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I'm also going to argue the definition of "stolen" artifacts

A lot of the artifact in the area where lifted from scavenger and sold on the black market, trough the inaction of the government at the time and corruption of officials of such government.

Given such context I see the artifacts at the British museum retrieved under these specific circumstances as saved, not stolen.

I do make a difference however for these artifacts that were taken at gun point against the will of the government.

The difference need to be made on a case by case basis. But still.

> I mean, it's a tough call, because you can't really identify who something is stolen from. In some cases you can, but in most you can't.

I don't think one has to identify whom something was stolen from to know that it was stolen. For a lot of artifacts in the British Museum, it may not be clear or able to be agreed upon who could be said at the time of their appropriation to own them, but it's clear that the British didn't.

> But then you say "no, that doesn't apply to colonial governments - not to white people. Only legitimate governments can benefit from the OG rule", to which I would answer ….

You seem to be putting a lot of words in your interlocutor's mouth! If I find something, it's not my responsibility or right to decide whose it is, and my inability to do so doesn't make it mine. It may be that someone else will come along and commit an injustice equal to my taking it if I don't—but that doesn't excuse my taking it. I need not work out a theory of ownership before simply leaving what I have found where I found it.

> I don't think one has to identify whom something was stolen from to know that it was stolen.

If we are talking about people, then yes, but governments are different. They are not people. Governments are law makers. So you are claiming that British law shouldn't apply and I am asking you for the name of the government whose law you think should apply. That at least deserves an answer.

The UK was ruling Egypt at the time and you have to prove its own laws weren't being followed -- which is unlikely to be the case as regardless of how we may not like Perfidious Albion, they are a stickler for things like property rights. The British museum paid for these artifacts, and you need to prove that the people who sold them those artifacts had no right to do so, but these antiquities traders were acting in accordance to British law, so you need to prove that someone else's law should have been applied instead. Whose?

> If I find something, it's not my responsibility or right to decide whose it is, and my inability to do so doesn't make it mine.

Again, people aren't governments. If you find oil in the ground, it may not belong to you, but if the UK finds oil somewhere in the mandate of Palestine, you can be sure that it belongs to the UK, since that is territory controlled by UK, and the oil belongs to the government that controls the territory, not France or China or some other government that doesn't control the territory. And if some Arab tribes conquer that region, then the oil belongs to them. And if some other nation conquers it, then the oil again gets a new owner. Or do you think the House of Saud was the first group of people to live in Saudi Arabia? No, but they were the government in charge when the oil was found, and no one has managed to conquer them -- that's the only reason it's their oil -- because they found it and they rule over the territory. And who do you think will be the owner of any artifacts that Saudi Arabia digs up as they search for more oil? Yes, it will be Saudi Arabia. The rightful owner. And they can transfer those artifacts to some museum in Riyadh if they want, even if the artifacts were made by some ancient civilization that has no genetic relationship to the house of Saud. They could be of Ethiopian origin, but Saudi Arabia is not going to "return" them to Ethiopia. This is the definition of what it means to be the government - it means your laws are the ones that apply in the territory you rule over.

I think that's the mistake you are making here. Maybe you think there was some international law in effect at the time? International law originates with the UN charter, which post-dates what the UK did, and you wouldn't want to apply a law to an action which predated the law, as that's understood to be an illegitimate application of law. If you start retroactively applying the UN charter to all government actions that happened in the past, you will find every government on earth an inveterate thief and lawbreaker - from the UK to the Egyptian Pharaohs, they all stole everything.

I suspect we're in some serious philosophy territory now. I find it problematic to insist that since governments make laws, they then are exempt from moral criticism. Just because a government can make a law doing something doesn't mean it's a morally permissible thing to do.

I guess the word "stolen" could have a legalistic interpretation, but there's surely a moral one as well. And I think the legal discussion is entirely uninteresting -- of course a country can write whatever law they want and follow it. What is interesting to me is whether the law and/or act is moral.

You said "stolen". That's a question of property rights. It's a legal definition. If the government takes my land via eminent domain, and pays me for it, I can criticize the government "morally", but I can't say it "stole" my land without engaging in hyperbole and some misdirection. This is why someone else would put "stolen" in quotes. Those quotes are what the thread is about. You can't just decide for yourself that something was stolen because you are morally offended. If you do that, someone else will put stolen in quotes.

