The British Museum is a testament to England’s history as a colonizer. Many of the artifacts here are in dispute including 900 Benin bronze artifacts taken from Nigeria, the Parthenon Sculptures, a collection of marble architectural decoration from the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, and the Rosetta Stone of Egypt.
Recently, there has been a movement for museums to return artifacts that are controversial in terms of ownership.
Harvard’s Peabody Museum returns sacred scrolls and pipe tomahawks to the White Earth tribe in a repatriation ceremony.
Boston Museum of Fine Arts will return an unspecified number of allegedly looted antiquities to the Italian government, as well as terra cotta figures back to Mali.
Berlin museum returns 20 looted objects from Namibia, including jewelry, tools, fashion, and dolls.
Northern Ireland museum returns iwi kūpuna (ancestral Hawaiian remains) from an ancient Hawaiian burial cave.
Cambridge University’s Jesus College is returning a bronze statue of a rooster that was taken from Benin by British troops in 1897 from Nigeria.
Paris’ Quai Branly museum is returning twelve Benin statues from Nigeria that were looted from Abomey Palace by French forces in 1892.
Lebanese museum returns artifacts from Syria’s ancient city of Palmyra.
London’s Victoria and Albert Museum returned a 4,250-year-old gold ewer taken from Ankara, modern-day Turkey.
200 looted antiquities from museums and private collections in the U.S. are being returned to Italy.
Brooklyn Museum returns 1,305 pre-Hispanic artifacts to Costa Rica.
Rubin Museum agrees to return stolen religious Artifacts to Nepal.
But don’t count The Britsh Museum among the museums that are returning artifacts.
Not all cultural institutions are rushing to return artifacts to their country of origin. The British Museum in London has refused to repatriate some of its most notable items and biggest visitor draws, including marbles from the Parthenon in Athens that were traded to a British noble during the Ottoman Empire’s occupation of Greece in the early 1800s. Greece maintains the marbles were taken under dubious circumstances and should be returned, but British Prime Minister Boris Johnson told a Greek newspaper earlier this year they will stay in London and were “legally acquired … under the appropriate laws of the time.” The museum has also said it intends to hold onto the famous Rosetta Stone, which was found in Egypt by French soldiers during the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt. For decades, Egypt has also called for the return of the iconic bust of ancient Egyptian Queen Nefertiti from the Neues Museum in Berlin, claiming it was illegally smuggled out of the country by a German archeologist in 1913, which German authorities deny. from Forbes
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