True Left

On the eve of the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum, some of the country’s artifacts, from the Rosetta Stone to the bust of Nefertiti, remain overseas

[...]Egypt’s riches have drawn colonizers and foreign treasure hunters since as early as 332 B.C.E., when Alexander the Great founded his namesake city on the delta. Wars with history’s biggest empires—the Romans, the Persians, the Arabs, the Ottomans and finally the British—have filled the 22 centuries since; in 1798, Napoleon also led a comparatively short French invasion that led to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, which opened Western Europe’s eyes to Egypt and started an undammable flow of ancient heritage leaving the country.

As the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) prepares to open its doors in Giza in 2023, some archaeologists, Egyptologists and museumgoers are calling for Egyptian antiquities to be returned to their homeland. Arriving amid a growing push to decolonize American and European museums, these campaigns ask a crucial question: Who gets to claim these artifacts as their own?

“People were asleep for years, and now they’re awake,” says Egyptologist Zahi Hawass. “I’m sure [Westerners] have nightmares of what happened: taking the history and the heritage of Africa to their countries with no right. There is no right for them to have this heritage in their country at all.”

Egypt and Europe

Even before Alexander the Great, Egypt was known to the Greeks, receiving mentions in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. The threads of European colonialism in Egypt have long been intertwined with the region’s cultural heritage: The Romans adopted and absorbed many aspects of ancient Egyptian customs following Octavian’s defeat of Mark Antony and Cleopatra in 30 B.C.E., but after the Arab conquest in the mid-seventh century C.E., European contact with Egypt became more sporadic...

[...]Some of Europe’s best-known museums also got their start around this time, prompting a race among rivals to fill their galleries with the most impressive pieces. The British Museum, founded in London in the 1750s, had artifacts from ancient Egypt in its collection from the start and today houses the largest collection of Egyptian objects outside of Egypt. In the 1820s, Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia bought thousands of historic Egyptian objects now housed in the Neues Museum in Berlin. That same decade, following the translation of the Rosetta Stone, France’s Charles X ordered the creation of an Egyptian museum in the Louvre Palace in Paris, with Champollion as its first director.

Colonial acquisitions

In the 1850s, the Ottoman-Egyptian government invited Frenchman Auguste Mariette, fresh from an impressive find at the Saqqara necropolis, to become Egypt’s first director of antiquities. The French handed the role down for decades, even maintaining control of the Department of Antiquities following the British occupation of Egypt in 1882. Egyptian Egyptologists were categorically excluded from the organization, though pioneers like Ahmed Kamal Pasha battled for a seat at the colonialist-dominated table...
[...]“[The] legal outflow of antiquities from colonized Egypt contrasted with Italy, where few foreigners were allowed even to dig, and Greece, where foreign excavators had to renounce any claim to their finds,” writes Donald Malcolm Reid in Contesting Antiquity in Egypt...

A British tourist could face the death penalty in Iraq after being accused of smuggling artifacts out of the country.

Jim Fitton, a former geologist, collected stone fragments and shards of broken pottery as souvenirs during an archaeological tour of Eridu, an ancient Sumerian city in southern Iraq. He was arrested at the airport on March 20 after the baggage belonging to the tour group was searched. A German tourist who was also part of the tour was apprehended at the airport.

Under Iraqi law, the intentional international export of any items determined to be cultural heritage is “punishable with execution”.

Fitton’s family members, who live in Malaysia, told the BBC that the fragments were “in the open, unguarded and with no signage warning against removal”. The tour leaders also collected shards and encouraged the tourists to do the same, the family said.

The Fittons are now petitioning the British government to intervene in the trial, which is set to begin May 7.  Fitton’s lawyer has drafted a proposal for the case to be dropped, the family told the BBC, however the plan needs the endorsement of the British Foreign Office to be presented to a high-ranking judiciary in Iraq.

For centuries, Europeans lusted after exotic treasures from all over the world. Millions of objects were stored away by German museums during the colonial era. That’s left a cultural vacuum in former colonial countries.

Today, the restitution of these objects to their cultures of origin does happen - but it is the exception, rather than the rule. According to Bénédicte Savoy, a critic of Berlin's Humboldt Forum museum, most institutions are still stone-walling. "Their greatest fear is arousing desire. They don’t want to give things back. So they keep quiet."

Sealed off from the public, artifacts stored by German museums are often treated with neglect. Berlin's new Humboldt Forum won’t change that. There, some 10,000 artifacts are planned for public display. But the entire collection is one million objects strong. This means that the vast majority of artifacts continue to be stored in a facility in the suburb of Dahlem, which suffers from flooding, dampness, and infestations of vermin.

Indeed, many museums do not even know how many cultural artifacts they possess. Munich's Fünf Kontinente Museum has records of just 57,000 of its estimated 160,000 pieces, while Hamburg's MARKK, formerly the Museum of Ethnology, has no idea which objects are in which boxes following roof damage and the disposal of asbestos.

The Netherlands and France have undertaken the complete digitization of global artifacts. But in Germany, budget and staff shortages are standing in the way. When will indigenous communities be able to finally look at their own cultural relics held in Germany? And how well equipped are ethnological museums to make such heritage available to the cultures that created it?

The documentary takes a critical look at the situation, making it clear that the problems are not the fault of often extremely-dedicated museum staff. There are structural problems, and solving them will require increased resources, research, and transparency.

#documentary #museums #Germany #dwdocumentary

    A 3,500-year-old clay tablet purchased by the Hobby Lobby arts and crafts chain for $1.6 million has been forfeited to the United States.

