Charlie WindleRepatriation, the return of cultural artefacts to their country of origin, has long been an intense debate amongst curators, scholars and politicians alike.
The University of Cambridge’s very own Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA), which boasts one million artefacts and is a forum for regular interaction between curators and leading academics, has no ongoing or rejected repatriation requests.
In information exclusively released to Per Capita Media via freedom of information request, it has been revealed that the museum currently has no ongoing requests from any person or organisation in another country.
Alongside this, as of 8th May 2025, the museum has never rejected a repatriation request.
The museum’s website includes a statement on their repatriation policy, as well as a comprehensive list of its return projects, the most recent being in June 2024.
The restitution of artefacts to their places of origin, especially those taken as loot during imperial conquest, is a pertinent issue facing major museums across the UK.
In particular, the British Museum frequently receives high publicity for its legal disputes with foreign governments over the restitution of its artefacts. Most famously, the museum still refuses to return the Parthenon Sculptures to Greece, and the Benin Bronzes to Nigeria, citing the British Museum Act of 1963 as its legal framework.
But, despite pressure and precedent from other major museums across Europe, including the Wereldmuseum in The Netherlands which returned more than 100 Benin Bronzes looted by British troops in the 19th century, the British Museum refuses to budge.
However, with an academic heavyweight like Cambridge making their position on restitution so clear, is it time for the Museum to reconsider their stance, updating their policy in line with the changing times?
Through a discussion of the specific case of the Parthenon Marbles, I will offer my perspective on the restitution debate as a Classics scholar and philhellene. These views are indebted to the work of Alexander Herman, whose ‘Restitution’ is a fine addition to the ‘Hot Topics in the Art World’ series, compiled by Sotheby’s, Dan Hicks, author of the fantastic book ‘The Brutish Museums’ and curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and Mary Beard, who writes as compellingly as anyone about the remarkable Acropolis Museum in Athens.
To provide a basic introduction and highlight some key contentions, I begin with an analysis of the Museum’s ‘How did they come to the British Museum?’ section on their ‘Contested Objects’ page dealing with the Parthenon Sculptures. For each paragraph from the website, in italics, I add my own notes.
By the early 19th century, the Ottoman Empire had been the governing authority in Athens for 350 years. Lord Elgin was the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and successfully petitioned the authorities to be able to draw, measure and remove figures.
The Ottoman Empire’s rule was resented by Greek people. The cultural repression and ethnic discrimination to which the Greek people were subjected by the Ottomans directly precipitated the Greek War of Independence. The Ottomans did not understand the cultural and religious significance of the Parthenon and other structures on the Acropolis, as shown by the fact that they converted the ancient Greek temple into a mosque, adding a minaret and transforming the apse into a mihrab.
What’s more, the Ottomans’ use of the Parthenon as an ammunition warehouse directly led to its destruction, when the powder store was struck by a Venetian shell in 1687. This demonstrates minimal concern for the Parthenon’s architectural value and cultural provenance, as the explosion resulted in catastrophic damage and the loss of many prized sculptures.
No Greek would have ever allowed Elgin to ‘draw, measure and remove figures’, and the Ottoman Empire’s officials had no care for the preservation of the Parthenon, as has been claimed.
He was granted a permit (firman), and between 1801 and 1805 acting under the oversight of the relevant authorities, Elgin removed about half of the remaining sculptures from the ruins of the Parthenon. He also obtained permission to have removed sculptural and architectural elements from other buildings on the Acropolis, namely the Erechtheion, the Temple of Athena Nike and the Propylaia.
The legality, or even existence of Elgin’s ‘firman’, is one of the cruxes of the whole debate. In 2024, Turkey’s culture ministry released a statement claiming that there is no evidence that Elgin was ever granted permission to remove antiquities from the Acropolis in the Ottoman archives.
Elgin took 75 metres of the frieze, a magnificent continuous sculpted panel that ran the whole way around the temple, 15 of the 92 metopes, panels sculpted in relief depicting the Centaurs fighting the Lapiths, and 17 figures from the pediments, triangular relief sculpture groups which stood atop each end.
The Parthenon’s sculptures – https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/introduction-parthenon-and-its-sculptures
Acting on the back of a permit which could not have been signed or sealed by the Imperial court, Elgin proceeded with haste, removing half of the sculptures from the Parthenon in what can only be described as the single greatest robbery of Classical sculpture in history.
All of Elgin’s collection of antiquities was then transported to Britain. His actions were thoroughly investigated by a Parliamentary Select Committee in 1816 and found to be entirely legal, prior to the sculptures entering the collection of the British Museum by Act of Parliament.
Before transporting the sculptures back to the United Kingdom, Elgin was forced, by budget constraints, to reduce the weight of his cargo. This meant brazenly sawing off the backs of many slabs which he had prized out of the Acropolis’ buildings, leaving the excess marble, which he could not afford to transport, dumped on the wayside.
The disrespect and cultural insensitivity demonstrated by the diplomat matched the sacrilegious treatment of the Parthenon by the Ottomans. Neither understood the Acropolis’ cultural and religious significance, neither cared about irreparably damaging the Parthenon and its sculptures, and neither saw anything but economic opportunity when they lied eyes upon these temples. It is no wonder that generations of Greeks refuse to forgive Elgin for the massacre he committed.
