hey I love your blog, you seem like an awesome patient lovely person :) I was wondering if you had thoughts about/an opinion on the British Museum and their refusal to return... many many things, considering you’re an Egyptologist who lives in the UK, so you’ve probably encountered this? If you just don’t want/cba to talk about it, or start drama or whatever that’s chill, I hope you’re doing well!
I do have opinions, but Tumblr is not a place for nuance and I think that getting people to understand who actually holds current ownership of the objects and how that influences certain discussions would be an exercise in pain.
Yes I do believe that certain objects should be returned (in particular the Benin Bronzes, the Rapa Nui statue, and the Parthenon marbles)
Yes I acknowledge the museum’s colonial past and I’m absolutely not a fan of it. A lot has been stolen.
No I don’t believe every object should be returned because there are such things as ‘partition agreements’ that used to exist between archaeologists and governments of countries. This split the finds from a dig in half, with the government of country the dig was in taking first pick and the archaeologists being allowed to take the rest back to their own countries. People don’t like hearing this because it conflicts with the ‘everything is stolen’ narrative, but it is a thing that happened. Quite a lot of museum collections are built on partition agreements.
Most of the time, when there are specific repatriation complaints it is in regards to only a handful of objects from a certain part of the collection. Sometimes it is more. It is never the whole collection being asked to be repatriated. Most countries, barring a specific circumstance, do not want everything back.
For the British Museum specifically, the British Government actually holds ownership of many objects, including the Parthenon marbles. When you hear the British Museum say ‘We can’t give these back’ it’s actually not their line but that of the UK Government, even if those in the museum feel differently. Their hands are sort of tied. Take for instance the aforementioned Parthenon marbles. When Elgin took those marbles there was actual outrage in the UK, and 4 years after he stole them the issue was brought before Parliament to decide what to do with his ‘ownership’. Parliament stripped him of the marbles, and instead of giving them back to Greece said ‘yeah they’re ours now’ (which still pissed people off) and then handed them to the BM and said ‘look after these for us’. The BM do not own them, nor do they control if they go back.
The UK Government controls the board of trustees for the museum, and keeps appointing people who will toe the line with regards to this. The Museum actually went against them last year when they appointed Mary Beard, whom the government had rejected as being too ‘liberal’. Mary Beard supports repatriation.
They have been, and still are, repatriating objects! Repatriation takes time, and is incredibly complicated due to the laws that are in place surrounding deaccessioning objects (something museums have no control over, again this is the government and if they don’t want to do it they won’t). Archaeological law was, of course, written to favour us. Museums and Historians are working to undo some of it, but the government doesn’t like budging on laws that benefit it.
This is why you’ll see objects going on ‘permanent loan’ as a means of repatriation because it’s one way to circumvent the laws surrounding deaccessioning objects. Yeah it’s not great, but they’re trying.
I believe it’s the Human Tissue Act of 2004 which makes it difficult to repatriate human remains unless they’re going to a relative/descendant. Makes it a long and difficult process. Again, that’s a government thing not in the museum’s control.
The Rosetta Stone isn’t actually special. It’s only special because it’s the object that was used to decipher hieroglyphs. There are at least 3 other versions of it (to my recollection) that are in better condition that are still in Egypt. Hawass was grandstanding off the back of actual colonial atrocities. I don’t like saying that, but that’s what he was doing.
Believe it or not the British Museum actually has a programme called the International Training Partnership, where interns from all over the world come every year and learn techniques for looking after and studying museum collections. Not only that, but this also builds a network of museum workers with which the BM is familiar with, and in training them allows them to take those skills back to their own countries. In doing so they can work on repatriating artefacts back to these countries, because it negates the tired argument that ‘these people can’t take care of these objects’ because yes they can, we trained them in the latest techniques.
They’ve actually been helping Syrian and Iraqi archaeologists repair sites like Palmyra and Nineveh. Money from exhibits like the Ashurbanipal exhibit, contributed to the efforts to rebuild these sites. This is part of the work of the museum that most people don’t know happens. But it does.
The British Museum has, since it reopened after lockdown, relocated the statue of Hans Sloane, the guy that gifted his collection to the ‘British Nation’ (i.e. the government), a collection he built on the back of slavery and colonialism. The statue now sits in a display about the exploitative effects of the British Empire and Colonialism. The Museum has also created a tour of the museum that includes objects that have been stolen, explaining how the came to be in the collection and the the people that were behind the theft. It’s a start, and not enough yet, but they’re acknowledging it. Also they’ve had a ton of grief for this from people who don’t believe in BLM…so…they’re angering the right people in this instance.
Repatriation happens quietly and behind the scenes since it takes so long. They don’t make a big deal out of it because it’s 100% guaranteed that they’ll get grief for ‘needing praise for something that ought to be done’ and they’d be right. So it happens quietly, and people complain because they can’t see it happening. Kinda a vicious circle.
So yeah, those are some bullet points about it. Do I think the museum is perfect? No I don’t. Do I think they’re trying to right some of the wrongs of their past? Yes I do. Do I think they’ve got a long way to go? Absolutely yes. Again, a lot of the time it’s not the Museum itself, it’s actually the British Government who say ‘no’ to things and laws put in place by said government, so I can’t always fault the museum for it since it’s often not their decision to make. They’re just the convenient scapegoat for government to sidestep responsibility for this country’s colonial past. It truly sucks, but that’s what it is.
One final thing I should mention, because in these discussions it irks me, is that the BM, and many other European countries/museums, get rightly pilloried by the internet for their colonial past and stolen objects within their collections, but US museums do not. Sure I’ve seen them get blasted for being disrespectful and racist towards Native American collections, but not for the colonial looting of other countries. The US may not have had an Empire like Britain’s, but they definitely had slavery and US sure as hell benefitted from that and from wealthy americans financing illegal digs in places like Egypt and stealing the artefacts which ended up in US museums. So while it is absolutely ok to lambast European museums for their colonial past, that argument should also include US museums. Also the Hobby Lobby, because…wow.
This was longer than I thought it was going to be, but I had to work through some frustrations with the narrative that’s so often presented. It’s not as nuanced as I’d like, but I hope I’ve presented some things that make it clearer as to why things happen the way they do. People are free to disagree with me on this, but all I ask is that it’s done respectfully.
