Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle Over Our Ancient Heritage

Participation in the workings of UNESCO is determined by national political self-interest. If a country believes it is to the benefit of its political position in the world to participate in UNESCO, it will. If it believes it is not, it won’t. This is true of the United Nations itself, of course. As the historian Paul Kennedy has written:

“The United Nations could never escape the central paradox of all international bodies. The paradox is this: Since the world organization was created by its member states, which acted like shareholders in a corporation, it can function effectively only when it received the support of national governments, especially those of the larger powers. Nations can ignore the world body…[and] the organization cannot pursue proposed actions if a Great Power-that is, one of the five countries possessing the veto is opposed. This tension between sovereignty and internationalism is inherent, persistent, and unavoidable.” (10)

At best UNESCO identifies issues of concern to the international community and raises awareness about them. It aspires “to build peace in the minds of men” by functioning as a “laboratory of ideas and a standard-setter to forge universal agreement on emerging ethical issues.”

But then, UNESCO is more. It wants to be, and often acts as, an operational agency. As its Web site states, “Through its strategies and activities, UNESCO is actively pursuing the Millennium Development Goals, especially those aiming to halve the proportion of people living in extreme poverty in developing countries by 2015, achieve universal primary education in all countries by 2015, eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education by 2005.”

To do this, UNESCO has a large bureaucracy. Its Executive Board comprises fifty-five members, divided among six world regions, and is charged with, among other things, executing the program adopted by the full General Conference and at times advising the U.N. Director-General on behalf of the General Conference, which comprises 193 Member States and six Associate Members. A twelve-member bureau of Executive Board members advises the Chairman of the Board. In addition, the Board has an eighteen-member Special Committee, a thirty-member Committee on Conventions, a twenty-four-member Committee on International Non-Governmental Organizations, and a Group of Experts on Financial and Administrative Matters, all of which are distributed more or less equally among the six world regions. The General Conference meets every two years. Its working languages are Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish. And the Executive Board meets twice a year. UNESCO’s major fields of action and priorities include Education, Natural Sciences, Social and Human Sciences, Communication and Information, and Culture. In the latter field, its current cultural priorities include “promoting cultural diversity, with special emphasis on the tangible and intangible heritage; cultural policies as well as intercultural and interfaith dialogue and understanding; cultural industries and artistic expressions.”

Among the committees in the field of Culture is the Intergovernmental Committee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Property to its Countries of Origin or its Restitution in case of Illicit Appropriation. The Committee was established in 1978 and held its first meeting in 1980. It recently held its fourteenth session. Its purpose is of an advisory nature, seeking “ways and means of facilitating bilateral negotiations for the restitution or return of cultural property to its countries of origin” as requested by the UNESCO Director-General, who shall have received requests for action from UNESCO Member States or Associate Members. It considers “cultural property” to denote “historical and ethnographic objects and documents including manuscripts, works of the plastic and decorative arts [i.e., sculpture, vases, bronzes], palaeontological and archaeological objects and zoological, botanical and mineralogical specimens.” Among its declared successes are the return of 7,000 cuneiform tablets from Germany to Turkey and 12,000 Pre-Columbian objects to Ecuador from Italy after a seven-year litigation. Other cases still pending include Greece’s request for the return of the Parthenon Marbles. It has also established a special Fund to support its efforts. The Committee has its own Web site, accessed through the UNESCO Culture field portal. There one can learn about the purpose, statutes, and procedures of the Committee, read texts of standing requests, and be advised on how to make requests for the return of cultural property. One can also find appeals for contributions to the Fund for the Return of Cultural Property to its Countries of Origin or its restitution in case of Illicit Appropriation, the purpose of which is to help claimant nation-states which “alone cannot solve the problem of recovering their lost heritage.” Emphasis is everywhere on the state: claimant states; art-trading states party to UNESCO 1970; and states willing “to assist in the return of these objects to their creators.”

It is time to question whether the nation-state bias of UNESCO and its Conventions has proven it to be a help or hindrance to the protection of the world’s cultural and artistic legacy. To date, some thirty years after it was drafted, UNESCO 1970 has failed, and failed because it has no teeth: it cannot contradict the authority of its Member States. It can only offer to help mediate claims between Member States; and on the basis that culture is the property of nation-States. We are losing our common ancient heritage at an ever-increasing rate through theft and destruction, poverty, development, warfare, and sectarian violence. No amount of international conventions and agreements that declare the existence of, and then proclaim to respect, the “collective genius of nationals of the State” will be able to over come the obstacle of nationalism. Nationalism is always a way out of international agreements. That’s just the way it is.

