To refrain the obelisk from freezing, heaters were installed on the planes and the monument was wrapped in steel bars to keep it from moving during the six-hour flight. Yale and Peru ended a year bitter dispute when the university agreed to return 40, artifacts originally taken from the Machu Picchu site in the Andes in the early s. Peru has claimed that the ancient artifacts -- pottery, jewelry and bones -- were sent to Yale for 18 months in but were never returned to the country.
In , Peru filed a lawsuit against Yale to return the pieces and Peru's President sent President Obama a letter seeking his assistance in An exhibit for the artifacts was opened to the public in April at the Government Palace in Lima. In Cambodia it is called Preah Vihear and in Thailand it is called Khao Phra Viharn , but both countries claim ownership of the temple at the Cambodia-Thailand border believing it is on their own land.
Ownership of the ancient, stone-walled temple has been the subject of dispute between the two countries since withdrawal of the French in the s. In a decision, the International Court of Justice gave Cambodia sovereignty of the surrounding land. Shortly thereafter, Thailand withdrew from the International Court of Justice.
Cambodia has requested that the International Court of Justice formally clarify its decision. The mini-war resumed in when the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization announced the temple a World Heritage with ownership to Cambodia.
In February , the United Nations ordered a ceasefire between the two nations after 10 people perished but the dispute resumed in April resulting in the deaths of 18 people and evacuation of 85, The Sphinx -- a symbol of ancient Eygypt -- is a monument built in the image of Pharaoh Khafre from the fourth dynasty.
The beard of the 4,year-old artifact accidentally fell off, was carted away and sold to the British Museum in For the past years, it has been stored in the basement of the museum with no plans to be returned to Eqypt.
A black basalt stone discovered in Rosetta, Eqypt in by a french officer is still the subject of dispute between nations today. Known as the Rosetta Stone, the famous artifact has inscriptions in ancient Greek, demotic characters and hieroglyphics. The 2,year-old stone is believed to hold the secret to translating hieroglyphics and Eqypt's ancient past.
In the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, Muslim clerics and leaders rallied against a court ruling over the site of a demolished mosque. The high court ruling gave ownership of two-thirds of the land to Hindus, resulting in Muslims rejecting the verdict and appealing at the supreme court level. It is time for galleries, museums and collectors to do their job and retrace the exact history of artefacts in their possession and return them as part of a reparation process to those countries that were victims of European colonialism and imperialism.
Those reparations should also include the funding of training programmes to preserve objects in their countries of origin. If the national galleries in Africa, Asia, South America or even, sometimes, Europe, seem ill-prepared it is because, so far, they have not been given the chance to meet the challenges of preservation. Ioannis D. More recently, one or more of them were displayed in various cities abroad and in Milan, before, in , they were relocated inside St Mark, as a precaution against further damage from air pollution.
The fate of the horses raises a number of issues, common to innumerable cases of claimed cultural property around the world. First, one needs to establish their place of origin: this could be either some part of Greece or, more plausibly, Italy.
A case could be made that, irrespective of where their foundry lay, they were intended for display in Constantinople. There for nearly nine centuries they symbolised equestrian prowess. Their forced Parisian sojourn seems to underscore their identification with the lagoon city, whose environment has, however, proved corrosive.
Could the second looters, the French, qualify? Time offers an easy answer. This would suggest that Constantinople or its modern incarnation, Istanbul, should be considered. The repatriation of artefacts removed from their place of origin before such practice was progressively outlawed during the 20th century raises questions that resist sweeping answers. It depends. In the sphere of culture no issue demands more careful, case-by-case, consideration. The question has often been raised of the ethnographic collections that became vast through the ambitious, indeed rapacious, collecting associated with European colonial trade and science in the late 19th century.
Other Arabic countries denounced the movement as a separatist attempt to create an independent Egypt within the greater Arab or Islamic world. And religious elements criticized it as neo-pagan. Nevertheless, it encouraged newfound cults of antiquity in other Islamic countries, especially Iraq and Iran, where it reached its height in In that year, the Pahlavi shah held a great celebration in Persepolis to commemorate the 2,th anniversary of the foundation of the Persian monarchy by Cyrus the Great.
He was heavily criticized for both exalting the monarchy and proclaiming a common identity with a pagan past. To include antiquities within the political construct of cultural property is to politicize them. It is to make them part of modern, national cultural politics. What is a national culture in this modern age, when the geographic extent of so many cultures does not coincide with national borders, and when national borders are often new and even artifi cial creations with sovereignty over the cultural artifacts of peoples no longer extant or no longer in political power?
What, we are reminded over and over again while reading reports of the war in Iraq, is Iraqi national culture? Some claim there is not one, but three: Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish. Some even claim that there is not one Iraqi nation but a weak national authority trying to govern over three nations: of Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish character. You see the prophet Muhammad, you see Imam Ali, you see the cedars. You see everybody in my country in my heart.
