a purely British institution.

Collaboration with other countries, to create reciprocal exhibitions is not limited to the British Museum however, as evidenced by previous exhibitions in China sponsored by Greece. Indeed, the two countries have quite a bit in common, as both are trying to recover items from abroad that were looted by different Earls of Elgin.

From:
People’s Daily

Athens history exhibit opens in Shanghai
17:28, June 11, 2010

The Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Tourism will organize a cultural archeological exhibition in the Shanghai Library from June 10 to June 20 with the title “Athens: The Living History.”

The exhibition is a Greek contribution to Expo 2010 closely related to the theme “Better City, Better Life” and the theme of the Greek Pavilion “Polis, The Living City.” It presents the ancient and modern city of Athens including the city’s architecture and urban development as well as the integration of ancient monuments into daily life.

The exhibition includes six separate but closely-connected sections. The first section is dedicated to “The Athenian Polis in the Light of its Inscriptions” and deals with the institutions of the ideal city through the epigraphic testimonies.

The second section is dedicated to “The Aegean of the Coins” (from the Numismatic Museum of Athens) underscoring the strong linkage between economic growth and the maritime tradition in Greece.

Also, a virtual reality tour of the Agora, which was the political and economic center of ancient Athens, created by the Foundation of the Hellenic World will be included and connected to both sections.

The fourth part of the exhibition is dedicated to the “Acropolis Restoration Project.” The exhibits of this section comprise 179 photographs and texts that cover part of the floor so that the visitor can actually walk and experience the interior of the ancient temple.

The fifth part of the exhibition is dedicated to the latest, most attractive development in the historic center of Athens, the “New Acropolis Museum,” describing how the museum was built in order to maintain visual contact with the Acropolis monuments and Parthenon’s sculptures without damaging the archaeological findings that extend across its foundations.

Finally, the last section is focused on the “Unification of Athens’ Archaeological Sites” which is a major ongoing urban regeneration project aiming to “unify” the six main archaeological sites of Athens all located at the city center and around the Acropolis. Visitors of the exhibition will be able to explore the historic center of Athens through videos, photos and texts.

By People’s Daily Online

When people argue against restitution of cultural property, much is made of the argument that it would leave the great museums of the world almost empty. Aside from the notion that this suggests nearly all the items in the collection were acquired in dubious circumstances (few claims are made about items that were legitimately purchased), this goes completely against the reality of the situation. Well over a hundred years ago, the British Museum already had far more in its collection than it could possibly display. Due to the prohibition on deaccessioning, this situation has only got worse since then. Certainly, some of the artefacts that are hidden in store rooms might not be particularly worth seeing – but there must be many that are.

From:
Heritage Key

How Many Ancient Artefacts Are on Display at the British Museum?
Submitted by Sean Williams on Thu, 06/03/2010 – 14:48

How many ancient artefacts are on show at the British Museum? Sounds like an easy question: after all, surely it’s just a case of finding the right person and writing down a figure, right? I mean, the British Museum is the second most visited museum on the planet behind the Louvre, and well over half the Louvre’s collection is non-ancient (for an explanation of what ‘ancient’ actually is check out Jon’s blog here) – someone must know how much stuff is on show. For the short story, the numbers and how I came to my conclusions click here. If not read on and suffer with me.

First port of call: the museum’s press office, who could only tell me the museum holds a total of around 6,000,000 artefacts. Around? It’s not a great omen if the press office doesn’t even know its own total collection, let alone how much of that has made it from storage into display cases. I was whisked off to another department: “We have around six million items in total, sir, but I’m not sure of the number on display – maybe one of our guidebooks has what you’re after.”

No other web source had the answer, unsurprisingly, so it was off to the BM itself, on a balmy summer’s afternoon, to find out for myself just what its magic number was. My first port of call was the information desk. By definition that was where I should be looking, right? Again, no. I had a very nice flick through some of the museum’s guidebooks, and a perfectly pleasant conversation, but no number. So armed with nothing but a phone, notepad and a C in GCSE Maths I set off in search of the British Museum’s magic number (see the British Museum’s top ten treaures here).

I quick foray into the Egyptian Gallery later I’d noted 160 Egyptian artefacts, alongside 100 Near Eastern pieces (I counted the Assyrian Lion Hunt as one item). There were even fewer in the nearby Greek marbles room – just thirty with the controversial Elgin Marbles counted as one. But these were three of what I’ve cleverly dubbed the BM’s ‘big’ rooms, the showcase bits with the headline treasures like the aforementioned marbles and the Rosetta Stone. On my reckoning there are eight of these, counting the famously beautiful stair wells.

That leaves another 87 rooms unaccounted for – 85 when you consider that two of the rooms, ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘Life and Death’ are non-ancient. So I headed up to some of the ‘small’ rooms to see what they would add to the number. ‘Greeks in Italy’: 740 (roughly, mind – I couldn’t count each and every item individually). ‘Cyprus’: 400; ‘Tomb of Nebamun’: 100 and the upstairs Egyptian galleries a whopping 1,500 between the four of them. Based on that information, and by checking how large or small the rooms are, I finally found my (rough) answer: 43,000.

How did I get 43,000? I flattened out each ‘big’ room’s items at 100, and multiplied by six. I then added this figure to that of the smaller rooms, which I averaged at 500 items per room. I then rounded down ever-so-slightly, though I think this number is fairly accurate. Even if I’m a fair distance out my number betrays a massive discrepancy between the museum’s six million artefacts in total and what’s on show: less than one per cent. I think we’d all like to explore the British Museum’s vast archives, but judging by this you’d be dead before you made it halfway.

Heritage Key is completing a list of the world’s greatest museums, taking in visitor numbers, collections and great treasures. We’ll also have an amazing map of the top museums for you to enjoy!

The new edition of Mary Beard’s Book – The Parthenon, has various changes, particularly in relation to the New Acropolis Museum which was still in the early stages of construction when the first edition was published.

From:
Lancashire Evening Post

Book review: The Parthenon by Mary Beard
By Pam Norfolk
Published on Fri May 28 15:07:23 BST 2010

Travellers have braved wars and bandits to see it, politicians and superstars have competed to be photographed in front of it and some of the world’s greatest artists and designers have been inspired by it…

The ancient Parthenon in Athens has been a centre of pilgrimage since it was built over 2,500 years ago and its stunning architectural beauty has never failed to disappoint the millions of visitors.

Oscar Wilde compared it to a white goddess, Virginia Woolf was uncharacteristically struck dumb by its majesty and Evelyn Waugh likened it to a mild Stilton cheese.

The blazing sun, maddening crowds, surly guards and, more latterly, acres of scaffolding have failed to deter devotees from marvelling at this amazing temple dedicated to the Greek goddess Athena.

Renowned classicist Mary Beard also knows a thing or two about this towering colossus and in her scholarly but witty and enthralling overview proves the perfect guide for those who want to know more about its history and its controversies.

From the Parthenon’s early days as the most important temple of imperial Athens, when it housed a giant gold statue of Athena, through its life as a cathedral church and ‘the finest mosque in the world’ to its current status as an iconic ruin, this is an entertaining, plain speaking and very readable historical odyssey.

The secret of Beard’s success as a knowledgeable tour guide is her ability to successfully digress…this is not just her view of the monument but how others have seen it, and used and abused it, over the course of two millennia.

For an ancient view of the Parthenon, we have to look to a writer called Pausanias, from what is now Turkey, who toured Greece in the 2nd century AD when Athens was a university town and notable high spot in the ancient ‘heritage trail’.

Remarkably to modern viewers, he hardly mentions the building itself, instead fussing over a small stone where a friend of the god Dionysus was said to have rested and extolling the virtues of a statue of the Roman emperor Hadrian.

The Elgin Marbles are never far from the top of the agenda in any history of the Parthenon. The poet Lord Byron launched a hate campaign against Lord Elgin after he removed part of the famous frieze and brought it to England.

‘Dull is the eye that will not weep to see/ Thy walls defac’d, thy mouldering shrines remov’d/ By British hands…’he famously wrote in his poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

Others, like Thomas Carlyle, viewed the marbles as all that was worst about classical art…a little too perfect, rather sterile and spoiled by the similarity of the figures and their lack of real-life expression.

Beard’s book is full of delightful surprises, amusing anecdotes and her own sparkling commentary.

History couldn’t be in better hands…

(Profile, paperback, £8.99)

The British Museum comes up with many reasons to try & prove that the Parthenon Sculptures are an integral part of their collection that can not now be removed from it & that this is an entirely legitimate position. Large amounts of information suggest that many of their arguments are far less robust than they claim though.

From:
Truthout

Is the Parthenon Sculpture a Permanent Hostage at the British Museum?
Thursday 27 May 2010
by: Evaggelos Vallianatos, truthout | Op-Ed

On March 8, 2010, Dyfri Williams, Research Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum, delivered a lecture on “The Parthenon Sculptures” at the University of Southern California.

Williams justified the holding by the British Museum of the plundered Parthenon treasures.

I found the reasons why the British government refuses to return the Parthenon “marbles” to Greece unacceptable – and not a little insulting.

But before I focus on the continuing cultural imperialism of the United Kingdom, some background throws light on more than the British rape of the Parthenon.

The Athenians erected the Parthenon in 447-432 BCE for two reasons: honoring their patron goddess, Athena Parthenos, the virgin daughter of Zeus, and thanking the gods, particularly Athena, for their victory over the Persians.

For the first millennium of its life, the Parthenon was the shining light of Hellenic culture: a religious, democratic, architectural, and artistic jewel unsurpassed in beauty and craft.

Ploutarchos, a priest of Apollon and a prolific writer who lived about five centuries after the founding of the Parthenon, said the Parthenon, untouched by time, was created for all time.

The Parthenon, however, did not exist in isolation. The temple did well only when the Greeks were masters of their country, a political reality that had changed dramatically by the time when Ploutarchos was admiring the grandeur of the temple of Athena.

The Romans incorporated Greece into their empire in 146 BCE. The Romans, like later “protectors” of Greece, loved and hated the Greeks.

But the Roman crisis in Greece became acute in the fourth century when the Roman Emperor Constantine made Christianity state religion, overthrowing the millennial polytheism of the Greeks and Romans.

Christianity immediately marched into Greece and declared war against the many gods of the Greeks, including Athena honored in the Parthenon.

In 484, the Christian Emperor Zeno inflicted the first major blow against the Parthenon. He pillaged the chryselephantine statue of Athena created by Pheidias.

In the sixth century, the Christians demonstrated their hatred for the Greeks with their conversion of the temple of Athena to a church. They also caused irreparable damage to the building and its sculpture.

The sculpture of the Parthenon, with dozens of statues of gods, men, and animals, was a pictorial history of Athens, a proud message of Greek origins and a celebration of freedom.

The Christians, like other barbarians that attacked the Parthenon, nearly obliterated Greek history and wrote their own. They hacked Parthenon statues to pieces. They defaced, mutilated, and smashed metopes. They punched windows through the frieze.

