Well if you really wanted to put them back where they originally came from, you’d just chuck them back into the marble quarry and call it a day, but I thought that might be obvious enough it didn’t warrant mentioning either.
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The Greeks have 13 frigates. The Brits have 13 frigates, too, but they also have a first rate ship of the line.
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Yep, but that one isn’t going anywhere.
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Ahh, now we bring Lord Castlereagh into the mix! Hard to resist quoting Shelley:
Oh, Castlereagh! thou art a patriot now;
Cato died for his country, so didst thou:
He perished rather than see Rome enslaved,
Thou cuttest thy throat that England might be saved!
So Castlereagh has cut his throat! - the worst
of this is, that his own was not the first.
So he has cut his throat at last! He? Who?
The man who cut his country’s long ago.Cold-blooded, smooth-faced, placid miscreant
Dabbling its sleek young hands in Erin’s gore,
And thus for wider carnage taught to pant,
Transferred to gorge upon a sister shore
The vulgarest tool that Tyranny could want,
With just enough of talent, and no more,
To lengthen fetters by another fixed,
And offer poison long already mixed.
Or Byron put it more briefly:
Posterity will ne’er survey
a Nobler grave than this:
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:
Stop, traveller, and piss !
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That’s true if we accept that collections should always remain collected; and that location can’t be changed by at least some sorts of agreements; but, while by no means way out there, those notions seem to need at least a bit of clarification and refinement.
Something like that bridge that ended up migrating from the Thames to Arizona doesn’t seem to draw much ire on geographic displacement grounds, despite being well geographically displaced(and, to a nontrivial degree, reduced to more of a decorative skin of original bridge displayed on a new structure than rebuilt to original spec); presumably because London voluntarily got rid of it because it wasn’t up to their needs anymore and some American developer being willing to buy and ship it came off as more of an oddity than an impropriety. One assumes that if it had been seen a more of an imposition the Lord Mayor of London would have been less willing to assist in the ceremonial start of reconstruction.
Also in the vein of ‘transfer, but seems legit’, people don’t generally credit France with a terribly strong claim to the Statue of Liberty, despite it being a French sculpture as fabricated in kit form by French artisans for assembly on a French engineer’s support structure; the project was voluntarily conceived as something between a cooperative enterprise and a gift, so while (this being France) the droit moral probably remain firmly on the far side of the Atlantic; it’s generally accepted that it’s an American monument now.
In terms of collection integrity; this is definitely something that gets consideration; artifacts related to one another usually aren’t allocated the same way as unrelated ones; but it’s still fairly well accepted to rip stuff out of inconveniently placed/hard to preserve/etc. archaeological sites and dispatch it(sometimes kept together, sometimes divided into smaller collections) to museums and universities and the like. This is definitely frowned on if the excavation process isn’t done to archaeologist spec; if the current government’s antiquities-related arm is circumvented or defied; and it goes over much better if the final location is a publicily accessible museum(or at least a justifiable spot in such a museum’s ‘super delicate stuff we can’t really display’ specialist storage area) rather than somebody’s flaunting yacht; but if those conventions are adhered to extracting the artifacts from a site and dislocating them is something that can at least be gotten away with, quite possibly something that won’t even get a raised eyebrow.
As noted, I’m not sticking up for the chain of custody that actually occurred in this instance, since it’s pretty sketchy; but am interested in trying to tease out what factors we actually weigh when deciding on the justice of competing claims, whether we weigh them consistently, and so on.
A foolish consistency, they say, is the hobgoblin of little minds.
Context matters, so each museum would have to work things out on a case by case basis. Precedent would help but, to give an example, the basis for the decision for the return of these is likely to be very different to the basis of Greece’s claim to the Marbles.
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Ya, but the Greeks have a trieme!
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Tell that to Taiwan.
I’m sure he thinks he can though. Or, more accurately, Cummings does.
Don’t forget Long Meg and her daughters.
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