The stuff of his culture—his cultural property does not include antiquities before the Muslim conquest. Culture after all is personal; it is not national. And in particular parts of the world, especially the Middle East—including Lebanon—non-national aspects of identity, especially religion or membership in a religious community, are far more determining than national ones.
Just as national claims on identity are political claims, so are national claims on antiquities. They serve the purpose of the modern, claiming nation. When regimes change, the parameters of the claims change as well. The claims of the Ottoman Empire were different than those of the Turkish Republic, just as the claims of Iran were different before and after its revolution of National, cultural identity claims are made by those in power and refl ect the interests of the powerful over those of the powerless.
I explore this in some detail in the following chapters; it is enough here to note that this is as true in the United States as it is anywhere in the world. If there were a single national, U. Those in power here over the two and one-quarter centuries we have been a nation have either ignored or dismissed these antiquities, considered them the artifacts of other, primitive cultures, or given them up to other sovereign entities within our borders: the nations of the Native American peoples.
National cultures are contested within and from outside a country. They are defi ned by and are meant to sustain the powerful elite within a nation, and they are defi ned by others as a way of distinguishing one national culture from another: ours from theirs.
Antiquities play a role in this, either because the people of a modern nation feel a direct, racial link to those earlier peoples, or because more frequently a modern nation derives a particular modern benefi t from them.
It is used, together with the legal and ethical cards, to argue against the acquisition of unprovenanced antiquities for the reasons I have outlined above. But are these the right principles on which to regulate the acquisition and international movement of unprovenanced antiquities?
How can we best protect the object and its context from impairment? Second is the quest for knowledge. And the third is access. Does it really matter who owns a particular antiquity—whether it is a museum in the fi rst world or a nation in the third world? Museums own antiquities and all works of art in their collections only insofar as they hold them in trust for the public they serve.
They are not in the collections of the art museum for the art museum. They are there for the public. This is why museums preserve antiquities. So, does it mean that antiquities can best be preserved only in their presumed countries of origin?
We have too many examples where that has proven not to be the case: Afghanistan and Iraq, only most recently. Critics, of course, will rightly point to the destruction of antiquities in Berlin museums during the Second World War. But is that an argument not to allow for the removal of antiquities from their place of origin?
For many decades in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, archaeological finds were shared between the excavating party and the local, host country through partage.
Petersburg, and of course how the great collections were formed at the university archaeological museums, like the Peabody Museums at Harvard and Yale, the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, and the University Museum at the University of Pennsylvania. But this principle is no longer in practice. With the surge in nationalism in the middle decades of the twentieth century, it has become almost impossible to share archaeological finds.
All such finds belong to the host nation and are its property. Only the state can authorize the removal of an archaeological artifact to another country, and it almost never does.
Even when one lends antiquities abroad, it is for severely restricted periods of time. In other words, is there a compelling reason, in terms of research and scholarship, why an antiquity should be in a particular place?
One can imagine cases when it makes most sense for an antiquity to be with like things: similar artifacts from the same culture and time period. But of course this could mean that a newly discovered Ottoman ceramic ought to be in New York rather in Istanbul, or a Khmer sculpture in Paris rather than in Phnom Penh.
One can also imagine cases when it makes sense for an antiquity to be with similar artifacts from different cultures: Han Chinese ceramics with Roman and Mayan ceramics in London, and Greek classical bronzes with Han bronzes and even much later Benin and Italian Renaissance bronzes in New York. Why should we want to see an antiquity only within the country of its presumed origin?
Why does it have its greatest meaning there? Of course, there are preservation reasons why one might impose restrictions: they are far too fragile or susceptible to sudden changes in environment to allow their being moved around the world. Possession is power, and notions of property include notions of control. Increasingly, that control lies in the hands of governments and governments have their own, nationalistic reasons for wanting to exercise control themselves.
The international agreements into which nations have entered regarding antiquities as control property reinforce the principle of national control. We live in a time of resurgent nationalism and sectarian violence. The United Nations was founded sixty years ago with fifty-one member nation-states. It now has It now has member nation-states and six associate members. A majority of these nations have either ownership laws, export laws, or some hybrid laws such as preemption rights. Nations with ownership laws, and many of those with hybrid laws, can bring charges of possession of stolen property against people and institutions holding objects covered by the relevant laws.
The world is increasingly divided: more nation-states than ever before, and more nation-states with laws that restrict the international movement in archaeological and cultural property found within their borders. The archaeological community is allying with the nationalistic programs of many of these nations, many of which are imposing tighter restrictions on the international movement in antiquities, including unprovenanced antiquities.
In the following chapters, I consider the political circumstances that inform the drafting of national and international laws and agreements governing the practice of archaeology and the international movement of antiquities. More often, one reads of such laws, agreements, and practices as if they were entirely free of politics: the stuff of objective science, reasoned best practice, and indifferent government regulations. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Governments issue archaeological permits and regulate the ownership and export of antiquities, and they do this in their own interest. Which archaeological excavations are encouraged and which antiquities are deemed important to regulate and collect in national museums depends on the perspective of national governments. What keeps you and me from doing what we want with archaeological sites and antiquities is government.
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