Should artifacts be returned?

At first glance it seems self-evident that valuable artifacts that were looted as spoils of war or plundered by our colonial ancestors should be sent back to where they came from. No one would argue with the notion that art stolen by the Nazis from countries they occupied during World War Two should be restored to its rightful owners, so why not treasures snatched by colonial powers? Repatriating the cultural heritage of nations that were robbed is part of a long process of restorative justice for past wrongs that Western powers are approaching in a variety of ways. Morally, it has to be the right thing to do.

But where do you draw the line? In the mists of antiquity, original ownership can be difficult to establish. Many items found in Rome had been stolen elsewhere in the vast Roman Empire, and the same is true for other ancient empires round the world. Country boundaries have changed umpteen times over millennia, and the civilization that created an artifact may no longer exist.

Take the “Horses of Saint Mark”, for example. This set of four bronze equestrian statues is believed to have been created by Byzantine sculptors in the 2nd or 3rd century AD. It is likely they were displayed on the Hippodrome in Constantinople until 1204, when they were looted by Venetian forces. The horses were transported to Venice and installed on the façade of Saint Mark’s Basilica, where they kicked their heels until 1797, at which point arch-plunderer Napoleon Bonaparte took a fancy to them and brought them to Paris to decorate his Arc de Triomphe. After Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo in 1815, the horses were returned to Venice, but should they now be relocated to Istanbul? Or to Greece, since Byzantium was the Eastern extension of the Roman Empire, covering much of that present-day country?

British Secretary of State for Culture Oliver Dowden said in March 2021: “Once you start pulling on this thread where do you actually end up? Would we [the UK] insist on having the Bayeux Tapestry back [from France]? American institutions are packed full of British artefacts. Japan has loads of Chinese and Korean artefacts. … I think it is just impossible to go back and disentangle all these things.”

This is one argument that Western museums offer for hanging onto their encyclopaedic world collections. Another is that they have the resources to protect antiquities from decay, with expert knowledge of preservation and restoration techniques, as well as governments that are stable enough to provide security, but the countries of origin might not. After all, look what Isis did to Palmyra…

The Earl of Elgin used a version of this argument in 1801 when he decided to appropriate a set of Classical Greek marbles from the Parthenon and transport them back to Britain. At the time, Athens was under Ottoman rule and the Parthenon had been severely damaged in successive wars and earthquakes, so he claimed the marbles would be safer with him. According to Lord Elgin, he had a firman giving the permission of the Ottoman sultan to remove them—but if such a document existed, its legality is hotly disputed today. He originally planned to use them to decorate his home, but eventually sold them to the British Museum, where they still reside. 

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