When the Turks captured Greece in 1453, they also added sacrilege and destruction to the Parthenon, which they made into a mosque.

In 1673, the Venetians bombarded the Parthenon, wrecking the building.

The next attack against the Parthenon came in early 1800s, also from the Europeans, especially Lord Elgin, who served as the British ambassador to the Turks.

Elgin and his agents bribed the Turks to give them a free hand with the surviving sculpture of the Parthenon.

The agents of Elgin sawed off just about every sculpture in the metopes and frieze, smashing in the process plenty of statues and damaging the Parthenon even more. They took intact slabs of metopes and frieze, including a caryatid from the Erechtheion, to England where they are now in the British Museum.

In 1801 and 1805, Edward Dodwell, a traveler who witnessed the agents of Elgin in action, said they left the Parthenon in “a state of shattered desolation.”

Lord Byron also denounced Elgin’s plunder of the Parthenon, calling Elgin a spoiler who rivaled the Goths and the Turks.

The looting and destruction of the Parthenon by Elgin sparked a more widespread stealing of Greek culture.

During the Greek Revolution in the 1820s, general John Makrygiannes stopped a couple of Greek soldiers from selling ancient artifacts to foreigners. He told them, “We went to war for these antiquities.”

In the twentieth century, the Greek government started asking the British to return the sculpture Elgin had pillaged from the Parthenon.

Melina Merkouri, Greek Minister of Culture in the 1980s and early 1990s, was right saying the Parthenon sculpture was “the soul of Greece.”

This language offended the British, who disputed Greek cultural continuity and resented Greek nationalism.

The British remembered the Greeks of the Ionian Islands and Cyprus, who revolted against their oppressive colonial rule. In the case of Cyprus, the British encouraged the Turks to nullify Cypriot independence. The Turks obliged and, in 1974, invaded Cyprus.

The British quote a Turkish order giving Elgin “legal” ground for his cultural atrocity, the violent removal and destruction of Parthenon sculpture. They conveniently ignore that the Turks had no more legal standing in Greece than the Nazis enjoyed in occupied Europe.

Second, British officials pretend that the Parthenon sculpture in their possession receives great care, which Greece, they claim, cannot give.

This is false.

During 1937 – 1938, the caretakers at the British Museum inflicted irreparable damage to the Parthenon sculpture. They scrubbed the statues with chemicals to make them “more white.” And rather than revealing what happened, the British Museum covered up the truth for decades.

William St. Clair, British author of “Lord Elgin and the Marbles,” concluded that the “stewardship” of the Parthenon sculpture by the British Museum for more than half a century was “a cynical sham,” which forfeited “the British claim to a trusteeship.”

In 2009, during the dedication of the Akropolis Museum, which the Greeks built to house the Parthenon treasures, the Greek Minister of Culture Antonis Samaras spoke about the “hostage” of the Parthenon sculpture at the British Museum.

Returning the Elgin marbles to the Akropolis Museum would be the right thing to do. It would be the only path to reconciliation between the British and the Greek people.

Reuniting the sculptures of the Parthenon would also be an act of respect for the integrity of the Greek culture, which, like other Europeans and Americans, the British have used successfully for building their own civilization.

At a time of tension, violence, and extreme financial hardship for Greece, the repatriation of the Parthenon sculpture in the British Museum would be an act of Renaissance humanism that may sow seeds of peace and philhellenism in the Mediterranean and the world.

Such an act of British generosity would also uplift the spirit of Greece.

In addition, in 2012, the Olympics, as Greek as the Parthenon, will be celebrated in London.

What an opportune time for the United Kingdom to return the Parthenon treasures to their Greek home, and show the world its appreciation for all it has benefited from Hellenic culture.

The Bring Them Back campaign for the return of the Elgin Marbles, sponsored by Metaxa has already achieved quite a bit of media attention – no doubt due in part to the clever yet amusing video that they have produced.

From;
Heritage Key

Bring Them Back Campaign Takes Big Ben Clock Hostage in Exchange for Elgin Marbles
Submitted by Ann on Tue, 05/25/2010 – 09:48

I you go sightseeing in London after a night out, stare up at Big Ben to find its clock missing, you might conclude you’ve overdone it on the Metaxa. But no: according to the new campaign video from bringthemback.org, Britain’s best-known clock was taken by Greek multi-millionaire Aristotle Elginiadis. In a month’s time the video – a call for the return of the Elgin Marbles (what else) – has amassed nearly half a million YouTube views, with little sign of its popularity waning.

The campaign video kicks off with a breaking news report: Big Ben’s clock has been stolen! Avid reporter Elena Katritsi quickly traces the timepiece to the Mediterranean villa of multi-millionaire Elginiadis, who isn’t shy to confess his ‘art theft’. Elginiadis says he took the Big Ben clock to protect it from London’s worsening pollution problems. The clock is a world-famous monument, it should be treated as such, and surely there’s less air pollution in a seaside village in Greece? That the ‘thief’ is taking good care of the clock is quickly demonstrated, with the cutest house-maid cleaning the clock in the background (Detail you won’t want to miss!).

When Katritsi enquires if Elginiadis plans to return the clock to be reunited with Big Ben, the multi-millionaire responds he “might consider letting (England) borrow it for a few days.” I guess London will have to settle for a replica version for now?

Reporter Nikos Aliagas takes over for a more serious part of the video. “You might find this story amusing or implausible,” he says, “but this is the reality Greece is facing.” In the early 19th century Lord Elgin and his crew – presumably with permission from the Ottomans – removed a massive haul of friezes and statues from the Parthenon and transported them to Britain, using brute force (and explosives). Some say it was to protect them, as the ruling Ottoman government didn’t seem to care. Others say it was to bring some classical culture to Britain as an example.

Although the British Museum isn’t the only high profile ancient history museum that holds part of the Parthenon’s Marbles, the majority of the original sculptures and half of the frieze are housed in the museum, which refuses to return them.

Previous British reasonings for not returning the relics were that Athens did not have the necessary infrastructure to display and preserve them, an argument that has been swept off the table since the opening of the New Acropolis Museum. Its makers had the foresight to include enough spaces to house the British Museum’s marbles, putting replicas in their place for now: maybe Athens could send their replicas the other way as part of a deal?

Find out more about the campaign on http://bringthemback.org. And next time you feel severely hungover after too much Metaxa, console yourself with having indirectly contributed to the return of the Elgin Marbles (A less expensive and intoxicating way of supporting the campaign is by sharing the video on Facebook, Twitter and whatever else ‘social media’ you are using).

Disclaimer: – Opinion Piece! – Although I strongly believe the Elgin Marbles – especially the friezes – should be put on a plane home, this might not be the opinion of the entire Heritage Key editorial team. Actually, repatriation is one of the hot debates in the office, together with the ‘value of museums’, ‘to replica or not to replica’, ‘human remains’ and ‘photo permissions in museum’. If you know of any other alcohol-based cultural campaigns (not just a drunken museum visit) let us know in the comments below! Alcoholic beverages willing to sponsor me? Just contact me at ann [ta] heritage-key [tod] com. Absolut Antiquity would be a great theme! ;)

The American Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures now has a page on Facebook, that Facebook users can use to follow the updates to their campaign. Visit the page here.

This is in addition to their main website, which you can still access here.

It is worth reminding people that Elginism is also available to follow on Facebook & Twitter so that you can have the articles appear straight in your newsfeed.

Matthew Parris in The Times has (although I am still hoping the remarks were made tongue in cheek) sadly descended to the level of many other commentators in the past, who claim that London is a far safer location for the display of the Parthenon Marbles. Notwithstanding any other issues associated with this argument, the fact remains that even the supposedly safe places can become unsafe – meaning that there is no form of guarantee that London is any safer than Athens for the display of artefacts. This fact is evidence by such things as the huge number of artworks destroyed in the collapse of New York’s World Trade Center in 2001.

If the argument is taken to its logical conclusion, then surely all artefacts should be located in secure underground vaults – perhaps only viewable by video cameras. If this was the case though, it should be determined by some sort of international body, by the voluntary consent of the parties concerned, not post-rationalised bay a single party without any sort of real consent from the original owners.

From:
The Times

May 20, 2010
Never mind the oil slick, just watch our carpet
BP should take a wider view when it comes to health and safety
Matthew Parris

[...]

Losing their Marbles

Speaking of mayhem, I see a silver lining to the cloud of rioting and destruction in Athens. I’ve always felt that there was merit in the argument that, as the Elgin Marbles were part of the Parthenon, they should be reunited with it, but I’m equally impressed with the argument that they were brought to Britain for safekeeping, and are ours now. It is at last clear how these two may be reconciled. Bring the Parthenon to London, too, for safekeeping.

[...]

Michael Kimmelman’s recent comments about the Elgin Marbles in the New York Times have provoked numerous responses – both in other publications & in the letters page of the newspaper.

From:
New York Times

Letters
Elgin Marbles: A Different Patrimony
Published: May 11, 2010

Re “Who Draws the Borders of Culture” by Michael Kimmelman [May 9]:

Mr. Kimmelman makes a thoughtful and persuasive case that ancient art contains multiple and shifting meanings and belongs to the world, not the current occupants of the country it came from. I found it odd, however, that he denies that the United States has cultural patrimony and argues that Americans would have difficulty understanding the concept.

It is true that American nationhood is not rooted in claims to an older civilization, but something like American cultural patrimony exists for the things we choose to value as a nation. The artifacts of our cultural patrimony are not artworks but relics from the years of our founding and the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. Imagine the reaction Americans would have if a Chinese collector tried to buy the Declaration of Independence. Mr. Kimmelman is right that Americans are happy to send American art and artifacts abroad, but he is looking in the wrong place for the analogy. It is not our art that defines our nationhood, but our political ideals.David Beffert

Washington

From:
New York Times

Letters
It’s All About Context
Published: May 11, 2010

Few can disagree with Mr. Kimmelman’s conclusion that art “ultimately belongs to everyone and no one.” But the Parthenon marbles are not random pieces that once adorned a building and can now be appreciated in isolation.

The marbles epitomize Classical Greece and its influence on Western civilization. Their separation is a great loss for art.

Michael Polymenis

College Station, Tex.

Following their attendance at the recent conference in Egypt, Indian officials want to make a major push to apply pressure to other countries that hold disputed artefacts from India.

From:
Telegraph (India)

Tuesday , May 18 , 2010
India in global bid to get back treasures
SEBANTI SARKAR

Calcutta, May 17: India has joined a global initiative to restore antiquities back to their countries of origin for the first time after decades of unsuccessfully trying to reclaim stolen treasures like the Koh-i-Noor diamond and the Birmingham Buddha.

“The legal process for restitution of antiquities is not only time-consuming but also expensive. An international campaign with Unesco’s backing is certainly the better option for us,” the director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), Gautam Sengupta, said today, on the eve of International Museum Day.

Sengupta, who represented India at the Cairo conference hosted by Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities last month, said India’s official wish-list included fragments of the vandalised Peacock Throne preserved in Persia, the Amravati railings, a stolen Saraswati idol from the Bhoj temple that found its way to a museum in Europe and the Birmingham Buddha, originally from 7th Century Bihar but now the pride of a British museum.

