| Living in the UK, the big repatriation discussion is around the British Museum and the Elgin Marbles https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elgin_Marbles It's named Elgin from the person that took it from Greece. There's a patriotism around it where it has become a political issue about whether to do so. The common argument against is that it would mean that the Museum would need to give back everything in its collection. Today we have such sophisticated technology we can recreate pretty much any artifact. Scan it, and get as much research data as possible, if there's a fear of it being lost. But like the article talks about the Nepalese statues which are still part of their culture being stolen in the 1980s, the people that would care most are those whose ancestors created it. If the role of a museum is to educate then exhibitions on something like reproducing an ancient Egyptian coffin would be fascinating. I visited Pompeii recently and what I really appreciated was the context of the artifacts together. Looking at home from almost 2000 years ago, and seeing the "beware of dog" mosaic in the entranceway gave me much more of an appreciation of the life people there would have lived. You see lead pipes going along the ground and you may think they're new. But no, there was a previous earthquake that damaged the infrastructure, so whilst there were repairs happening the volcano erupted. |
I assume the plan is to ship a replica back to Greece and hope that nobody notices.