Repatriation (cultural property)
The stele commemorating Naram-Sin's victory in a battle against the Lullubi people in 2250 BCE was taken as war plunder about a thousand years later by the Elamites who relocated it to their capital in Susa, Iran.
This myth illustrates the sacramental significance of statuary in Ancient Greece as divine manifestations of the gods that symbolized power and were often believed to possess supernatural abilities.
In Rome's many subsequent wars, blood-stained armor and weaponry were gathered and placed in temples as a symbol of respect toward the enemies' deities and as a way to win their patronage.
[5] However, the triumphal procession of Marcus Claudius Marcellus after the fall of Syracuse in 211 is believed to have set a standard of reverence to conquered sanctuaries as it engendered disapproval by critics and a negative social reaction.
[11] In fact, the French revolutionaries justified the large-scale and systematic looting of Italy in 1796 by viewing themselves as the political successors of Rome, in the same way that ancient Romans saw themselves as the heirs of Greek civilization.
[13] The most famous artworks plundered included the Bronze Horses of Saint Mark in Venice (itself looted from the Sack of Constantinople in 1204) and the Laocoön and His Sons in Rome (both since returned), with the latter then being considered the most impressive sculpture.
[15] With the founding of the Louvre museum in Paris in 1793, Napoleon's aim was to establish an encyclopedic exhibition of art history, which later both Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler attempted to emulate in their respective countries.
[25] In a letter to Lord Castlereagh he wrote: The Allies then, having the contents of the museum justly in their power, could not do otherwise than restore them to the countries from which, contrary to the practice of civilized warfare, they had been torn during the disastrous period of the French revolution and the tyranny of Bonaparte.
[29] In the several months leading up to the war, scholars, art directors, and collector met with the Pentagon to ensure that the US government would protect Iraq's important archaeological heritage, with the National Museum in Baghdad being at the top of the list of concerns.
[32] In 1863 US President Abraham Lincoln summoned Francis Lieber, a German-American jurist and political philosopher, to write a legal code to regulate Union soldiers' behavior toward Confederate prisoners, noncombatants, spies and property.
[35] A portion of the ROE clauses instruct US troops not to attack "schools, museums, national monuments, and any other historical or cultural sites unless they are being used for a military purpose and pose a threat".
[39] The Hague Convention of 1907 aimed to forbid pillaging and sought to make wartime plunder the subject of legal proceedings, although in practice the defeated countries did not gain any leverage in their demands for repatriation.
[42] The 1978 UNESCO Convention strengthened existing provisions; the Intergovernmental Committee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Property to its countries of origin or its restitution in case of illicit appropriation was established.
[43] In response to the Iraqi National Museum looting, UNESCO Director-General, Kōichirō Matsuura convened a meeting in Paris on 17 April 2003, to assess the situation and coordinate international networks in order to recover the cultural heritage of Iraq.
[49] Museums furnished by colonial looting have largely shaped the way a nation imagines its dominion, the nature of the human beings under its power, the geography of the land, and the legitimacy of its ancestors, working to suggest a process of political inheriting.
States shall seek to enable the access and/or repatriation of ceremonial objects and human remains in their possession through fair, transparent and effective mechanisms developed in conjunction with indigenous peoples concerned.
[60] The repatriation debate is a term referring to the dialogue between individuals, heritage institutions, and nations who have possession of cultural property and those who pursue its return to its country or community of origin.
[95] Jason Gibson, a museum anthropologist working in Central Australia, notes how there is a lack of Aboriginal authority surrounding collections and so protocols have instead been made by non-Indigenous professionals.
With the 250th anniversary of Captain James Cook's landing looming in April 2020, two Labor MPs called on the government to "establish a process for the return of relevant cultural and historical artefacts to the original custodians and owners".
[97] The Return of Cultural Heritage program run by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) began in 2019, the year before the 250th anniversary of Captain James Cook's first voyage to Australia.
The next phase of the project would repatriate 40 culturally significant objects from the Manchester Museum in the UK, which would be returned to the Aranda, Ganggalidda, Garawa, Nyamal and Yawuru peoples.
[98] In November 2019, the objects were returned from Manchester Museum, which included sacred artefacts collected 125 years earlier from the Nyamal people of the Pilbara region of Western Australia.
[117] Museums and galleries in both England and Wales will be given unprecedented powers to give away their collections if there is a justified moral obligation to do so, under the new act, according to Alexander Herman, an expert in art law.
[120] In July 1996, the British Government agreed to return the Stone of Scone to Scotland, which had been taken to London in 1296 and placed in the newly made Coronation Chair, following growing dissatisfaction among Scots at the prevailing constitutional settlement.
Even though Greece claims that the marbles should be returned to Athens on moral grounds and wants to present the sculptures in its National Archaeological Museum,[127] British authorities continue to insist on their legal ownership.
[134] In the context of local and international debates, the Pitt Rivers Museum of the University of Oxford started a broader programme of decolonization and reconciliation that centres on four tenets: provenance, transparency, repatriation and redress.
[156] In 2013, Fintan O'Toole noted that much of the material in the NMI's ethnographic collection "lies in the grey area between trade and coercive acquisition: an expansive terrain in imperial relations," but that other objects were unambiguously loot, taken in punitive expeditions in Africa, Asia and Oceania.
Middle-East scholars and Jewish organizations have opined that because the materials were abandoned under duress, and because almost no Jews live in Iraq today, the archive should instead be housed in Israel or the United States.
Tess Davis, an archaeologist and lawyer for the Antiquities Coalition, praised the museum's decision, but said, "The Hanuman first surfaced on the market, while Cambodia was in the midst of a war and facing genocide.
[186][187] In 2022, Piotr Gliński, Poland's culture minister, announced a formal request for Russia's Pushkin Museum to return seven paintings that were looted by the Red Army during World War II.