“We have already petitioned Unesco to amend a convention that bans the export or ownership of stolen antiquities acquired after 1970. The pact also does not specify what must be done about artefacts stolen before 1970, which we want clarified in the amendment. Countries like the US must be made a party to the amended pact,” the ASI chief said.

The April conference also saw unanimity among the participants — Bolivia, China, Cyprus, Greece, Guatemala, Honduras, Iraq, Italy, Libya, Mexico, Nigeria, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka and Syria — about the need to regularly share information about stolen antiquities.

“We need to be realistic but it is possible to win back national treasures if everyone co-operates. Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, led by Zahl Hawass, has retrieved some 31,000 artefacts since 2002. India has also reclaimed a few antiquities like the bronze Vishnu from Sagardighi, Murshidabad, and the Amin relief from Haryana with Interpol’s help and through diplomatic negotiations,” Sengupta said.

Apart from strengthening laws, the focus of the Cairo conference was how to reduce time and legal costs.

Greece has been locked in a 30-year legal battle with the UK to retrieve the Elgin Marbles, a collection of classical Greek sculptures, while Peru wants to initiate legal action to reclaim Inca treasures from Yale University in the US but doesn’t have the resources.

Sengupta said the conference decided to draw up a single list of “unique items” to be returned to their countries of origin instead of countries individually spending their resources on legal battles. “Once this list is ready, these countries will jointly initiate a series of steps, including a diplomatic and legal campaign to get back the lost treasures,” he added.

Egypt, which has been trying to get back the Rosetta Stone — it contains rare samples of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing — and a bust of Queen Nefertiti from foreign museums, had broken off all ties with the Louvre in Paris till France returned fragments chipped off the wall of an Egyptian tomb.

So would India also adopt “non-co-operation” as a means to retrieve national treasures?

“Let the official minutes of the Cairo conference arrive and we will decide how to go about the joint campaign. Artefacts have and continue to be smuggled out of countries like India, China and Egypt. If museums in England, America and Europe were to return all such treasures to their countries of origin, they would have little left to display,” Sengupta said.

To begin with, he urged state governments to take “stronger steps” to curb looting from historical sites and museums.

Sengupta probably had home state Bengal in mind, where even Rabindranath Tagore’s Nobel isn’t safe.

Kwame Opoku looks at the somewhat peculiar assertions made by Michael Kimmelman, about the Parthenon Sculptures being split between different countries that: The effect of this vandalism on the education and enlightenment of people in all the various places where the dismembered works have landed has been in many ways democratizing.

From:
Modern Ghana

DEMOCRATIZATION THROUGH VANDALISM: NEW ANSWER TO DEMANDS FOR RESTITUTION OF CULTURAL ARTEFACTS?
Columnist: Kwame Opoku, Dr.

“You must understand what the Parthenon Marbles mean to us. They are our pride. They are our sacrifices. They are the supreme symbol of nobility. They are a tribute to democratic philosophy. They are our aspiration and our name. They are the essence of Greekness”.
Melina Mercouri (1)

After a long period of studying the question of restitution of cultural artefacts, I thought I had heard all the arguments that could be advanced for or against restitution. However, I received a jolt of surprise when I saw an article by Michael Kimmelman entitled “Who Draws the Borders of Culture?” in which, among other contestable statements, he wrote concerning the dismemberment of the Parthenon and its scattering outside Greece, the following:

“Over the centuries, meanwhile, bits and pieces of the Parthenon have ended up in six different countries, in the way that countless altars and other works of art have been split up and dispersed among private collectors and museums here and there. To the Greeks the Parthenon marbles may be a singular cause, but they’re like plenty of other works that have been broken up and disseminated. The effect of this vandalism on the education and enlightenment of people in all the various places where the dismembered works have landed has been in many ways democratizing.” (2)

I must confess that I have never thought of the possibility that the act of vandalism by Lord Elgin which has resulted in decades of dispute between Greece and the United Kingdom could be justified in this way. My first reaction was to dismiss the article as one of the many strange articles we read on restitution but then I noticed that it was discussed by Paul Harford who correctly summed it up as “pure imperialism”.(3) However, Derek Fincham thought that Kimmelman “manages to make some thoughtful observations”. (4)

Kimmelman, I learnt, is Chief critic of the New York Times, a respectable American newspaper and so may be considered to be representing some parts of the American elite. The views he expressed must therefore be seen as a serious matter since the USA is home of many of the worlds important cultural objects.

Democratization through vandalism? If one follows the underlying logic of the argument it implies that any act of vandalism which spreads parts of the vandalized objects in the world could be seen as initiating a process of democratization in so far as it enables more people to view objects which might otherwise be intact in their original location and accessible only to those who visit the original location. If we were to accept this argument, there would be few cases of looting, vandalism or illegitimate appropriation, as far as cultural objects are concerned, that could not be defended as having a democratizing effect, if by democratizing one means making subjects accessible to more persons.

This way of reasoning would justify what most of us would consider as absolute evils: slavery and Nazism. Following Kimmelman’s logic, one could argue that the Atlantic slavery that caused the scattering of Africans in many countries of America was a democratizing process since it enabled other countries and peoples to participate in the African heritage which is also a heritage of mankind. Surely, an American author would shrink from justifying ex post facto the evils of slavery. Could he also see how his argumentation would shock the Greeks and others who view Lord Elgin’s vandalism as a destructive actthat cannot be accepted?

More worrying is the effect that such arguments could have on others, especially the impressionable youth, both from the Western world and non-Western world. Convinced of striking a blow for democratization, some may feel they are doing humankind a service by trying to dismantle monuments or tearing down parts of objects such as the Statute of Liberty so that they could be seen by the rest of the world and not only by US Americans. Is Kimmelman still with us? Would he approve of people taking parts of the statute of Lincoln and other US national treasures in the name of a democratization process? What would he think if some young Africans went about taking pieces of looted African sculptures that are available only in Western museums? They might think they are bringing authentic African culture to people in Africa who do not have the opportunity to visit museums in Amsterdam, Paris, London, Berlin. New York and Chicago.

Many arguments or statements presented by Kimmelman appear to distort the issues rather than bring enlightenment. Take for instance this statement: “The Greek proposal that Britain fork over Elgin’s treasures has never involved actually putting the sculptures back onto the Parthenon, which started crumbling long before he showed up. The marbles would go from one museum into another, albeit one much closer. The Greeks argue for proximity, not authenticity. Their case has always been more abstract, not strictly about restoration but about historical reparations, pride and justice. It is more nationalistic and symbolic.”

So the Greeks are motivated by nationalism in seeking to recover their Parthenon Marbles. What about the British? Are they nationalists by wanting to retain the objects in the British Museum, London? What motivates them in their stubborn refusal to return the Parthenon Marbles to Greece despite UNESCO, United Nations and international conference resolutions? For Kimmelman, as apparently for many US Americans and the British, nationalists exist everywhere except in the US and Great Britain. (5) Kimmelman makes the British custodians of world heritage and not nationalists:

“The British Museum is Europe’s Western front in the global war over cultural patrimony, on account of the marbles. The pamphlets give the museum’s version for why they should stay in Britain, as they have for two centuries — ever since Lord Elgin, the British ambassador to the Sublime Porte at Constantinople, and with the consent of the ruling Ottomans (not to mention a blithe disregard for whatever may have been the wishes of the Greek populace), spirited them from the Acropolis in Athens. The pamphlet stresses that the British Museum is free and attracts millions of visitors every year from around the world, making the sculptures available to, and putting them in the context of, a wide swath of human civilization.”

Not surprisingly, Egypt and Zahi Hawass come under attack:

“It isn’t to belittle a deep-seated connection to such works to point out that claimants to far-flung patrimony may have various motives. When Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s chief archaeologist, who made the recent fuss about the Rosetta Stone, also demanded that Germany hand over Nerfertiti, the 3,500-year-old bust of Akhenaten’s wife, he chose the moment when the Neues Museum in Berlin opened with the bust as its main attraction.

This was just after Farouk Hosny, Egypt’s candidate to run Unesco, the United Nations cultural agency, was defeated in a vote that Egyptian leaders considered a diplomatic slap. Mr. Hawass used Egypt’s only real weapon on the international stage, its cultural patrimony, to lash out by proxy at the perceived enemies of Mr. Hosny’s candidacy and pander to the wounded egos of Egypt’s ruling elite.

It was a public relations gambit. Practically speaking, Egypt had to know there was no immediate shot at getting Nerfertiti back. The sculpture served in a passing form of political theater common these days, with Egypt playing plucky David to the West’s Goliath.”

Kimmelman seems to be aiming at creating a bad image of Zahi Hawass and Egypt. The requests for the return of the Rosetta Stone from the British Museum and the bust of Nefertiti from the Neues Museum, Berlin are described as making fuss. I do not know what meaning the writer attributes to “fuss”. The Concise Oxford Dictionary offers the following explanations, inter alia: “excessive commotion, ostentatious or nervous activity, treatment of trifles as important, abundance of petty detail, busy oneself restlessly with trifles.”

Whether one can describe a demand for the restitution of two cultural objects considered by many as important icons in Western museums as making fuss, is a matter we leave to the judgement of readers. Egypt’s demand for restitution is presented as motivated by revenge against those responsible for the failure of an Egyptian to secure the post of the Director-General at UNESCO. Kimmelmann presents Egypt’s motivation as seeking “to lash out by proxy at the perceived enemies of Mr. Hosny’s candidacy” but when we look at the references the author gives, we do not find Germany and Great Britain presented as enemies of the Egyptian candidacy. For which countries then do Germany and Great Britain serve as proxies? True the author refers at the beginning of the article to “the Rosetta Stone which Egyptian authorities just lately have again demanded that Britain return to Egypt” but the reader is not told that the first demand was made long time ago. Egypt’s demands for restitution of the Rosetta Stone and the bust of Nefertiti are not from yesterday. When Ludwig Borchardt brought the bust to Germany in August 1913 it was kept secret for some ten years and not exhibited so as to avoid the Egyptians getting to know about it. Finally, in 1923, after a decade, the bust of Nefertiti was shown in a book by Borchardt “Porträts der Königin Nofretete”. After this publication, the Egyptians started demanding that the bust be sent back. But the Germans have refused to return the bust. (6)

Kimmelman is a man of the media. What did he expect the Egyptians to do when everybody was talking about Nefertiti in view of the opening of the Neues Museum, Berlin? Did he expect the Egyptians to remain silent as if the discussions about Nefertiti did not concern them? One could imagine that if the Egyptians had not said anything at the re-opening of the museum but did so only long after the event, the same critics would be saying: “It is surprising that the Egyptians did not make their claim at the opening of the museum. It seemed at that time they had accepted the futility of such demands. But why are they now putting in a demand ?” At whatever time the Egyptians repeat their demands, they will be suspected by some as being motivated by factors other than the fact that they seek the return of Egyptian objects taken away during the heyday of imperialism. It almost seems as if some could not imagine that the Egyptians are genuinely interested in Egyptian cultural objects. Instead of wondering about Egyptian motivations, Kimmelman and others could perhaps also concern themselves a little with the motivations of the British and the Germans in wishing to hold on to objects nobody disputes are Egyptian. They could also examine the arguments that have been advanced by the retentionists.

