https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/p2xlwz/every_stolen_artifact_needs_to_come_back_to_its/
“Oh no, not brown people selling ancient artifacts so they can put food on the table!”
As a side note: going to a museum as a young kid and looking at Egyptian artifacts has been so influential on my life. What is a solution to giving looted artifacts back to their home country but ensuring people around the world can appreciate them?
Put copies on display. You don't even notice when it's a plaster dinosaur bone, why would it be different with a statue? Put a plaque that says "we used to have this for real but returned it, aren't we a great institution" for bonus feel-good points.
Ideally, in a worldwide socialist planet that values arts and historical artifacts for all mankind, we could rotate/loan out groups of artifacts to museums around the world so that everyone can get a chance to see them in person without having to transport themselves across huge distances. Of course this must be done with the consent of the peoples who historically created these artifacts.
As for right now, you could digitise and make freely available high quality copies through the internet. Not everywhere has proper internet access though so it's not perfect. Or if colonising countries really care about these artifacts they should help their former colonies construct and staff, at no charge and under these countries control, properly maintained and curated museums to safeguard ancient works in the places they came from. This way any money generated from these works actually goes to enrich the places that they were stolen from and not the British/French.
My ideas were pay reparations or establish a leasing system. The home country places a leasing fee for a set amount of years on the museum.
The Cairo museum did a traveling King Tut exhibit a while ago. So free exchanges still occur.
I mentioned this elsewhere in this thread, but there are some items that are more important to certain regions than others. Like the Rosetta Stone isn't of historical importance to Egypt, and I don't think they want it back. But, it's of massive historical significance to Europe.
Pretty sure the Rosetta Stone is still important to Egypt, my dude. Colonizers should return everything they stole.
To be honest, I was just having this conversation with an actual archeologist a few days ago. I'm just parroting this point and I hadn't really thought about it too much. I figured someone with a PhD knows a lot more than I do about this stuff.
The artifact that had 2 different ancient Egyptian writing systems on it, and led to a breakthrough in understanding hieroglyphics, isn't of historical significance to Egypt?
I'm drawing a blank on why it'd be more important to France.
Yea in a not shit system a visitors museum could just be a constantly shifting hall of traveling exhibits (real museums would be needed for all the preservation and archiving type work though).
I went to a museum in Tokyo that does this. The National Art Center, Tokyo
Unlike Japan's other national art museums, NACT is an 'empty museum', without a collection, permanent display, and curators. Like Kunsthalle in German-speaking regions, it accommodates temporary exhibitions sponsored and curated by other organizations.The policy has been successful. In its first fiscal year in 2007, it had 69 exhibitions organized by arts groups and 10 organized by NACT. Its Monet exhibition, held between 7 April and 2 July 2007, was the second most visited exhibition of the year, not only in Japan but in the world.
When I visited, there was a museum/show/gallery of how to design furniture, streets, appliances etc that can be used by people across all ages, it was neat.
A lot of museums already do that. The natural history museum has a space that rotates what's there every few months. Sometimes there's really neat shit, they had a whole bunch of movie used costumes and stuff one time. Got to see the original Gorn costume, Kirk's green tunic thing, Darth Vader suit from Empire, everything from Indiana Jones and a bunch of other cool movie shit.
These people have not a fucking clue how serious Egypt is about this. Via the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities article on Wikipedia:
"Grave robbers have been looting ancient Egyptian tombs nearly continuously for well over 4 thousand years.[2] The Ministry of Antiquities works to get the items restored back to Egypt, whenever possible. Over the years, thousands of stolen antiquities have made their way back to Egypt. For instance, in late 2016, the ministry recovered and repatriated two of four Islamic era lamps which had been stolen in 2015.[3] In 2018, a carving in the shape of Osiris which had been hidden in furniture and shipped to Kuwait was repatriated to Egypt's Ministry of Antiquities.[4]"
There are a few compelling reasons why not to repatriate items, but this is just straight racism. One example is the Rosetta Stone, it's not really that important to Egypt, so they don't really need it back. But, it's extremely important to European history.
like the 'instability of the region' is pretty entirely a function of the western interventions in the region
these god damn fucking dorks
we need to go and pillage the savages culture, they're too barbaric to look after it you see. fuck off. if the west wasn't so intent on centuries of imperialism and destabilisation of the post colonial world 95% of this violence would never fucking happen in the first place. AND EVEN THEN, it should still be given back, because you have no right to the looted artefacts of other cultures that have been demanded back time and time again.
the only egyptian artefacts that should be outta country are like, the obelisks the romans stole, the romans are remote enough in the past that their theft is history in of itself
though if the italians ever do a romanism-fascism again they lose this privilege
The whole thread is one of the worst things I've seen on :reddit-logo:
These should be seen as Human history instead of just a countries history
Unironically a correct sentiment.
Second commenter doesn't realize that imperialism is the cause of the instability they described.
Taking away my neighbors car because they might crash it, then pointing to then stealing to survive because they can't get to a job on time anymore as proof that they weren't responsible enough for the car.
tons of Black and Native and Melungeon communities in the Anglo-West were razed to the ground and/or demolished under the guise of "urban renewal", resulting in millions of internal refugees whose stories and causes for dispersal are unknown and unrecorded
even the few ones that are recorded with signs or statues get continuously vandalized by US chuds every day
but we're better at preservation
wigga please.