Despite 200 years of public pressure and precedent from museums overseas, the British Museum and consecutive governments refuse to grant the return of the sculptures to Greece.
Before coming to the reasons which curators and directors fall back upon to refuse repatriation, I will treat the other side: the compelling arguments in favour of the return of these marbles to their home in Athens.
When the Acropolis Museum in Athens was opened in 2009, many Greeks believed that the Parthenon Sculptures would be returned imminently. For years, the British Museum had leveraged the lack of a secure, highly visited museum in central Athens to avoid the repatriation debate completely.
16 years on, the hope of the Acropolis Museum turning the tide remains vain.
When I visited in 2023, I was struck by the poignant emphasis which the museum’s curators place on ‘the missing’.
Those sections of the frieze which Elgin robbed are not entirely left out of the display in the Acropolis Museum. Instead, they are replicated by deliberately white plaster casts, which clash violently with the golden colour of the original portions.
In the lineup of the Caryatids from the Erechtheion, incredibly detailed pillars carved in the shape of women’s bodies, a pathetic gap is left, ever-hopeful of the missing sister’s return from the British Museum.
Throughout the whole museum, the coherent sense is this: ‘everything should be together, and it should all be here’.
One factor often overlooked in debates such as these is the power of affiliation, and the importance of cultural and religious understanding.
The sculptures in the British Museum stand isolated and contextless, with the forensic cleanliness of the Parthenon Gallery confusing beauty with minimalism.
The lack of cultural understanding is most painfully shown by the lone caryatid, whose plaque which reads ‘one of six’ betrays the Museum’s inability to adequately contextualise these stolen wonders.
The contrast with the Acropolis Museum could not be starker; but this is no surprise. Generations of Greeks have passed on their passion, knowledge of understanding of the holy hill’s remains, and the attention to detail in their displays accentuates this appreciation exquisitely.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the Acropolis Museum’s display rooms is their deliberate business. The rooms are crowded with statues, devoted as votive offerings on the Acropolis, ingeniously simulating how the turf of the sanctuary would have been continuously coated in sculptures and offerings of all kinds.
Sculptures of this kind are isolated in the British Museum, placed around walls in display cabinets which sell out the museum’s inability to comprehend the chaos of ancient citadels. Perhaps most powerfully, the frieze room of the Acropolis Museum is angled in such a way that visitors can look out of the room’s glass front and look directly at the original Parthenon
This is the cultural understanding that the British Museum could never simulate. This is the contextualisation and provenance which makes repatriation so necessary.
As Greek Culture Minister Antonis Samaris said when opening the Acropolis Museum, it is an “injustice… to everyone in the world” that the sculptures of the Parthenon are in “enforced exile 4000 kilometres away”. As he spoke, he pointedly placed a sculpted head, on loan from the Vatican Museums, on its original body.
With the construction of the Acropolis Museum, the British government’s arguments against restitution fell apart. Tragically, new arguments were manufactured.
If nothing else, one must appreciate the inventiveness and imagination with which the British government barricades and steadfastly defends the spoils of the Empire.
The British Museum and the British Government utilise different tools to argue that the sculptures should not be returned.
The government falls back on the British Museum Act of 1963, which forbids the museum from returning any of its collection to any requester.
It cannot be denied that this statute was written at a time when public sentiment was wildly different from what it is today. With political will, a simple majority in government could be leveraged to propose a new statute to overturn the outdates sixties legislation.
But the government refuses.
The Museum’s position was very clearly set out in George Osborne’s speech at the 2024 Annual Trustees’ Dinner. Speaking as the Museum’s chair, Osborne listed the Parthenon Sculptures amongst those things which “when [people] think of the British Museum, [they] think first of the great civilisations of the Mediterranean and the Middle East”.
The Parthenon Sculptures, then, occupy a considerable role in the Museum’s project to be a ‘world encyclopaedia’, a place “where you can see all the great civilisations alongside each other”.
Banging the same drum which museum heads have for years, Osborne claimed that the six million guests a year get to see the whole world in one place, an honour and privilege granted to visitors by a benevolent force of education and holism. And it’s all for free.
With the recent heist at the British Museum’s French sister The Louvre, one wonders whether debates about the safety of the world’s ‘big museums’ will spark up once again, as they did when the British Museum was revealed to be leaky, and as illuminated in the opening sequence of the 2018 Marvel Film ‘Black Panther’.
My argument is this: without their contexts, without being grounded in the civilisations which created them, without being in the place where the creators’ ancestors still live, what do these lumps of rock mean?
To take the moai away from Easter Island, to steal aboriginal weapons from Australian soil, to rob Benin of its bronzes, to abduct the sculptures of the Parthenon, is to deprive these objects of their power.
To avoid remaining ridden with scandal and controversy for decades to come, the British Museum must come to terms with the times in which we live.
With the precedent of more museums, more academic heavyweights like the University of Cambridge, and more curators making the right choices, the wave of restitution will eventually crash into the walls of the British Museum, and I sincerely hope that those walls do not hold firm.
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