Kimmelman refers to the unforgettable Melina Mercouri having participated in a modern repatriation campaign which was part of a nationalist programme. He could have told his readers a little bit about the visit of the great actress to London and the disgraceful behaviour of David Wilson, the then Director of the British Museum. When the charismatic actress went to London to discuss the issue of restitution, David Wilson described as cultural fascists all who advocated the return of the Marbles to Athens. (7) It is very difficult for a non-Westerner to understand the motivation behind insulting a person or people whose cultural artefacts you are holding. Nevertheless, the politics of insults seem to continue. We have had the present Director of the British Museum saying that in removing the rest of the Parthenon Marbles to the New Acropolis Museum, the Greeks were following in the steps of Lord Elgin.(8)

His partiality for the British or rather the dislike of the Greek position goes so far that Kimmelman even attacks the New Acropolis Museum as “forbidden and frankly ugly”, not without first taking a swipe at the Greek economy:

“For their part the Greeks, before their economy collapsed, finally opened the long-delayed New Acropolis Museum last year to much fanfare: it’s an up-to-date facility, forbidding and frankly ugly outside, but airy and light-filled inside, a home-in-waiting for the marbles, whose absence is clearly advertised by bone-white plaster casts of what Elgin took, alongside yellowed originals that he left behind.”

It is true that the availability or otherwise of adequate museums may be relevant to a discussion on restitution but is the beauty or elegance of the building itself relevant? If the new museum which Kimmelman himself describes as “up-to-date facility” is ugly, what does he say about the British Museum’s architectural design? Nothing. The article puts the Greeks and the Egyptians under scrutiny for daring to demand restitution from the British. Their motivations must be examined. The assumption of the whole article is that the Greeks and Egyptians

must establish their worthiness in reclaiming their cultural objects. The British who are holding onto the contested objects need not establish any grounds for their conduct in refusing restitution. In other words the burden of proof is put on those seeking repatriation

Kimmelman’s comment on the new museum at Athens recalls that of Neil MacGregor who after the opening of the New Acropolis Museum declared that the location of the Parthenon Marbles was never an issue:

“The real question is about how the Greek and British governments can work together so that the sculptures can be seen in China and Africa”. (9)

Kimmelman’s statement that the Greeks do not propose putting the marbles in the Parthenon is an echo of the insulting remark by MacGregor that the Greeks were following the steps of Elgin. Kimmelman declares that:

“The Greek proposal that Britain fork over Elgin’s treasures has never involved actually putting the sculptures back onto the Parthenon, which started crumbling long before he showed up. The marbles would go from one museum into another, albeit one much closer. The Greeks argue for proximity, not authenticity. Their case has always been more abstract, not strictly about restoration but about historical reparations, pride and justice. It is more nationalistic and symbolic.”

Neil MacGregor put this more directly:
“The Greek government has simply continued Elgin’s practice and removed the rest [of the Parthenon Marbles] now from the building, because you can’t see them on the building. When those sculptures came to London, for the first time they were at a height where people could see them and they were in a place where tens, hundreds of thousands of people could see these were great objects” (10).

Kimmelman, like most retentionists is anxious to present any argument that could remove the question of ownership from restitution discussions and does not shrink from statements which cannot stand close examination:

“Art is something made in a particular place by particular people, and may serve a particular function at one time but obtain different meanings at other times. It summons distinct feelings to those for whom it’s local, but ultimately belongs to everyone and to no one.

We’re all custodians of global culture for posterity.

Neither today’s Greeks nor Britons own the Parthenon marbles, really.”

Are we to take seriously a declaration that art “ultimately belongs to everyone and to no one”? Can we affirm that a work of Picasso “belongs to everyone and to no one”? How came that some persons are selling and buying for millions works of Picasso that belong to everyone and to no one”? The absurdity of Kimmelman’s statement is obvious. Without rights of ownership and control we could hardly have any dealings with art objects.

Kimmelman is obviously under the spell of James Cuno whose ideas he conveys throughout the article without acknowledgement. In order to deny the Egyptians of their rights to Egyptian cultural objects like the bust of Nefertiti and the Rosetta Stone, Cuno goes so far as to deny that there is any connection between present Egyptians and ancient Egyptians:

“What is the relationship between, say, modern Egypt and the antiquities that were part of the land’s Pharaonic past? The people of modern-day Cairo do not speak the language of the ancient Egyptians, do not practice their religion, do not make their art, wear their dress, eat their food, or play their music, and do not adhere to the same kind of laws or form of government the ancient Egyptians did.” (11)

Once we apply the criteria enumerated here to France, Germany, Great Britain and other States we realize immediately that hardly any modern peoples eat the same food as their ancestors, follow the same religion as their forbearers or dance to the same music as their ancestors and on this basis could be denied any right to cultural objects found on their lands.

Kimmelman writes as if the United Nations, UNESCO and several international conferences had not requested the return of cultural artefacts to their countries of origin. UNESCO is mentioned only to be blamed for the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas because the organization allegedly refused to authorise the export of artefacts. The writer does not seem to understand the role of UNESCO in cultural matters nor does he appear to be aware of the fact that it is for governments to authorise or deny the export of cultural objects from their territory.

Kimmelman who appreciates the spread of democracy through vandalism totally ignores the fact that the majority of the British people have always spoken in favour of returning the Parthenon/Elgin Marbles to Greece. Recent polls by the Guardian have confirmed this 94.8 5% were in favour of returning the Marbles to Athens and only 5.2% were against. (12)

Do people like Kimmelman really care about the opinion of the British people or indeed of any people? They talk about democracy but are the first to trample on the democratic rights of others or support those responsible for such violations. It is obvious that depriving any people of their cultural artefacts is a violation of their human right to cultural development and to enjoyment of their cultural objects.

Kimmelman does not mention the Benin bronzes, the Ethiopian Treasures and Asante Gold Treasures. Perhaps he realized it would be rather difficult to sell the idea that despite the violence in the invasion and looting of Benin (Nigeria) in 1897, Maqdala (Ethiopia) in 1868, Kumasi (Ghana) in 1874 by the British Army, the spread of the national treasures can be considered as democratization process. He surely would not want to say to the Nigerians, Ethiopians and Ghanaians: “It is true that your cultural objects have been taken with violence in unjustified wars prompted by the greed of the British imperialists. But you should appreciate that your cultures are now well-known in the world and the spread of those objects has made them accessible to a large number of people rather than to a small ruling elite. A truly democratic enjoyment of culture.”

If the Parthenon Marbles, the Rosetta Stone, the bust of Nefertiti and the Benin bronzes were returned to their countries of origin, the museums would still have more than enough objects to display. Indeed most of them have space problems and cannot display the many objects kept in depots. British, French, German and other Western cultures can survive the departure of the looted, stolen or disputed artefacts. So who is holding back all these artefacts against the will of the owners and against the will of their own people? There is small cultural elite, including some experts and museum directors who have built their careers and lives around such artefacts and cannot contemplate, even for a second, the departure of such objects. It is the kind of elite that has developed its own values, far removed from those of the average citizens. It is the elite whose values would justify paying $ 106 m for a painting in a world where many have to live on less than $1 a day. (13)

Since Kimmelman is interested in motivation research, one may wonder what his motivation was in writing his article at the time he did. Was he perhaps motivated by the Greek economic problems? He also failed to mention or refer to the Cairo Conference on restitution which took place a few weeks before he wrote his article. (14) What was the motivation here? After all, that conference dealt directly with the topic he was writing about and there has not been of recent any meeting as significant as the meeting called by Zahi Hawass of Egypt. Was this a result of the arrogant position that those who met at Cairo were of no significance and deserve no attention?

It is very sad that writers such Kimmelman do not use their important positions to contribute to finding solutions to questions of restitution but take the side of those who are alleged to have deprived others of their rights and in the process make absurd statements, disingenuous arguments and unsupported assertions. One could point at the thousands of Egyptian artefacts that are in Western museums and the absence of any French, British or German cultural artefacts in Egyptian museums. One could urge parties contesting cultural objects to submit to arbitration or judicial settlement.

It is not for those of us who oppose the retentionism of the major museums to advise on how to present arguments in favour of an outmoded ideology of previous centuries. But we are surely entitled to hope and pray that certain standards are observed. The article “Who Draws the Borders of Culture” does no good service to the cause of the retentionists.

Once again, Kimmelman’s article demonstrates that when it comes to restitution of cultural objects, many in find it difficult to remain fair and to refrain from absurdities, insults and contempt for the demanders of restitution whose only offence is to dare ask for the return of their stolen/looted or illegitimately acquired cultural objects.

Kwame Opoku, 16 May 2010.

NOTES
1. http://www.melinamercourifoundation.org.
2. Michael Kimmelman, Who Draws the Borders of Culture? THE NEW YORK TIMES, May 4, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05 All citations of Kimmelman are from this article. Readers may be interested in 2009 coverage of the museum by the New York Tines http://www.nytimes.com…

3. Paul Barford, http://paul-barford.blogspot.com

http://paul-barford.blogspot.com

See excellent comments at http://archaeologymatters

4. Derek Fincham, http://illicit-cultural-property.blogspot.com

5. K. Opoku, “Is Nationalism such a Dangerous Phenomenon for Culture and Stolen/Looted Cultural Property?” http://www.modernghana.com

6. Gert v. Pacezensky and Herbert Ganslmayr, Nofretete will nach Hause; Europa – Schatzhaus der “Dritten Welt”, C.Bertelsmann, München, 1984; see also, Culture and Development, www.nofretete-geht-auf-reisen.de/echronol.htm K.Opoku, “Nefertiti, Idia and other African Icons in European Museums: The Thin Edge of European Morality”, http://www.modernghana.com

7. Christopher Hitchens, The Parthenon Marbles, Verso, London, New York, 2008, pp. 97-99

I found in this useful book, a report on an interview said to have been given by David Wilson, then Director of the British Museum who threw the accusation of “nationalism” and “fascism” at the supporters of restitution. His statements are so remarkable in their violence and lack of logic that I feel everyone should read them:

“In a BBC television discussion on 15 June 1985, Sir David Wilson, Director of the British Museum, was invited to contrast his opinions with those of Melina Mercouri. Sir David had already exhibited a certain lack of gallantry when, on an earlier visit to London, Mrs. Mercouri had expressed a wish to visit the Museum and view the marbles. On that occasion he had said publicly that it was not usual to allow burglars ‘to case the joint’ in advance. But once before the cameras he easily improved on this ill-mannered exaggeration. ‘To rip the Elgin Marbles from the walls of the British Museum’ he said, ‘is a much greater disaster than the threat of blowing up the Parthenon’. This might have been thought hyperbolic, if Sir David had not gone on to say, in response to a mild question about the feasibility of restitution:

Oh, anything can be done. That’s what Hitler said, that’s what Mussolini

said when he got Italian trains to run on time
The interviewer, David Lomax, broke in to say:
You are not seriously suggesting there’s a parallel between

Sir David was unrepentant:
Yes, I am. I think this is cultural fascism. It’s nationalism and it’s cultural danger. Enormous cultural danger. If you start to destroy great intellectual institutions, you are culturally fascist.