    The tablet was illegally transported to the U.S. in 2003 and 2014.

    In a complaint filed in May 2020, prosecutors said the 5-by-6-inch tablet is considered the property of the Iraqi government and should be returned.
[...]
The tablet, which bears a portion of the epic of Gilgamesh, a Sumerian poem considered one of the world’s oldest works, originated in the area of modern-day Iraq and was illegally transported to the U.S. in 2003 and 2014.

A false provenance letter was used to sell the tablet several times before Hobby Lobby purchased the item from a London-based auction house in 2014.

On Tuesday morning, the Daily Beast reported that Hobby Lobby’s C.E.O. Steve Green, whose company successfully challenged Obamacare’s contraception mandate on the grounds that it violated the owning family’s religious beliefs, was being investigated for the allegedly illicit importation of biblical-era Assyrian and Babylonian artifacts into the United States.

The four-year investigation involves nearly 300 “small clay tablets” from what’s now modern-day Iraq and Syria, bound for the Museum of the Bible, a multi-million-dollar complex in Washington, D.C. and scheduled to open in 2017, largely financed by the Green family, which owns Hobby Lobby and is worth an estimated $4.5 billion. But when the family tried to get the collections through U.S. Customs—having declared them, according to the Daily Beast, as “hand-crafted clay tiles” worth a collective $300—their actions triggered an F.B.I. inquiry. To date, the investigation is still ongoing, while a representative from the Museum of the Bible characterized the investigation as a problem spawned from “incomplete paperwork”.
[...]
Last February, the United Nations adopted a resolution stating that its members would seek to prevent terrorist groups, including ISIS, from profiting off these sales. According to Col. Matt Bogdanos, a single, four-inch cylinder seal from ancient Babylonia can sell for nearly $250,000 alone, and the U.N. ambassador from Iraq, Mohamed Ali Alhakim, estimated that ISIS earns more than $100 million per year antiquities trading.

It's being called a game changer - and the start of a new era. Germany has promised to begin returning the artefacts known as the Benin Bronzes to Nigeria next year, making it the first country to do so.
Germany has a collection of just over 1,000 Benin Bronzes. They're on display in museums in Cologne, Dresden, Hamburg, Leipzig, and Stuttgart. The sculptures and metal plaques are from the ancient Kingdom of Benin - which is today known as Edo State in southern Nigeria. The Bronzes were looted by British soldiers in 1897 and sold to museums in North America and Europe. The largest collection of the Bronzes is held by the British Museum.
Nigeria has been trying to get the bronzes back for decades. Without success. But momentum has been building over the last few years, with calls growing ever louder for artifacts seized during the colonial era to be returned to their places of origin. Germany's culture minister explained why Berlin had decided to act now. She said:
''We are confronting our historic and moral responsibility. We want to contribute to a common understanding and reconciliation with the descendants of the people who were robbed of their cultural treasures during the times of colonialism.''
It's not just the Benin Bronzes from Nigeria that are wanted by their rightful owners. There is also a claim from Cameroon from where a special artifact known as the Tangue was stolen from a local King. More than a century later it is still in Germany. But not everyone in Cameroon is of the view that it should be brought back to the country.
In Douala, Cameroon Prince Kum'a Ndumbe III has been advocating for the return of the Tangue, a sculpture stolen from his grandfather in 1884. Prince Ndumbe has made a copy of the Tangue and put it on show in Cameroon.
The original artifact - looted by the Germans during colonial times - is on display at a museum in Munich.
But not everyone agrees that the Tangue should be immediately returned. Princess Marilyn Douala Bell is an artist and founder of an art center in Douala. Even though her great-grandfather was executed in 1914 for resisting German rule, Marilyn thinks Cameroon is not ready to receive the artefact.
Others in Douala also claim to be the rightful owners of the Tangue.  At least one more descendant of a Douala King has made a claim on the artifact. For Marilyn this is a source of concern.  She wants the tangue to be  returned but fears the conditions are currently not right.

The University of Pennsylvania apologized to members of MOVE on Monday for using the remains of one of the group’s members as a case study in its anthropology classes, rather than returning them to the family.

“We understand the importance of reuniting the remains with the family and we are working now to find a respectful, consultative resolution,” a university spokesperson said. “... We are reassessing our practices of collecting, stewarding, displaying, and researching human remains.”

Meanwhile, members of MOVE, the West Philadelphia-based radical organization whose compound was bombed by the city in 1985 in a conflagration that killed 11, accused the city and the Penn Museum of mishandling and disrespecting the remains of at least one child who died in the blast.

They rejected the museum’s apology at a news conference Monday at the group’s West Philadelphia office, calling it empty words offered by an untrustworthy institution 36 years late.

Pam Africa, one of the group’s most vocal and prominent members, called the museum “body snatchers” and “grave robbers.”
...
Another member, Janine Africa, said the museum’s handling of the remains was “the most disrespectful, hateful thing you can do to anybody.”
...
Consuewella Dotson Africa, the mother of the two oldest children killed in the 1985 bombing, became emotional during the news conference and left the room. She later returned.

”Some 36 years later they come to us and say they got some bones of our children. You go to hell with that bull—,” she said.
...
”I could not imagine, in my worse nightmare, that the government would drop a bomb on us and kill my brothers and sisters. And I could not have imagined 36 years later that they would be displaying parts of our family as if they’re some dinosaur relics that they dug up,”