Who Owns History?

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Naturally, there's a good measure of international payback here. For source nations, the idea of cultural property is a way to assert their sovereignty against those great powers that once picked through their treasures. It's also a defense against the suction of the present-day free market, which could easily vacuum up whatever the colonial powers haven't carted away. Zahi Hawass is the very vocal head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities. "While I believe that Egyptian monuments are the shared heritage of mankind," he told TIME by e-mail, "I also believe that as a sovereign state and the home of this great civilization, Egypt has a right to protect its legal and moral rights in regard to its antiquities."

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Disputed Antiquities

Museum professionals have counterarguments. Some places--think of the Met, the Louvre or the National Gallery in London--are "universal museums," worth cherishing precisely because they permanently display the works of many cultures side by side. Neil MacGregor is the director of the British Museum, founded in 1753 as the first and now one of the greatest of those. "The idea," he says, "of having in one building things from the whole world, there for free, is just as important now as it was 250 years ago."

Dimitrios Pandermalis knows all about the idea of the universal museum. He doesn't think much of it. "A translation of the imperialism of the 19th century to the globalization of the 20th century" is what he calls the concept, and his view counts. Pandermalis is president of the organization behind the New Acropolis Museum in Athens, conceived as a standing rebuke to the British Museum's continued possession of the most passionately disputed cultural property of them all, the 5th century B.C. Elgin Marbles. Those are carvings taken from the Parthenon in the early 19th century at the direction of Lord Elgin, who was then British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Together the Elgins constitute roughly half of the surviving figures from the Parthenon. Most of the rest remain in Athens.

To MacGregor, whose museum displays the marbles in galleries near its great collections of Egyptian, Near Eastern, Asian and African art, the division of the work between London and Athens is ideal. "The sculptures are part of two separate stories," he says. "One is the story of architecture and sculpture in Athens. The other is the story of sculpture in the world."

To the Greeks, it's not so ideal. They want the marbles back, and the New Acropolis Museum is an ingenious part of their lengthy campaign to retrieve them. It will display the Greek portions of the Parthenon frieze side by side with pale plaster copies of the portions in London, like empty chairs at a banquet table. Meanwhile, the Greeks have also proposed that the British Museum might simply lend them the Elgin Marbles for the official opening of the museum later this year. There's just one problem. The British Museum insists that Greece must first recognize, formally, that the marbles are its property. "The conversation," says MacGregor, "cannot even begin until that has happened."

Digging for History

It isn't just source nations like Greece that have it in for the museums. So do archaeologists, who complain that simply by providing a commercial market for ancient objects, museums and private collectors encourage looters who vandalize archaeological digs, removing the artifacts from surroundings that hold clues about the culture that made them. To most people, a Mesopotamian cult figure or a Maya stela, before it's anything else, is a work of art. To an archaeologist, it's first a crucial piece of a much larger puzzle, the puzzle that is history itself. And theft breaks the puzzle into pieces that can never be put back together. "Archaeologists are concerned about all the other information that goes along with [found objects]," says Alex Barker, who directs the Museum of Art and Archaeology at the University of Missouri-Columbia. "And that's a very fragile thing."

Site destruction--and the consequent loss of knowledge--is a cultural disaster for everyone. But is prohibiting almost any lawful export the best way to protect sites? Despite the spread of cultural-property laws, looting is on the rise. "The laws have failed," says James Cuno, director of the Art Institute of Chicago and author of the forthcoming book Who Owns Antiquity? "What they are doing is driving this material underground into black markets."

But is there any reasonable way to permit the movement of antiquities across national borders and still protect archaeological digs? Cuno wants to revive the practice of partage, the system that prevailed in expeditions through the first part of the 20th century. Under partage, the source country kept much of what was found, but archaeologists took home a share for their affiliated museums and universities. Today the source nation keeps almost everything, despite the fact that a foreign museum or university is usually paying for the dig. "If archaeologists were to say, 'We're going to withdraw our expertise until you say you will re-establish partage,''' says Cuno, "it seems to me [source] nations would respond to that."

Possibly, but given that archaeologists depend on the goodwill of source nations to conduct their digs, it's not very likely they would cooperate. However, Michael Kremer, a Harvard economics professor, and Tom Wilkening, a grad student at MIT, have another idea. They published a paper last year suggesting that source countries might, in effect, "lease" their treasures to the museums of richer nations on a temporary basis while retaining title to them. The cash produced by such a scheme could be used to beef up site security.

All this still leaves open the touchiest of all controversies: whether museums should ever acquire, either through purchases or as gifts, antiquities that have no clear record of how and when they came out of the ground. Some museum directors argue they should be able to take in the most important of these. To do otherwise would mean the object disappears into private hands, where it's denied to the public and to specialists for study. Cuno suggests the establishment of an outside advisory panel that could rule on whether an object is so significant that a museum could acquire it even if its papers are not in order, so long as there is no evidence that it was dug up during the period covered by the source nation's cultural-property laws. "We can't just have a policy that prohibits those acquisitions," he says. "We've got to exercise informed reasonable judgment."