LOMAX: What do you mean by cultural fascist?
WILSON: You are destroying the whole fabric of intellectual achievement. You are starting to erode it. I can’t say you are destroying, you are starting to erode. I think it’s a very, very serious, thing to do. It’s a thing you ought to think of very careful, it’s like burning books. That’s what Hitler did, I think you’ve to be very careful about that.

LOMAX: But are you seriously suggesting that the people who want the Elgin Marbles to go back to Greece, who feel there’s an overwhelming moral case that they should go back, are guilty of cultural fascism?

WILSON: I think not the people who are wanting the Elgin Marbles to go back to Greece if they are Greek. But I think that the world opinion and the people in this country who want the Elgin Marbles to go back to Greece are actually guilty of something very much approaching it, it is censoring the British Museum. And I think that this is a bad thing to do. It is as bad as burning books”.

This is an extraordinary performance by a Director of the British Museum. One can sympathize with his desperation in face of the mounting pressure to return the Parthenon/Elgin Marbles to Athens and the great presence of the unforgettable Melina Mercouri in London. But can anyone excuse his shameful performance?

8. K.Opoku, “The Amazing Director of the British Museum: Gratuitous Insults as Currency of Cultural Diplomacy?”http://www.modernghana.com

9. Culturegrrl MacGregor Whopper: Greek Government “Simply Continued Elgin’s Practice”

10. Culturegrrl.ibid.
11. James Cuno, Who owns antiquity? Museums and the battle over our ancient heritage,p.9, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2008. See also, K. Opoku, “Do Present-Day Egyptians Eat the same Food as Tuthankhamun? Review of James Cuno’s Who Owns Antiquity? http://www.modernghana.com

12. Aida Edemariam “How G2′s Parthenon marbles poll went global”, http://www.elginism.com See http://www.parthenonuk.com for more information on the Elgin Marbles.

13. See comments on the sale by Tom Flynn, “Annus mirabilis for bankers, annus horribilis for those who bailed them out” http://tom-flynn.blogspot.com/search/label/Picasso

14. K. Opoku – “Reflections on the Cairo Conference on Restitution: Encouraging Beginning”, http://www.museum-security.org

The Parthenon Sculptures are an issue that is seen as important by many people who take all possible opportunities to try & raise awareness of it. This is in direct contract to the approach taken by the British Museum that the issue will go away if they just ignore it.

From:
Greek Reporter

Formula 1 drivers in the “race” for Parthenon Marbles return
Posted on 11 May 2010 by Apostolos Papapostolou

The drivers of this year’s Formula 1 Monaco Grand Prix race, also known as the Natiole Piloti and headed by the Michail Schumacher will participate in a friendly soccer match that will send out two messages: the first being safe driving and the second and most important for Greece-the return of the Parthenon Marbles to Greece, their homeland. With this special event to take place before the lavish opening of the Monaco Grand Prix, the drivers aim to sensitize many of the dignitaries and officials as well as the people attending this spectacular sporting event. Among the expected celebrities to be attending the event will be Greek-French television personality, Nikos Aliagas, who spearheads the drive for the Parthenon Marbles to Greece.

Many who are against the restitution of various artefacts to their countries of origin, argue that the countries today are completely different ones (in many cases with different names) to those from which the artefacts originated. To argue this though it to lose track of the geographical connection itself – artefacts are a product of a time & place. Even if the times have changed, the place is still where it always was.

From:
Egypt Today

May 2010
Whose Heritage?
Repatriating ancient treasures seems like a noble cause, but history might end up the loser
By 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 back to Greece,” in the British magazine The Spectator. Korski was referring to the sculptures and friezes originally mounted on the Parthenon, which were removed from Ottoman-administered Greece by Lord Thomas Elgin from 1801 to 1812. Currently in the British Museum, the marbles have been a long-standing slight to Greek national pride. Finally returning them, suggests Korski, could give Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou the political capital he needs to sustain unpopular economic reforms in his bankrupt country.

The suggestion is not as crazy as you might think. Antiquities are an effective weapon in any country’s political arsenal. But the furor generated over who owns which antiquities is swiftly superseding the appreciation of their cultural and historical value.

No one knows the political power of antiquities better than Dr. Zahi Hawass, the head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA). Egypt, by some accounts, is the repository of a full third of the world’s surviving antiquities. Add to that its long history of occupation and looting by colonial powers, and it is no wonder today’s battle to repatriate ancient artifacts is being led by Hawass, who for years has been challenging the status quo and stoking controversy in the world antiquities community with his demands for the return of high-profile artifacts from abroad.

On April 7 and 8, the SCA hosted the Conference on International Cooperation for the Protection and Repatriation of Cultural Heritage in Cairo, bringing together 25 countries — among them Greece, Peru and Italy — to discuss how to work cohesively to repatriate pilfered artifacts, with Hawass suggesting that countries draw up wish-lists of artifacts to recover from foreign museums. At the end of the conference, Hawass told international media, “Some of us will make the life of those museums that have our artifacts miserable.”

The conference participants may also submit recommendations to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to amend current antiquities conventions to allow the countries greater flexibility in pursuing antiquities removed from their borders.

A week after the conference, the SCA signed an agreement with Switzerland that will see the return of all artifacts illegally taken from Egypt and found within Swiss borders. Switzerland has virtually no antiquities protection laws, which has made it a hotbed for global antiquities smuggling.

The conference and the Swiss accord are merely the latest in Hawass’ well-publicized campaign to return allegedly stolen antiquities to Egypt. In recent years, Hawass has lobbied for the return of several high-profile artifacts, including the Rosetta Stone from the British Museum and the bust of Nefertiti from Germany’s Neues Museum. Though the two pieces still remain in the West, Hawass scored a victory when the Louvre returned five fresco fragments after he threatened to break off all cooperation with the museum and suspend its archeological missions in Egypt until the pieces were returned.

Despite the sound bites, public shaming and media grandstanding, the question of who owns history isn’t as simple as Egypt’s Indiana Jones might have you think.

The war over antiquities is waged between modern nation states, which didn’t exist at the times the artifacts were created or removed. Many of the artifacts in question were taken across the borders of defunct political bodies, Ottoman-administered Egypt in the case of the Rosetta Stone, and Ottoman-administered Greece in the case of the Elgin Marbles. Though cases can be made for their return, it is logically and legally impossible to hold modern-day states accountable for the actions of past governments, regimes and empires.

What the now-existing states can do is enact laws protecting their cultural heritage — Egypt has recently strengthened its own laws against antiquities looters — and negotiate agreements with other existing political bodies. Though international frameworks exist for the protection of cultural heritage, such as those created by UNESCO, these agreements value national sovereignty above all. UNESCO has no authority to enact laws or force one country to return artifacts to another. This means countries holding antiquities originating elsewhere must voluntarily agree to their return to source countries, ideally through international agreements.

The key UNESCO convention on the issue — the Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property — was enacted in 1970. But it has no legal weight, and applies only to antiquities removed from countries after 1970.

The lack of international legal tools that can be used to reclaim antiquities is part of the problem for source countries, leading to high-profile repatriation campaigns such as the one led by Hawass.

“I think [these countries] do that because they feel there is a void in this area in terms of international law or prevailing conventions that they can refer to,” says Tarek Shawki, director of UNESCO’s regional bureau for science in Arab states.

But even if laws are in place, the case for ownership isn’t always cut and dry. Exhibit A: the Rosetta Stone. The stone was first discovered by French occupation soldiers in 1799, when Egypt was under the nominal rule of the Ottomans. In 1801, after Napoleon’s defeat by the British, the stone was ceded to the victors. Since 1802, it has been displayed in the British Museum (with a brief break during the heavy bombing of London during the Second World War). It was decoded by British and French archaeologists and subsequently maintained by the British Museum.

It’s an all-too-common tale of colonial powers pilfering antiquities from source countries under occupation. But it’s an argument that sways the heart, not the head.

Not only does the stone’s complicated history make a legal case for returning it difficult, the British Museum has demurred on giving the stone back, citing practical concerns over the stone’s security in Egypt.

Such concerns can come off as “logical or hostile, depending on who’s listening,” says Shawki. Genuine concern over the well-being of priceless artifacts on the part of, in this case, European museums, can come off as patronizing and colonial. Conversely, Hawass’ rhetoric, though born of a passion for antiquities, can come off as nationalistic. Hawass told Al Jazeera in a July 2007 television interview about the Rosetta Stone: “We own that stone. The motherland should own this.”

Such talk is disturbing to those who see ancient artifacts as world heritage, not national symbols.

It is difficult to make the case that the artifacts of ancient Egypt were made by people bearing strong similarities to citizens of the modern-day Arab Republic of Egypt, just as it would be difficult for Greek PM Papindreou to say he has a tangible link to the lineage of Socrates. Though geography and cultural identity count for much personally, they are not consistent, logical or legal foundations for creating effective mechanisms to govern the return of antiquities.

These larger issues are precisely the ones people like James Cuno, director of the Art Institute of Chicago, see as the overriding concern in the political debate over antiquities. Cuno’s book Who Owns Antiquity? and his subsequent lectures on the subject of antiquities argue for a global culture of antiquities exchange, in which scholars refuse to cave to the pressure of leaders and governments seeking to acquire antiquities for their own national promotion. “It is in the nature of our species to connect and exchange,” Cuno wrote in his book. “And the result is a common culture in which we all have a stake. It is not, and can never be, the property of one modern nation or another.”

Cuno argues that the laws drafted by nations to protect their antiquities are not only ineffective and drive pieces to the black market, away from the public eye and scholarship, but also that ancient antiquities are used to foster the nationalist identity of the state.

The arguments made by the SCA hinge on national ownership, but those arguments can be dangerous when used by any country seeking to place a national claim on human heritage. The modern state of Israel declared in February that Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem and the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, two West Bank sites considered holy to both Jews and Muslims, as Israeli national heritage sites. Clashes erupted after the announcement in what many viewed as a bid to claim Palestinian land under the guise of preserving cultural heritage.

On March 14, Hawass cancelled the SCA’s unveiling ceremony for Cairo’s Maimonides Synagogue, a recently restored nineteenth-century synagogue, citing displeasure with recent Israeli actions in the Palestinian territories. He was quoted in the independent Israeli daily Ha’aretz, as saying that he had given “the Zionist enemy a slap in the face.”

In a cultural, scientific and educational sense, name-calling and flag-waving degrade the ideals behind preserving humanity’s past. When artifacts are used as political footballs, history gets sidelined.

