Following are excerpts from a fantastic article in the Times Online:
"The visitors pouring through the doors of the British Museum represent the triumph of an idea born in the white intellectual heat of the Enlightenment - as valuable today as it was 250 years ago when the museum first opened, but now under attack, despite its fabulous success, as never before.
"That simple, brilliant idea is now under assault from the concept of “cultural property”, part of a worldwide struggle over ownership of the past. In the past half-century, but gathering pace in recent years, so-called “source countries” have successfully begun to reclaim and repatriate artefacts from museums around the world.
"The governments of Italy, Greece, Egypt, China, Cambodia and other geographical homes of ancient civilisations argue that antiquities in foreign museums are national property, vital components of national identity that should be returned “home” as a matter of moral urgency.
"Yet the cultural property movement is complex and deeply flawed. Italy, as a state, is a comparatively modern creation, but the objects it claims date back up to 1,200 years. Who, for example, “owns” the Alexander Sarcophagus, created in the tradition of Greek sculpture, discovered in Lebanon in the 19th century and brought to Turkey when Lebanon was still part of the Ottoman Empire? Many of the demands for restitution are bound up with narrow nationalism and a political agenda, an attempt to lend historical credibility to modern states that did not exist when the objects were created. Some nations asserting cultural property rights are culturally, religiously and even ethnically distinct from the civilisations whose artefacts they now claim.
"Antiquities are not national symbols but elements of a shared global inheritance, best displayed in the encyclopedic museum imagined by our Enlightened forebears, “a museum dedicated to ideas, not ideologies, a museum of international, indeed universal aspirations”. To some, encyclopaedic museums such as the British Museum are mere treasure houses of imperial plunder. But in their inception such institutions set out to create public places where we might discover and understand other peoples, and thus find out about ourselves.
"A shared heritage implies greater sharing, a new sort of philosophy in which individual museums do not merely gather, preserve and display artefacts from across the world, but borrow, lend and swap in a global exchange of objects and ideas."
Read the full article in The Times.
