https://www.bbc.com/news/world-66486926
The items were all stolen from Italy in the late 1990s and some were worth millions of euros.
The United States has returned more than 250 ancient artifacts to Italy after police discovered that they had been stolen.
Italy wouldn’t want to start that conversation - the city of Rome has more Egyptian obelisks than Egypt.
The house I'm living in in Germany is built on top of a Roman pottery district. I hope they don't want that one back.
Difference is that those Egyptian obelisks were not built in modern day Italy by the Egyptians, but the Roman pottery district was built in modern day Germany by the Romans
A lot of the obelisks in European cities were stolen from Egypt
The art unit of Italy's police force found the items had been looted and sold to US museums and private collectors in the 1990s.
Kind of different, a lot of the same.
This seems like an excellent time to recommend an excellent podcast: Stuff The British Stole
Is there a difference between artefact and artifact? Or is it just another weird thing in the english language?
Great. You've done the first world nation justice. Now do your own indigenous nations justice and return all of their stolen artifacts.
I see it as a realist view. Land has been exchanging hands since Sumer and Elam fought the first war in history.
Practically all land on earth has been contested, and isn't inhabited by the original human group to walk to it.
It seems odd to draw the line between human nature and colonialism.
You could make the same argument about slavery. It's happened for all of human history.
So there's no issues with slavery, right?
How about rape? No problem with rape? It's been happening since time immemorial. Animals even do it. So rape is fine, right?
I would like to note that there's plenty of war loot the US has that we took from dead Nazis, Imperial Japanese, Central Powers, Confederates, etc, and that's pretty dope and they shouldn't have it back.
I doubt that will ever happen, but artifacts in museums can absolutely be given back to indigenous nations without much effort on the museum's part. They just don't want to.