In the spat over Maimonides Synagogue, the irony was lost on all parties. The synagogue’s namesake was a famous thirteenth-century Jewish philosopher and physician who died in Cairo after serving as the court physician to a series of Muslim sultans, including Salah Al-Din. et

I’m fairly unconvinced by the viewpoint represented in this article. The argument is never about where the impact of the Parthenon Marbles is greater, but about where they actually belong & who they belong to.

From:
New York Times

Abroad
Who Draws the Borders of Culture?

Swarms of visitors see the Elgin marbles daily in the British Museum. The Greeks want them moved to a new museum near the Parthenon, but would their impact be greater there?
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: May 4, 2010

IT was gridlock in the British Museum the other morning as South African teenagers, Japanese businessmen toting Harrods bags, and a busload of German tourists — the usual crane-necked, camera-flashing babel of visitors — formed scrums before the Rosetta Stone, which Egyptian authorities just lately have again demanded that Britain return to Egypt. From the Egyptian rooms the crowds shuffled past the Assyrian gates from Balawat (Iraq is another country pleading for lost antiquities) and past the Roman statue of the crouching Aphrodite (ditto Italy), then headed toward the galleries containing what are known in Britain as the Elgin marbles (but in Greece as the Parthenon marbles, or simply booty), where passers-by plucked pamphlets from a rack.

The British Museum is Europe’s Western front in the global war over cultural patrimony, on account of the marbles. The pamphlets give the museum’s version for why they should stay in Britain, as they have for two centuries — ever since Lord Elgin, the British ambassador to the Sublime Porte at Constantinople, and with the consent of the ruling Ottomans (not to mention a blithe disregard for whatever may have been the wishes of the Greek populace), spirited them from the Acropolis in Athens. The pamphlet stresses that the British Museum is free and attracts millions of visitors every year from around the world, making the sculptures available to, and putting them in the context of, a wide swath of human civilization.

For their part the Greeks, before their economy collapsed, finally opened the long-delayed New Acropolis Museum last year to much fanfare: it’s an up-to-date facility, forbidding and frankly ugly outside, but airy and light-filled inside, a home-in-waiting for the marbles, whose absence is clearly advertised by bone-white plaster casts of what Elgin took, alongside yellowed originals that he left behind. The view through a broad picture window, eloquent but baleful under the circumstances, looks onto the ruined Parthenon, playing on visitors’ heartstrings. Greeks deem the museum a slam-dunk argument for the marbles’ return.

It’s definitely compelling.

But the British still make the better case.

Siding with the imperialists drives good people bonkers, I know. It’s akin to Yankees worship, with the Greeks playing the underdog role of the old Red Sox. That said, patrimony claims too often serve merely nationalist ends these days, no less often than they do decent ones, never mind that the archaeological and legal arguments by the Greeks, while elaborately reasoned and passionately felt, don’t finally trump the British ones.

Mostly, though, the issue comes down to the fact that culture, while it can have deeply rooted, special meanings to specific people, doesn’t belong to anyone in the grand scheme of things. It doesn’t stand still. When Walter Benjamin wrote in the last century about the original or authentic work of art losing its aura, he was in part suggesting that the past is not something we can just return to whenever we like — it’s not something fixed and always available. It’s something forever beyond our grasp, which we must reinvent to make present.

Today’s Acropolis is itself a kind of fiction. Over the centuries and through succeeding empires and regimes, it became Christian and Turkish, and briefly Venetian, after it had been Roman. The Parthenon was a pagan temple, a church, a mosque, an arms depot (disastrously, under the Turks) and even a place from which the Nazis hung a big swastika flag whose removal by Greek patriots helped spur a resistance movement. Modernity has mostly stripped the site of all those layers of history to recover a Periclean-era past that represents, because it has come to mean the most to us, its supposed true self — a process of archeological excavation, based on another modern kind of fiction about historical and scientific objectivity that inevitably adds its own layer of history.

One of the paradoxes of the marbles debate is that it was precisely their removal to London, and all the anguish and furor and archaeological interest and study this provoked, starting with Hellenophiles like Lord Byron heaping scorn on Elgin and fellow Britons, that helped galvanize the Greeks’ own sense of national identity and their pride in the Parthenon sculptures. Now the Greek government has even chosen to name its consolidation plan to combat the economic collapse after an architect of the Parthenon, Kallikrates.

But the general question, looting and tourist dollars aside, is why should any objects necessarily reside in the modern nation-state controlling the plot of land where, at one time, perhaps thousands of years earlier, they came from? The question goes to the heart of how culture operates in a global age.

The Greek proposal that Britain fork over Elgin’s treasures has never involved actually putting the sculptures back onto the Parthenon, which started crumbling long before he showed up. The marbles would go from one museum into another, albeit one much closer. The Greeks argue for proximity, not authenticity. Their case has always been more abstract, not strictly about restoration but about historical reparations, pride and justice. It is more nationalistic and symbolic.

Over the centuries, meanwhile, bits and pieces of the Parthenon have ended up in six different countries, in the way that countless altars and other works of art have been split up and dispersed among private collectors and museums here and there. To the Greeks the Parthenon marbles may be a singular cause, but they’re like plenty of other works that have been broken up and disseminated. The effect of this vandalism on the education and enlightenment of people in all the various places where the dismembered works have landed has been in many ways democratizing.

That’s not an excuse for looting. It’s simply to recognize that art, differently presented, abridged, whatever, can speak in myriad contexts. It’s resilient and spreads knowledge and sympathy across borders. Ripped from its origins, it loses one set of meanings, to gain others.

Laws today fortunately prevent pillaging sites like the Acropolis. But they stop short of demanding that every chopped-up altar by Rubens, Fra Angelico or whomever now be pieced together and returned to the churches and families and institutions for which they were first intended. For better and worse, history moves on.

The Elgin marbles, from the cultural crossroads of imperial London, reshaped cultural history over the course of the last 200 years by giving rise to neo-Classicism around the globe. Or perhaps it is more precise to say that the Parthenon marbles, by virtue of their presence both in Athens and London, helped spread that movement along with sympathy for the Greeks’ cause.

Americans, excepting Indians, may find this whole issue hard to grasp. We don’t tend to think in terms of American cultural patrimony, save perhaps for the Liberty Bell or the Brooklyn Bridge, because we’re an immigrant nation worshipful of the free market. Demanding the return of American art and artifacts to America sounds, well, un-American, not to mention bad for the bottom line. We are too diverse in our roots, too focused on the present, too historically amnesiac and individualistic (not to mention rich) to worry overly about a collective culture or who might own it.

And in the end patrimony is about ownership, often of objects that as in the marbles’ case, come from bygone civilizations. What, in this context, does it really mean to own culture?

Italy recently celebrated the return of a national treasure after the Metropolitan Museum gave back a sixth-century B.C. Greek krater by the painter Euphronius that tomb robbers dug up outside Rome during the 1970s. Stolen property is stolen property. But how curious that an ancient Greek vase, which centuries after it was made came into the possession of an Etruscan collector (a kind of ancient Elgin) living on what is now the outskirts of Rome, and then ended up buried for thousands of years below what became modern Italy, is today Italian cultural patrimony. By that definition, Elgin’s loot is arguably British patrimony.

It’s not coincidental that conflicts over patrimony have accelerated in recent decades thanks to globalizing trends: the increasing circulation of information along with objects and money — consequences of the Web, jet travel and mass tourism — and the evolution of institutions like the British Museum from sleepy, scholarly repositories of artifacts into entertainment palaces and virtual town squares. Authorities in countries like Greece, having seen the escalating economic and symbolic value of works like the marbles, have naturally sought to take advantage.

It isn’t to belittle a deep-seated connection to such works to point out that claimants to far-flung patrimony may have various motives. When Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s chief archaeologist, who made the recent fuss about the Rosetta Stone, also demanded that Germany hand over Nerfertiti, the 3,500-year-old bust of Akhenaten’s wife, he chose the moment when the Neues Museum in Berlin opened with the bust as its main attraction.

This was just after Farouk Hosny, Egypt’s candidate to run Unesco, the United Nations cultural agency, was defeated in a vote that Egyptian leaders considered a diplomatic slap. Mr. Hawass used Egypt’s only real weapon on the international stage, its cultural patrimony, to lash out by proxy at the perceived enemies of Mr. Hosny’s candidacy and pander to the wounded egos of Egypt’s ruling elite.

It was a public relations gambit. Practically speaking, Egypt had to know there was no immediate shot at getting Nerfertiti back. The sculpture served in a passing form of political theater common these days, with Egypt playing plucky David to the West’s Goliath.

Patrimony debates often end up in this moral fog of shifting geopolitics. The world was outraged when the National Museum in Iraq was looted after the war there started. But almost nobody (outside Germany, anyway) cares today whether Russia returns storerooms of treasures it stole at the end of World War II. Nigeria holds the moral high ground in demanding the return of sculptures burgled from that country’s beleaguered museums, even though insiders were often complicit in the crimes.

And after the Taliban destroyed a Buddhist temple and burned centuries-old illuminated manuscripts, hardly anybody outside the country blinked when Unesco refused to authorize shipments of artifacts from Afghanistan to Switzerland because the move violated international rules against the removal of “national patrimony” — and also because nobody was really paying much attention to that region yet.

Then Taliban inspectors pulverized priceless treasures before the eyes of helpless Afghan curators and blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas in obedience to Mullah Omar’s edict against the existence of pre-Islamic art. Only then did people in the West wake up and Unesco reconsider its position. Too late.

In the Parthenon’s case the Greek actress Melina Mercouri kicked off the modern repatriation push during the 1980s as part of the nationalist program of a Greek leader, Andreas Papandreou, whose slogan was “Greece for the Greeks.” What started in conjunction with a political campaign then evolved into a genuine street movement. Dimitris Pandermalis, the New Acropolis Museum’s director, told me before the museum opened last year that the Elgin marbles’ return “unifies us,” meaning the Greek people, although surveys show that few of them actually bother to visit the Acropolis after grade school, while antique sites rivaling the Parthenon in archaeological significance often go neglected across Greece. As I said, it’s ultimately about nationalism and symbolism.

So be it. That’s why Greek authorities always decline diplomatic solutions like sharing the marbles or asking for their loan. They assume any loan request would legitimize Britain’s ownership. The principle is high minded. What results is, in effect, nothing, which doesn’t diminish the Greeks’ connection with the missing marbles.

But as the Princeton philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has cautioned about the whole patrimony question: “We should remind ourselves of other connections. One connection — the one neglected in talk of cultural patrimony — is the connection not through identity but despite difference.”

What he means is that people make connections across cultures through objects like the marbles. These objects can become handmaidens for ideologues, instruments for social division and tools of the economy, or cicerones through history and oracles to a more perfect union of nations. Art is something made in a particular place by particular people, and may serve a particular function at one time but obtain different meanings at other times. It summons distinct feelings to those for whom it’s local, but ultimately belongs to everyone and to no one.

We’re all custodians of global culture for posterity.

Neither today’s Greeks nor Britons own the Parthenon marbles, really.

