Loot
The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World
By Sharon Waxman
Times Books; 414 pages; $30
The title, stamped in gold capital letters on the dust jacket, gives
away the author's agenda: This is a muckraking book about art objects
from ancient cultures that have found their way into major museums of
Europe and the United States. Sharon Waxman has a nose for scandal
and spends much of the book following up on reports of thefts by
grave robbers, smuggling by dealers and sexual hanky-panky between
museum personnel.

The result is an odd volume, part scandal mongering and part
travelogue, wrapped around a philosophical question that could have
been discussed in a book a tenth of its size.

To the victor belong the spoils has been the case for all of history.
Soldiers, from generals to privates, have brought home treasures from
the lands they conquered. Napoleon systematized things, bringing 167
artists, scientists and historians on his Egyptian campaign with
orders to collect all manner of objects, particularly art. Those
French intellectuals, as Waxman points out, created modern
Egyptology. Many of their finds wound up in the Louvre, but not the
most famous, the Rosetta Stone, key to deciphering hieroglyphs, which
the British claimed after defeating Napoleon.

The war ended, but European antiquity hunters stayed in Egypt, aided
by local officials who, if properly provided for, were quite willing
to grant permits to dig and remove ancient objects. This pattern was
followed throughout the Mediterranean and Near East during the 19th
century, most notoriously when the Earl of Elgin bribed the Turkish
authorities who ruled Greece at the time to allow him to remove from
the Parthenon and ship to England what are now known as the Elgin
Marbles. They were soon acquired by the British Museum, where they
still reside.

The Greeks have never forgotten the loss.

They and other Mediterranean nations have begun the quest in recent
times to recover what they regard as their looted patrimony. The
result is a conflict between those who espouse the Enlightenment's
idea of a universal museum, where masterpieces from all civilizations
are collected and displayed, and those who claim that the removal of
objects from the place of their creation, in addition to being theft,
robs the objects of the context without which they cannot be fully
understood. Museum officials have little patience with the latter
view.

As the curator of Egyptian art at the Louvre says, "If that's the
case, then we should put everything back in the tombs and leave it in
the dark. At its extreme, that argument is absurd. These objects were
not meant to be seen."

rest at
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?
f=/c/a/2008/11/29/DDSM148LFK.DTL&hw=Loot&sn=001&sc=1000