Why do archaeologists accept this? Because they are dependent on nation-states to do their work. Nation-states hold the goods - antiquities and archaeological sites as national cultural property and cultural patrimony - and they control access to them. The history of archaeology as a discipline is deeply embedded in the history of the politics of the regions within which archaeology has been practiced. There is no denying this. And some would say there is no way out of it, either. It is the reality of the conditions within which archaeologists engage in the practice of their profession. But what if foreign archaeologists withheld their expertise until nation-states agreed to restore the practice of partage, or the sharing of archaeological finds, generally and generously? Host nations have always depended in great part on the work of foreign archaeologists for the raw material of their nationalist ideologies, not to mention the tangible property that fuels their tourism economies. Archaeologists should question their support of nationalist retentionist cultural property laws, especially those who benefit today from working among the finds in the collections of their host university museums, collections which could not now be formed, ever since the implementation of foreign cultural property laws. And they should join museums in pressing for the return of partage, the principle and practice by which so many local and encyclopedic museum collections were built in the past.

We should all work together to counter the nationalist basis of national laws and international conventions and agreements and promote a principle of shared stewardship of our common heritage. John Henry Merryman has already articulated a framework for reconsidering national and international cultural property laws: a “triad of regulatory imperatives” - preservation, knowledge, and access. Antiquities should be distributed around the world to better ensure their preservation, broaden our knowledge of them, and increase the world’s access to them. And museums should share and exchange scholarly and professional expertise. Surely these are sounder principles on which to proceed than the nationalist ones enshrined in national laws and UNESCO’s conventions.

Let’s be clear about this: the argument between art museums and archaeologists is not over whether antiquities and archaeological sites should be preserved. It is over how best to preserve them and increase our knowledge of and public access to them for the benefit of all of us. This will not happen by emboldening nation-states and encouraging them to join forces to reclaim their self-proclaimed cultural property-Italy with Greece, Egypt with Italy and Greece, China with Peru, and more. Nation-states are feeling more confident now than ever. And the world’s ancient artistic legacy is being held hostage to the nationalist ambitions of these nation-state governments.

The real argument is between museums and modern nation-states over the imposition of nationalist retentionist cultural property laws and their failure to protect our common ancient heritage and their perversion of that heritage by claiming the archaeological record as a modern nation’s cultural property, important as a source of identity and esteem for modern nations and their nationals. It is imperative that we resolve this. The recent rise in nationalist and sectarian violence and the pervasive misunderstanding, even intolerance, of other cultures, and our ignorance of the very hybridity of culture and the interrelatedness of cultures such that we all have a stake in their preservation precisely because they are ours-both ancient and living cultures-because they are the mark of humanity, of what it means to be human, compels us to resolve our differences. Too much time has been wasted arguing the wrong issues. And in the meantime, our archaeological record is being destroyed.

We can do better than this. We need to encourage the sharing of the world’s heritage, to allow people everywhere to learn from the kind of experience I described at the start of this book, when over just three galleries in one museum we were able to draw connections between cultures distant in time and space, and we realized that the ancient peoples of the Yellow River region of today’s China ornamented their lives and engaged in ritual practices not unlike the peoples of medieval Europe and nineteenth-century Benin; and that the exquisite objects all of those people made resulted from contact between different cultures: a Christian monstrance with a crystal bottle made in the and holding the tooth of the Baptist; and an ivory box likely made by Muslim artists living among Christians in Sicily and decorated with motifs, which derived from Middle Eastern metalware, and including the Arabic inscription, “May glory endure.” This is the nature and promise of culure itself, and has always been.

I remember well my first visit to a museum. It was 1970 and I was nineteen. I hadn’t come from a privileged family. My father was a career U.S. Air Force officer. I grew up on military bases. I was studying in Europe as a university sophomore and visiting Paris. I went to the Louvre for the obvious reason: it was what one did as a tourist. But as I walked from room to room I became profoundly aware of the strange, new universe I had entered. Most of the world was there before me, or so it seemed, on the museum’s walls and in its cases: fragile artifacts from places of which I had never heard-Mesopotamia, Sumer, Akkad, Elam-some of them monumental, fragments of whole city walls (Susa in the time of Darius); mysteriously beautiful basalt sculptures and rapturously exotic gold- and other metal works from New Kingdom and Pharoanic Egypt; Cycladic heads and ceramic vessels and metal sculptures from what I now know to have been the age of Homer; awe-inspiring, over life-size Greek and Roman sculptures from the Victory of Samothrace to the Venus de Milo; Roman silver and those all-too-serious portrait busts of emperors and republicans; Islamic ceramics, calligraphy, and metalwork; and of course the paintings of Renaissance Italy and Baroque France, both familiar and strange, from Leonardo to Poussin, the slaves of Michelangelo, and the modern monuments by David, Delacroix, Ingres, and Courbet. It was the Louvre before le pyramid. And on that winter afternoon I seemed to have the galleries to myself. I could wander at will, uninterrupted by crowds and commerce.

I remember being moved, powerfully. The largeness of the Louvre-as-universe - the “world under one roof,” as the founders of the British Museum described their ambition for that museum - did not diminish my sense of being but enlarged it. I was not the lesser for not being “from” these magnificent cultures.

(10) Paul Kennedy, The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations (New York: Vintage Books, 1007): xiii-xiv.