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Who Should Own the World's Antiquities?
"In stressing the multiple meanings—aesthetic, textual, political, ritual—that an object may have, these contributors oppose the claim that art divorced from its archaeological setting is a cosa morta ("dead thing"), as an Italian cultural official described the Euphronios krater to de Montebello. "Few, I expect who have marveled at the scale and majesty of the Euphronios krater and the precision and elegance of line and its poignant depiction of a Homeric epic of the death of Sarpedon would concede that it is a cosa morta," de Montebello writes...
At the Art Institute of Chicago we may discover an exquisite ivory box that was used as a Christian reliquary in thirteenth-century Sicily, yet features an Arabic inscription; it was made from an elephant's tusk likely found in southern Africa and brought to Sicily by "Muslim traders from the Swahili coast." Such a work may in turn remind us of pieces in neighboring rooms—a carved ivory tusk from the nineteenth-century court of Benin, perhaps; or a fourteenth-century German monstrance—another kind of reliquary—consisting of gilt silver around a translucent vessel, the holder for the relic, that "was originally a perfume bottle made in Fatimid—Muslim—Egypt."...
Cuno worries that cultural property laws have given some states vast powers over world art. The Italian government, for example, may forbid an Italian citizen from taking a Matisse or even a Jackson Pollock out of the country...
Cuno lays much of the responsibility for the accelerating destruction of archaeological sites to such nations. In the absence of legitimate ways to acquire antiquities, their categorical and unenforceable prohibitions have simply made the looting worse. And where they have succeeded in preserving sites and monuments, he maintains, their laws have just as often caused a "perversion" of cultural heritage for the purposes of national identity and parochial politics.
Thus, instead of encyclopedic museums dedicated to gathering and furthering knowledge about objects from many different parts of the world, most archaeological countries have "national" museums, whose mission, Cuno suggests, is to use artifacts found within their own modern boundaries to fill out a spurious national mythology: Etruscan pots (more often than not manufactured in Athens) are used to define Italianness; Sumerian sculptures to define Iraqiness, Hittite jewelry to define Turkishness, and so on. In many such cases, he argues, the modern populations have no historical connections with the ancient cultures whose objects are being collected.
As a result, we have arrived at a situation in which ancient heritage is "divided up and claimed by modern nation-states as theirs, the property of only some of the world's people, made by their alleged ancestors for them and deprived of its rich diversity of sources and evidence of cultural influences." From here, it is only a small further step to argue, as Cuno does, that cultural property laws may reinforce the worst tendencies of nationalism:
I do recognize that nationalistic feelings have bred beautiful music, poetry, and works of visual art.... But all too often they have also hardened into ideologies with roots in fear and hatred of the Other, often with racist affinities. They then become dangerous as rep- rehensible means of oppressing others, sources of vicious, even barbaric sectarian violence, persuading colossal numbers of people to lay down their own lives in an effort to kill others.
... in contrast to the multiethnic Ottoman Empire, modern Turkey, apart from its Kurdish population, which is continually discriminated against, is overwhelmingly homogeneous: "Turkey and Istanbul," Cuno observes, "have become almost only Turkish and Muslim, when once both included large populations of Arabs, Christians, and Jews."
As a result, Turkey has developed a narrowly "nationalistic" approach to cultural property—denying, for example, the Kurdish minority control over its rich Kurdish heritage—even as it claims a diverse Ottoman past: it maintains an absolute prohibition on the circulation of antiquities found within its own present-day borders, because of their perceived importance to Turkish identity. Yet Turkish museums are filled with pieces like the Alexander Sarcophagus that were recovered from other former territories of the vast Ottoman Empire—objects, Cuno writes, that "could rightly be considered important to the cultural heritage and national identities of the modern states occupying those lands today."...
By the time of Saddam Hussein, archaeological finds had become subject to what Cuno describes as "political manipulation" aimed at serving "the ends of the Ba'thist Party." Yet he does not mention that such state interest—however questionable its aims—also meant that, until the economic crisis of the 1990s, Iraq had almost no looting, and foreign archaeologists considered its antiquities administration one of the best-funded and most professional in the Middle East...
The recent emphasis on repatriation as a solution to antiquities disputes is unfortunate: tracking down unprovenanced artifacts that may have left a country years earlier does little to address contemporary looting problems, and it rarely makes the objects in question more meaningful to archaeologists or accessible to the public than they were in a foreign museum...
Antiquities are ancient artifacts of times and cultures long preceding the history of the modern nation-state. And in all but a very few cases, they have no obvious relation to that state other than the accident of geography: they happen to be found within its modern borders.
... Archaeological countries must recognize that national ownership laws have often been a disastrous failure. Such policies—which were often accompanied by strict limits on antiquities loans to foreign institutions—succeeded only in driving the trade further underground; and museums ultimately had to face the prospect of criminal prosecution for collecting ancient art. Even as these countries fight to reclaim works, some of them, including Italy, have begun to acknowledge the flaws of prohibition."
Incidentally, even in their countries of origin, archaeological objects are cosa morta since they are almost never displayed on-site.