Who Owns the Past?

I am completely unimpressed by the claims of countries to own all the ancient artifacts excavated from their soil.

For one thing, I dispute that there is necessarily any meaningful continuity between the current owners of a tract of land and the people who actually made the objects in question. What right does modern Turkey have to the relics of ancient Greeks, whose descendants the Turks drove out of the country in 1923? When Ephesus was a great city, the Turks were nomads roaming central Asia; to me they have a better claim to the treasures of Samarkand than they have to the Hagia Sophia. Even in a simpler case, like in Italy, I deny that the average Italian has a more meaningful connection to the ancient Romans than I do. And who among us has any meaningful connection to Paleolithic cave artists?

What about Greek statues stolen by the Romans that happen to be excavated in Rome? Hordes of Viking silver found in Norway, most of it no doubt looted from British or Irish monasteries? Or even Greek vases excavated from Etruscan tombs? True, the Etruscans bought them, but then the Metropolitan museum paid a lot for the Euphronios crater. Why does that purchase by the Etruscans matter more than the one by the Met?

This is in the news again because the Egyptians are trying to get the Rosetta Stone returned to Egypt. But what connection does a modern, Arabic-speaking Egyptian have to the Greek-speaking rulers of Hellenistic Egypt? Just the accident of geography, as far as I am concerned. I understand that in a world of nation states, any protection of archaeological sites has to be provided by nations, and that export controls can help to curtail looting. But to me that has no relevance to objects dug up centuries ago.

The spread of art and artifacts around the world serves a real purpose: it spreads the appreciation and enjoyment of diverse cultures. My 15-year-old daughter just went to the Metropolitan in New York and came back full of enthusiasm for studying Egypt and Rome. If the Egyptian and Italian governments have their way, she would have to fly to Europe and Africa to have those experiences, which means that she would likely never have them, and her enthusiasm for the past would still lie unawakened. The result of nationalizing the past is the narrowing of human interests.

I believe the past of the world belongs to all of us. I recognize that certain objects may be strongly associated with certain nations or peoples, like the Star Bangled Banner with the US, Chin Shih Huang Ti's tomb with China, or sacred medicine bundles with Indian tribes. I can accept that a few objects closely associated with a National narrative may be in some sense national property. But the rest, I assert, truly belongs to humanity.

K. Anthony Appiah recently wrote a book advancing the kind of arguments I am making here, and now James Cuno of the Art Institute of Chicago has written another. Cuno points out that many of the most protectionist countries have artistic traditions that relied very heavily on foreign examples: "imagine the Renaissance without the influence of looted Greek antiquities." He writes, and I completely agree:

It is in the nature of our species to connect and exchange. And the result is a common culture in which we all have a stake. It is not, and can never be, the property of one modern nation or another.