Give us back our monuments, Britain!
As I’ve posted before, the existence and robustness of the British Museum is interesting and makes for fun browsing, but it is also deeply problematic.
The Guardian reported on Monday that the upcoming Olympics might be a good time to give Greece back it’s Pantheon Marbles. The Pantheon Marbles are barely the only thing that different nations would like back. Adding to that is the fact that England has the largest collection of Egyptian Antiquities in the world.
There is some difficulty in trying to negotiate about who owns what, and the author of the Guardian article points out that a group of people who made the object have more of a claim to it (and indeed, have had objects from Britain successfully repatriated to them) than say, present-day Italians to artefacts of Ancient Rome. However, excepting the rule of ‘finders keepers’ it isn’t as though Britain necessarily ‘deserves’ those things. They just happen to be really good at accruing those things and making sure they don’t break.