A version of this article appeared in print on May 9, 2010, on page AR1 of the New York edition.

Vasiliki Savvidou-Mihalarea, an English teacher from Rhodes, has sent me a poem that she has written about the Elgin Marbles.

SILENT AWAITING

Marble pieces lie about
burdened with century- old dust
and great deeds of the past,
polished with sweat and labour
AWAIT the return of
their counterparts, lost and gone
to faraway lands.
Handicapped the Parthenon stands
with a bright amputated sun
casting its light, always bright
on this axed colossal cradle.
The great Greek spirit immortal,
hovers restlessly above, seeking
the pieces of this great monument.
The parade of life-depicting figures,
so elaborately carved on marble,
are now sad, a vehicle of the past
they have now become.
The pilgrims to the gentle spirit
stand in awe before the Parthenon
and a sudden sadness fills their heart
when they see the Temple
handicapped and so brutally attacked.

Vasiliki Savvidou-Mihalarea
Teacher of English
Translator/Interpreter
Rhodes, Greece.

A conference in London aims to represent London as a beacon of enlightenment in the world of restitution of cultural property. Many countries will be unconvinced by this argument however.

From:
The Times

May 4, 2010
London – a beacon of cultural resistution?

Plenty of people in Greece, Egypt, and Scotland might disagree but London, home of the Elgin marbles, the Rosetta Stone and the Lewis Chessmen, will today present itself as a beacon of enlightenment on the thorny subject of cultural restitution.

Delegates ranging from a lawyer with the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest to the Surveyor of The Queen’s Pictures and the Director General of ICCROM (the International Organisation for the Conservation of Cultural Heritage) in Rome are attending a conference at the National Gallery this afternoon billed as Restitution – Where Now?

Julian Smith, a partner at Farrer & Co, the solicitor’s firm that has organised the conference, said that they had tried to put the broadest possible spectrum of views in one room. “This conference might be the dullest ever,” he said, “It might end in a fight. That’s what makes it interesting.” Certainly there are few more controversial or complex issues in the arts than what to do with cultural treasures taken from weak nations by stronger ones many years ago.

Worldwide the trend has been towards returning looted artefacts to their country of origin. In recent years the Americans have led the way with the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston all returning ancient artefacts to the countries they were taken from.

The Greeks have built a museum for the Parthenon Marbles that Lord Elgin spirited back to England. The Egyptians want the Rosetta Stone back from the British Museum and the bust of Nefertiti from the Egyptian Museum in Berlin. The Iranian government has accused the British Museum of playing politics with the Cyrus Cylinder, a 2,500 year old Persian cuneiform text cited as the earliest declaration of human rights.

In the opposite corner are scholars and museum bosses like Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, who argue against a blanket drift towards restitution, in favour of a universal museum culture where institutions maintain diverse collections so that they can tell big stories.

“It’s only by comparing things from different places that you can understand them,” Mr MacGregor said yesterday.

“If you want to look at human achievement you’ve got to gather everything together. If you start breaking up these collections you end up with a series of disassociated narratives.” The proviso is that “you make them genuinely available to everybody. You have to put them on line, tour them and loan them.” His point of view is supported by Sir Norman Rosenthal, one of the speakers today. The former exhibitions secretary of the Royal Academy (and son of Jewish refugees) argued last year that returning art stolen by Nazis to descendants of their original Jewish owners was often the wrong course of action.

“I believe history is history and that you can’t turn the clock back or make things good again through art,” he wrote. “Ever since the beginning of recorded history, because of its value, art has been looted and as a result, arbitrarily distributed and disseminated throughout the world.”

It is also true, however, that most of the great collections of world objects are in big cities in wealthier countries. And while relatively influential countries like Egypt can run high profile restitution campaigns, poorer states such as Mali in West Africa tend not to be able to exert so much pressure.

Professor Jack Lohman, director of the Museum of London and former UK chairman of ICOM (the International Organisation of Museums) said that the National Gallery event was a groundbreaking occasion.

“It’s about not sweeping this important international issue under the carpet, about having the courage to talk about it, because this is so emotional for so many people,” he said. “You might find the sort of conversations that we are having [for this conference] around global warming or climate change but they haven’t really entered the art world. I really feel it’s a new global conversation.” Professor Lohman, who is introducing the conference, added that London is the right place to host it precisely because the controversies around its museums have forced its curators to engage with the arguments around cultural ownership.

“Actually we might now be leaders in this field. These very difficult cases have allowed us to work with partners and innovate – for instance the way the Lewis chessmen [900 year old chess figures discovered in the Western Isles of Scotland and claimed by the administration in Edinburgh] are travelling quite a bit at the moment. There’s a very positive angle to what we have always understood was a horrific nightmare of a problem. Dialogue brings understanding. You only get the shouting between countries where there aren’t relationships and there are now more conversations taking place. There is movement. Conversation allows you to move objects.”

FIVE CONTROVERSIAL OBJECTS HELD IN BRITAIN

Parthenon Marbles (claimed by Greece, held in the British Museum) Lewis Chessmen (Scotland; British Museum) Benin Bronzes (Nigeria; British Museum) Rosetta Stone (Egypt; British Museum) Golden Crown of Emperor Tewodros (Ethiopia; Victoria and Albert Museum)

AND THREE ELSEWHERE

Priam’s Gold from Troy (Turkey; Pushkin Museum, Moscow) Joseon-period royal manuscripts (South Korea; Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris) Treasures excavated by Hiram Bingham III from Machu Picchu (Peru; Yale Peabody Museum)

More coverage of the conclusions of the conference in Egypt on the restitution of cultural property.

From:
Reuters

Egypt urges states to cooperate on artefact return
Wed Apr 7, 2010 5:49pm GMT

CAIRO (Reuters) – Egypt and other states which say artefacts have been illegally taken abroad should work together and list items they want returned from Western museums, Egypt’s top archaeologist said on Wednesday.

Zahi Hawass, head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, was speaking to representatives from 21 countries, some like Greece and Syria, seeking the return of artefacts and others like the United States which have returned stolen antiquities.

“Museums are the main source for stolen artefacts. If they stop (buying stolen artefacts) the theft will be less,” Hawass told delegates who also included representatives from China, Libya, Peru, Chile, Nigeria and Italy.

Hawass has been pushing to repatriate some major pharaonic treasures Egypt says were plundered by foreign powers, including the Rosetta Stone now in the British Museum and Queen Nefertiti’s bust from Berlin’s Neues Museum.

“We have good cooperation with other countries. We have had artefacts returned from Spain, Italy but the number one country that has returned artefacts is the United States,” Hawass told the two-day conference in Cairo.

One of the conference aims was to ensure implementation of a 1970 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) convention under which countries agreed measures to prevent the illegal export of national treasures.

“There is a real problem of antiquities trafficking through theft, colonialism and the negative role some foreign missions play,” Ayman Slaiman, from the Syrian Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums, told Reuters.

Greece is seeking the return of stone sculptures, inscriptions and architectural features taken from the Parthenon in Athens by British diplomat Lord Elgin in the 19th century during Ottoman rule, which now reside in the British Museum.

“It is not a question of legality but of goodwill and that cannot fall under a paragraph of law,” said Elena Korka, a delegate from Greece’s Culture Ministry.

At the conclusion of the conference in Egypt on the restitution of looted artefacts, Zahi Hawass re-iterated a point that he has made in the past, that Museums that he has the power to make life very difficult for institutions that refuse to co-operate to try & resolve cases involving disputed artefacts.

From:
Bloomberg News

Egypt’s Hawass Sees ‘Miserable Life’ for Museums With Relics
By Daniel Williams

April 8 (Bloomberg) — Egypt’s chief antiquities administrator wrapped up a two-day conference among countries that want valuable relics held abroad returned by threatening to make “life miserable” for museums that keep them.

“We will decide together what to do,” said Zahi Hawass, who heads the Supreme Council of Antiquities, at the end of the Cairo conference that attracted 16 delegates and nine observers from abroad. “We will make life miserable for museums that refuse to repatriate.”

Hawass, 62, known for his television documentary appearances in which he unveils new Egyptian archaeological discoveries, later told reporters, “We’re not after anyone. The subject can be discussed, meaning we can negotiate.”

He has been lobbying to get the 3,300-year-old bust of Queen Nefertiti from Berlin’s Neues Museum and the Rosetta Stone from London’s British Museum. Today he added a statue of Ramses II at Turin’s Museo Egizio.

Five other countries presented their own wish lists: Peru for items from Machu Picchu housed at Yale University and textiles at the Museum of World Cultures in Gothenburg, Sweden; Greece, for the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum; Nigeria, for bronzes spread out in several collections; Syria, items from the Louvre and Hermitage museums; and Libya, for a statue of Apollo in the Louvre.

Conflict History

International rules and treaties are of little use in getting key relics back because laws regarding their transfer don’t apply before the mid-20th century. Countries that hold them are reluctant to undo the history of conflicts and possession and to break up collections. For instance, Rome has many Egyptian obelisks taken by Roman emperors, scholars said.

Some artifacts were obtained legally, although Hawass referred to his conference as a gathering of “countries that have suffered from theft.” In any case, Hawass bases his demands not on law but on the idea that certain artifacts by right belong to the “motherland” where they were found.

The meeting provided an early glimpse of the difficulties inherent in Hawass’s campaign. The Italian government’s representative at the meeting, Jeanette Papadopoulos, described her country as a major victim of cultural expropriation.

When asked whether Italy is ready to return Ramses II to Egypt, she said, “it won’t be me who will bring it back.”

Last year, the Louvre repatriated frescoes removed from Egypt in the 1980s after Hawass threatened to ban its scholars from exploring in Egypt. The Louvre complied because “serious doubts” emerged about “the legality of their exit from Egyptian territory,” France’s Culture Ministry said at the time.

Hawass said he will organize another meeting next year.

To contact the reporter on this story: Daniel Williams in Cairo

Last Updated: April 8, 2010 12:07 EDT

From:
Agence France Presse

Countries list relics they want back
# From correspondents in Cairo
# From: AFP
# April 09, 2010

A CONFERENCE of countries that want antiquities returned from abroad ended today with a wish list of priceless relics housed in Western museums, but it fell short of drafting an action plan.

The two-day conference in Cairo drew representatives from 25 countries, many of them former colonies, who say their heritage has been stolen.

Egypt’s antiquities chief Zahi Hawass said seven of the countries drew up a list of artefacts they wanted back, and the remaining countries were given one month to add items to the list.

“I consider today a historic conference for all the world’s countries that have lost artefacts,” he said.

“We agreed to fight together,” he said. “Cultural heritage has to return to its country.”

“Seven countries have made a wish list. Some have to go back to their governments; they have a period of one month,” he said.

Many of the relics included in the list are in European and North American museums. Egypt demanded six items, including the Rosetta stone in the British Museum and the Dendara temple ceiling in France’s Louvre Museum.

Greece listed the Elgin Marbles, a collection of marble structures removed from the Parthenon in the beginning of the 19th century by Thomas Bruce, Earl of Elgin and ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.

