After delays, Egypt set for lavish opening of grand museum

I wonder if the British Museum will do the right thing and return previously stolen artefacts?

I’m conflicted. I understand the concept that stolen goods should be returned and it’s the right thing to do, but at the same time it was centuries ago and the preservation was done by them. I have seen well preserved exposition in that museum and then you visit the original country where it’s from and they themselves have nothing or very little left from that era.

We never fail to find someone to defend colonization!

> then you visit the original country where it’s from and they themselves have nothing or very little left from that era.

You seem to generalize quite a lot in order to validate your view point that everything stolen should stay stolen.

Sometimes it's the entire opposite. It's not being shown anywhere, it's just hidden in a museum collection in the UK. In other cases it's exposed but with very little relevant information because it's not particularly relevant to the local culture or the colonizer is too ashamed of the real history of how this object got there that they fail to explain the true story of it.

Here's a great podcast that I hope will make you change your mind, lots of examples: https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1030-stuff-the-britis...

You're using the word "stolen" here with a lot of conviction but, imho, not a lot of rigor. In what sense did people "own" the artifacts that the British removed from Egypt? Who owned them? If nobody owned them, how were they "stolen"? That's the weak version of the problem.

The stronger version: how is it the case that Egypt, or Egyptians, today "own" something that has been in the British museum far longer than any of them have been alive? Even if the artifacts were wrongfully taken in the first instance, does that automatically mean that the only right thing to do is to return them, even after centuries? Are the myriad other interests that have accumulated in the interim simply not matter? How long domes something have to remain in Britain for it to meaningfully become part of British heritage as well as Egyptian? Should we also be working to return artifacts looted by the ancient Egyptians to their own ancestral homes, even though the looting occurred thousands of years ago when they were the dominant power? Perhaps they should give back everything south of the First Cataract to the Nubians. (Hopefully it's clear that this is a reductio not a policy proposal!)

That's not to say I think it's categorically acceptable for powerful nations to take historical artifacts. But I don't think this has really anything to do with "stealing" in the usual sense. if anything, that rhetoric just obscures the issues here that might truly be worth thinking about.

If someone went to England and took the rocks from Stonehenge and carted them off to a museum overseas, that would surely be stealing?

Probably so. I imagine the U.K. has laws that make such artifacts the formal property of the state. Was this true for 19th century Egypt?

I think it was true, on some level, at the time the bust of Nefertiti was taken in the 1920s. Supposedly, the Germans nominally followed some sort of legal process for removing the artifact -- though perhaps with less-than-full transparency.

Perhaps there are other reasons to claim that Egyptian artifacts were 'stolen.' But I'm trying to have a conversation about what those might be since the subject is not as obvious to me as others seem to think it is.