Why looted relics should be returned to their rightful owners

For those with the stamina for a tour lasting more than five hours, a guided “crash course in archeology” at the British Museum this summer offers visitors the opportunity to “learn about the explorers, archeologists, and relic hunters” who helped to build its vast collection of treasures from around the world.
Those treasures include “classic pieces from Egyptian, Assyrian, and Greek empires, from the Rosetta Stone to the Parthenon Marbles.”
For now, at least.
Last week, the new UK Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, hinted that his government might be prepared to resolve the long-standing row with Greece over the so-called Elgin Marbles, the ancient friezes that were stripped from the 2,470-year-old Parthenon temple in Athens and shipped to England in the early 19th century by the 7th Earl Elgin.
In response to decades of pleas from Greek governments to return the marbles, the British Museum has always insisted that they were acquired lawfully, skating over the fact that at the time they were taken, permission was given not by the Greeks but by representatives of the occupying Ottoman powers.
And, in fact, the only permission that Elgin did obtain was to take plaster casts of the sculptures, in situ.
Even at the time, however, the pillaging of half the friezes on the Parthenon raised eyebrows in Britain. The poet Lord Byron, for one, accused Elgin — in elegant verse, of course — of vandalism and looting. One MP remarked that “the Honorable Lord” had “committed the most flagrant pillages.”
Anyone who visits the stunning Acropolis Museum in Athens, where the marbles retained by Greece are displayed alongside plaster copies of those in London, can clearly see there is simply no possible case to be made for Britain retaining those pieces taken by Elgin.
But no matter how the dispute is resolved, the suggestion that the new British government might be considering returning the marbles raises a bigger question.
The British Museum was established in 1753, and most of the material it holds today was “acquired,” as it likes to say, over the subsequent two centuries of British colonial imperialism.
“Acquired” is, of course, a far less pejorative term than “looted,” a term the museum apparently reserves for only modern-day Elgins.
In 2019, Britain made a great show of returning to Iraq a recently acquired 3,000-year-old boundary stone that most likely was among the many artifacts looted from archeological sites in the chaotic wake of the US-led 2003 invasion of the country.
But was there really a difference between this item, looted by an opportunistic thief in Iraq, and any of the thousands of Mesopotamian treasures the museum bought from dodgy dealers during the 19th and 20th centuries?

Many of the great museums are stocked with the plunder of colonialism.

Jonathan Gornall

Take the so-called Flood Tablet, an inscribed clay tablet bearing part of the Epic of Gilgamesh and described by the museum as “the single most famous cuneiform text” ever discovered.
Created in the 7th century B.C. — hundreds of years, incidentally, before the Romans introduced backward Britain to writing — the tablet was originally part of the fabled library of Ashurbanipal, king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire from 669-631 B.C.
Its provenance is, at best, shady. It was dug up at Nineveh in the 1850s by Mosul-born Hormuzd Rassam. A former assistant to the English “gentleman-archeologist” Henry Layard, Rassam went into business on his own account after Layard returned to Britain.
As an account published by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq noted in 2021, Rassam embarked on “an extensive and essentially unrecorded simultaneous looting of a large number of sites.”
This explains why the British Museum collection includes more than 50,000 items acquired by Rassam — compared with the 22,000 items supplied by Layard — and how the former was able to enjoy a comfortable retirement in a charming villa in the genteel English seaside resort of Brighton.
As a result of the activities of “gentleman-archeologists” and assorted chancers, the 8 million artifacts from around the world held by the British Museum include more than 65,000 from India, 120,000 from ancient Egypt, 170,000 from Mesopotamia, and 260,000 from Africa.
Only a tiny fraction of this material is on display, and much of it never has been.
Across Europe and North America, many of the great museums are similarly stocked with the loot of colonialism.
Smugly, the British Museum likes to describe itself as a museum of the world, for the world, a self-satisfied accolade which rather overlooks the fact that the vast majority of the world’s people cannot just pop over to London when they wish to engage with their heritage.
Back in the day, Elgin argued that the Greeks were ill-equipped to protect their own heritage. Napoleon Bonaparte offered a similar explanation to justify helping himself to cratefuls of the treasures of ancient Egypt and Syria during his invasion of North Africa in 1798. Many of these found their way to the new Louvre Museum in Paris.
Today, as the Acropolis Museum so clearly demonstrates, the high-handed “we know best” argument holds no water. Likewise, some of the world’s best Egyptologists are to be found in Egypt, home of the vast and spectacular Grand Egyptian Museum, soon to be opened in the shadow of the pyramids of Giza.
In short, in our globalized modern era, there is simply no reasonable excuse for any single country to pose as the rightful repository of the treasures of the world. Rather, those treasures belong with the peoples whose stories they tell, not only to give them access to their own heritage, but also to attract to their countries a fair share of the visitors who currently are obliged to visit the British Museum.
Britain, itself attacked, invaded or colonized in turn by the Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Vikings, and Normans, among others, has its own fascinating history to tell. The British Museum could also have much to say about the country’s imperialist past, from the early colonialization of North America, India, and Australia to the swansong of empire that was the Suez debacle.
That, surely, would be more than enough to fill a five-hour tour and, with all the loot of the colonial past returned to its rightful owners, there would be no need to learn about the “relic hunters” who took it.

• Jonathan Gornall is a British journalist, formerly with The Times, who has lived and worked in the Middle East and is now based in the UK.