Syria demanded five relics, one of them in housed in the Louvre, and Libya listed a statue of Apollo in the British Museum and a marble statue of a woman in the Louvre, according to a copy of the list sent by Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities.

The other countries were Nigeria, Guatemala and Peru.

“We are waiting for the other countries to present their wish list. Then we can go and fight,” Mr Hawass said.

“It doesn’t mean that if you have a statue in the museum, you own the statue. No, it belongs to us,” he said.

But the conference, touted as the first of its kind, fell short by not laying out an action plan to retrieve the items.

Mr Hawass described international regulations on antiquities as “insufficient” but the conference did not call for an amendment to a UN convention on stolen antiquities that applied to thefts after 1970.

Mr Hawass said the countries had to confer again before drawing up steps they would take but warned of apparently drastic measures.

“I am not going to talk to you about what we are going to do; we have to decide together. Some of us will make the lives of some of those museums that have artefacts miserable,” he said.

It was not clear whether he was talking about museums that housed stolen goods or those that displayed relics long excavated from their countries of origin.

The flamboyant archaeologist, who says he has overseen the return of 5000 relics since he became head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in 2002, suspended ties with the Louvre last year to win the return of five fragments stolen from an ancient Egyptian tomb.

He said he hoped to reach agreements on such relics as the bust of Queen Nefertiti and the Rosetta Stone through negotiations.

Both Berlin’s Neues Museum which has the bust on display and the British Museum have so far refused to even lend the artefacts to Egypt.

From:
ANSA (Italy)

ARCHAEOLOGY: EGYPT LAUNCHES STOLEN WORK RECOVERY

(ANSAmed) – ROME – The Rosetta Stone, the bust of Nefertiti, the Elgin marbles, Moctezumas feathered crown, and Inca treasures are just a few examples from the long list of works of art that departed from their country of origin, and whose owners would now like to see them returned. This thorny issue is at the centre of a two-day conference on the protection and return of cultural heritage organised by Cairos Supreme Council of Antiquities, which aims to analyse the current situation, draw up a thorough list of claims and decide on a common strategy. The man behind the event, which ended today, is the general secretary of the Egyptian organisation, Zahi Hawass, who since 2002 has become well-known for his contribution to the cause, namely the struggle to bring home the numerous items of Egyptian handiwork residing in all four corners of the globe, 31,000 of which have been returned to Egypt in the last eight years. He was at the centre of last years wrangling with the Louvre, and broke off relations with the Paris museum until it returned fragments of a fresco from an Egyptian tomb in Luxors Valley of the Kings. Relations are equally strained between Zawass and Berlins New Museum, the current guardian of the prestigious bust of Nefertiti, which Egypt wants to see returned, though the Germans, who claim to have legitimately purchased the item a century ago, are refusing to budge. Among the most famous disputes is the one surrounding the Rosetta Stone, which was found by the French in 1799 and handed over two years later to Great Britain. Other famous examples include the Statue of Hemiunu, which is also in Berlin, and the statue of Ramesses II in Italy. Zawass told the closing press conference that about thirty countries including China, Greece, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Spain and Italy had taken part in the event, each country having claims to present to the Council. Zawass said that the countries involved were sending a strong message to the world, showing that they are prepared to fight together for their lost heritage. Each country has suffered alone, especially Egypt, and we will fight together, he said. The representative for Greeces Ministry of Culture, Elena Korka, agreed, noting that this conference demonstrates the importance to many countries of joining forces. This is not a question of legality but rather one of good will, and this cannot be summed up in a paragraph of a legal document, she added. Greece has spent thirty years asking London for the return of marble from the Parthenon taken by Lord Elgin in 1800 and currently housed in the British Museum. During todays meeting, it was agreed that a conference is to be held every year and a list of countries involved in the initiative is to be drawn up and announced in about a month. A helping hand may come from a change to the Unesco Convention, which bans the export and the possession of antiquities stolen after 1970, although participants in the conference would like the date to be moved back, giving them a legal way of obtaining exhibits purloined earlier. Zawass strongly condemned the theft of these works, accusing museums and their role in the buying and selling of stolen handiworks. As part of the conference, the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities has put on an exhibition of works recently repossessed by Cairo, including the limestone bust of Amenhotep III, which has been brought back from London, the statue of Nefer-Renpet and that of the priest of the god Monthu, returned from Germany and the Netherlands respectively. (ANSAmed).

Further coverage of the recent conference in Cairo on the restitution of looted antiquities.

From:
BBC News

Page last updated at 23:31 GMT, Wednesday, 7 April 2010 00:31 UK
Egypt calls for antiquities unity

States which say artefacts have been stolen and displayed overseas should unite to recover their stolen heritage, Egypt’s top archaeologist has said.

Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), urged culture officials from around the world to draw up lists of missing items.

Some 20 countries are represented at the two-day conference in Cairo aimed at recovering artefacts from overseas.

The SCA wants many pharaonic items returned by Western museums.

“Museums are the main source for stolen artefacts,” he told delegates from countries including Libya, Greece, Italy, China and Peru.

“If they stop (buying stolen artefacts) the theft will be less.”

Stepped-up efforts

Mr Hawass told the delegates their nations needed to work together to recover their heritage.

“Every country is fighting alone, every country suffered alone, especially Egypt,” he said. “We will battle together.”

Representatives are also considering calling on the United Nations cultural body, Unesco, to amend a convention banning export and ownership of antiquities stolen after 1970 – so that they can pursue items that were snatched earlier, says the BBC’s Yolande Knell in Cairo.

In recent years, the Egyptian authorities have stepped up their efforts to recover stolen artefacts, with the head of the SCA, Zahi Hawass, attracting international attention for his efforts.

Last year, he broke off ties with the Louvre museum until France returned fragments chipped from a wall painting in an ancient Egyptian tomb.

He has repeatedly asked for the Rosetta Stone – which has been kept in the British Museum for more than 200 years – and a 3,400-year-old bust of Queen Nefertiti on display in Berlin, to be given back to Egypt.

Greece has long demanded that the Parthenon Marbles should be given back by the British Museum, while Peru is taking legal action to try to reclaim Inca treasures from Yale University in the United States.

From:
Hurriyet (Turkey)

Monday, May 10 2010 15:36 GMT+2
Countries seek return of looted antiquities
Thursday, April 8, 2010
LONDON – Daily News with wires

An international conference on recovering illicitly acquired antiquities began in Cairo with the participation of antiquities officials and deputy culture ministers from 16 countries, not including Turkey, daily Radikal reported Thursday, citing the BBC.

Egypt, the host of the two-day conference, aims to retrieve several precious artifacts dating back to the era of the pharaohs from Western museums.

Representatives from Greece, Syria, Iraq, Italy, Mexico and China are also seeking to devise strategies for recovering artifacts that are part of their cultural heritage from famous museums in Berlin, London and Paris.

A major objective of the conference is to call on the United Nations cultural body UNESCO to amend a 1970 convention banning the export or ownership of stolen antiquities acquired after that date, Agence France-Presse reported Wednesday. The convention prohibits the illicit import, export and sale of cultural property, but stipulates there will be no retroactive measures applied to artifacts acquired before the convention was signed.

Zahi Hawass, the head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities and the leading figure at the Cairo conference, urged delegates to draw up lists of artifacts missing from their countries and displayed in museums abroad.

Since becoming head of antiquities in 2002, Hawass has helped Egypt reclaim 31,000 relics from other countries. Last year, he insisted that “what has been stolen from us must be returned.” Egypt continues to seek the repatriation of the Rosetta stone held by the British Museum for more than 200 years and the 3,400-year-old bust of Queen Nefertiti on display at the Neues Museum in Berlin.

“This conference shows the importance many countries place in joining forces,” said Elena Korka, who is in charge of protecting Greece’s cultural heritage.

Korka confirmed that the return of the Elgin Marbles is Greece’s top priority. Athens has been locked in a 30-year antiquities “war” with London to retrieve them from the British Museum.

Turkey sent no representative to the conference.

The recent conference in Egypt, highlights yet again that pressure for the return of cultural artefacts is growing from many parts of the world.

From:
Daily Telegraph

British Museum under pressure to give up leading treasures
by Damien McElroy, Foreign Affairs Correspondent
Published: 7:39PM BST 07 Apr 2010

The British museum is to come under renewed pressure to give up leading treasures as 16 countries plan to sign a declaration that demands the return of artefacts sent overseas generations ago.

The demand, issued in Cairo at the end of a two-day conference, is addressed to every country that holds ancient relics.

Western museum hold most of the items listed by countries ranging from China to Mexico. The British museum is the principal target because of the prominence of the artefacts it owns.

Egypt wants returned include the Rosetta stone in the British Museum and the bust of Nefertiti in Berlin’s Neues Museum. Both the British and Neues Museum have rejected the demand.

The conference was hosted by Zahi Hawass, the head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, who has been an outspoken campaigner for the return of lost treasures.

Mr Hawass acknowledged that there was no international legal basis for the demands but said a united stand between affected nations would bolster the claims.

“Instead of Egypt fighting on its own, let’s all fight together. let’s all come out with a wishlist,” he said. “We need to co-operate all of us especially with that wish list. we need all of us to come with one list and fight until we return this artefacts back.

“Forget the legal issue,” he said. “Important icons should be in their motherland, period.”

A spokeswoman said the British museum had not received an official request from Egypt.

“The British Museum has not received an official request for the permanent return of the Rosetta Stone,” she said. “The Museum has received a request from the Supreme Council of Antiquities requesting the short term loan of the stone for the opening of the new museum in Giza in 2012 or 2013. The Trustees of the British Museum will consider this request in due course.”

It has faced a long running campaign by the Greek government for the return of the Elgin Marbles which were taken from the Parthenon at the outset of the 19th century.

Elana Korka, a Greek culture ministry official said the marbles were its prime concern. “We would like to see some good faith,” she said. “They are the Parthenon marbles and that is where they belong.”

International conventions written since 1954 prohibited wartime looting, theft and resale of artefacts but the agreements don’t apply to items taken abroad before national or global laws were in force.

Nigeria has listed its claims for the Benin bronzes, which are also housed from the British Museum. Mexico has demanded the return of a feathered headdress of a tribal warrior and China has sought the handover of astrological items looted from the Summer Palace in Beijing during the Second Opuim War.

Artefacts that are on the looted list:

1 Elgin Marbles (British Museum) Greece has long fought to reclaim the frieze stripped from the Parthenon at the behest of the 7th Earl of Elgin in 1801

2 Rosetta Stone (British Museum) Egypt demands the return of the 2,200-year-old stone tablet that holds the key to translating ancient hieroglyphs

3 Summer Palace bronzes (private French owner) China claims bronze heads from a zodiac clock were stolen during the Second Opium War in 1860

4 Benin Bronzes (British Museum) Nigeria lays claim to the royal treasures of Benin, saying that they were seized by British troops in 1897

5 Queen Nefertiti (Berlin Neues Museum) Egypt wants the 3,500-year-old bust of the wife of Pharaoh Akhenaten returned