IMO there should be a limited period of time for which nations can lay claim to 'artifacts', especially when considerable effort to recover them is expended by a private party.
Take for example the Odyssey group that spent years tracking down, and excavating treasure from an 1804 spanish vessel off the coast of Portugal (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/01/treasure-trove...). There's no reason that a judge in Atlanta, should be able to force a private company to return 200+ year old property found near Portugal, to Spain that was lost in a dispute with the British.
I look at it from this standpoint. It is highly unlikely in many parts of the world that the government now laying claim to an artifact has any relationship to the government if any at the time that existed in the same area. Just because you live in the same area should not automatically be an absolute right.
The care of the artifact must be weighed against those who seek to claim it.
Even items freely given have had attempts to take them back. I also am greatly concerned with antiquities returning to areas which have experience real strife if not outright wars. Especially the rash of religion based conflicts even between sects of the same. We have seen the destruction visited upon irreplaceable sites and this must be a consideration before any object is sent to a claimant.
Sadly the middle east has proven by example that had some of these artifacts not been removed, they would have been substantially lost by now. It's not an easy topic to address.
That's an entirely different situation to the one GP linked. In your case the artifacts were excavated but in his case they were literally seized violently. It's even more egregious in his case because not only did the artifact have cultural significance, it had religious significance that was being violated.
> ...especially when considerable effort to recover them is expended by a private party.
I'm curious why this is a part of your argument. If I spend a year staking out your house, and spend considerable effort to break in and steal your stuff... does that make it any more legitimate?
I would suggest that if it was not the British Museum then someone else would have these treasures and they would probably be tucked away far from public view or possibly destroyed through lack of maintenance. I would not mind them being returned if they were guaranteed to remain in good condition and in public ownership. That may be possible now but for a long time it wasn't.
By who though? Many were looted by locals and sold on to private collectors and then made it to the British Museum. Are the brotha museum the looters, no, the looters were often locals looking to make money selling artifacts and European collectors who sought them out or actually did the looting.
Who's to say the British Museum are the best equipped to maintain the artifacts? Why would you expect an organization that acquired these artifacts through violence to be able to properly take care of them, or even understand their significance? In GP's example the British are literally committing blasphemy against one of the artifacts. And this is for an Ethiopian artifact, which belongs to arguably the same religious group as the British, and is from a region the British have been aware of for more than a thousand years.
> they would probably be tucked away far from public view
IIRC for most museums the vast majority of items aren't on display either because they're not suitable for public display or because there simply isn't enough space to display them.
Why are the best equipped? The exhibits still exist, in great condition and can still be viewed by the public, so they must be doing something correct.
Perhaps what you fail to realise is that a great many treasures have been looted and sold into private collections over the years. Looted and sold by locals, to anyone who can pay. So there is a good chance that anything that the British Museum received as loot would have been someone else's loot otherwise.
I'm honestly surprised there hasn't been vigilante action to get historical artifacts returned from certain countries that looted all over the world (mostly England/France/Spain).
Stories like this are kinda amusing when you consider that what it essentially boils down to is this. Some collections of carbon imbued with sentience are squabbling over who "owns" some other collections of carbon that were sentient a few millions years ago.
Maybe a hundred million years from now something will be deciding who gets to own the carbon remnants of the people involved in this current predicament :)