But if we venture into moral criticism, then let's remember that for many ancient artifacts, they were in the process of being destroyed by the various local governments until Europeans came along. Greek papyri were being burned in scrap heaps for heat. Ancient pottery was being smashed and recycled for raw materials. Many of these artifacts were pulled from local trash heaps and recyclers. Europeans had to come and decipher the hieroglyphs and Sumerian cuneiform because the local societies -- for whom these were the works of foreign civilizations -- had no idea what they meant and zero intellectual curiosity in studying these works. Arab Egypt had ownership of the rosetta stone and a vast array of hieroglyphs for over a millennia and never understood it, and launched no program to uncover their secrets. For them, pre-Islamic Egypt was at best a pagan society that they conquered long ago, and there wasn't much point in trying to understand it. The French and British travelled long distances and spent great personal fortunes on expeditions to study these artifacts and understand these ancient civilizations. It wasn't Arab Egypt that learned the names of the Egyptian dynasties and deciphered the Book of the Dead. It wasn't Arab civilization in Mesopotamia that deciphered Akkadian and learned the Epic of Gilgamesh. It was Europeans. Europeans prized and valued this cultural product of other civilizations, they preserved it, often rescuing it from destruction, and they purchased it from local antiquities dealers, and they put it in their museums. Of all the consequences of colonialism, this was on balance on the good side of the ledger, or at least ambiguous, so it's an odd thing to morally condemn, given the many richer targets for criticism in the colonial world.

Thank you very much! I really appreciate the amount of thought and care you put into all your responses. You're probably right that were it not for Europeans taking some artifacts from around the globe they would have perished; and so I agree that on the whole it may have been better that Europeans took many things into museums.

I feel like Last Week Tonight show about Museums was probably a decent overview of the state of things. I wonder, if you've seen it, you disagree with more than 10% of what's said?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJPLiT1kCSM

That is kind of you.

I will take a look, but 35 minutes of John Oliver is a big ask.

Last time I watched him -- years ago -- he spent the entire segment in 100% outrage mode with a sledgehammer wall-of-sound style rhetoric in which nuance and empathy were entirely absent from his sequence of cherry-picked outrage nuggets.

But at the same time, I didn't find him very funny. Sam Kinison was also a loud outrage comic, but he was funny. But Kinison's yelling had an emotional honesty that Oliver lacked, since you can't really be too honest if you are doing politics on TV, especially partisan politics for the PMC class - a large amount of Oliver's material (that I saw) was basically mocking the beliefs of working class people. But perhaps he's changed. George Carlin was probably the one who made political comedy work the best, but he was deconstructing ideas that people have, and specifically ideas that you, the listener, had, often without questioning. That's what made people go "hmmm, that's interesting" when they listen to Carlin. Nobody says "Hmm, that's interesting" when listening to Oliver, they say "Boom! Nailed it! He's got their number!!" Subtlety, balance, making an honest effort to portray the complex world as it really is -- that was completely absent. It was all about caricaturing people or institutions as being unreasonable or suitable for mocking. Real life tends not to be like that.

I do wonder why people refer to Oliver as a news source or use him in arguments, it's basically the same thing as citing Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh was actually much kinder -- sure, he also cherry picked examples to make his opponents look like fools, but he usually treated them as confused fools ("young minds, full of mush") rather than malicious actors. Limbaugh was also often self-deprecating and was able to change tone so that it wasn't all full throttle attack mode. But still I wouldn't cite one of his shows as evidence to support my point, as that's clearly a partisan show that is meant to be entertainment for those who agree with him rather than any kind of reasoned investigation.

Update:

So I watched the first five minutes, and it's the standard grievances. Take the Elgin sculptures, which Oliver says Elgin stole from Greece, and as proof, he says that they were sawed off -- with a picture of a man wearing a wig hat entering a bedroom window in the background. Then he claims to show a rebuttal by the British Museum which isn't the official rebuttal at all. Here is the actual rebuttal: https://www.britishmuseum.org/about-us/british-museum-story/...

Here is a Smithsonian article on this, feating both pro and con views:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-much-debated-...

What no one disputes is that Elgin bought the right to remove those sculptures from the Government at the time, which simply didn't value them as we do today. Nothing was stolen. What is disputed is whether it was "fair" to buy the sculptures -- both the government that sold them and the buyer have been criticized.

Unfortunately for the Greeks, this was the Ottoman government, because Greece was ruled by the Ottomans for four hundred years, and no one knew that twenty years after Elgin bought the sculptures, Greece would wage a successful war for independence from the Ottomans, finally ending that reign. Bad luck for Greece. However, does that mean that they should be "returned" to Greece, because the later rebellion somehow invalidated the sale?

You basically need to go through this process of Oliverification for all of his points, and maybe some you'll agree and others you wont, but then you still have to step back and ask "Are these representative?" and more importantly "Have the important issues been discussed at all?". Also note that while all of these cases are controversial, Oliver is not presenting both sides, and when presented the British Museum side, it wasn't actually their rebuttal but something that made them look foolish. That should tell you something about the reliability of the show. I'll let you decide whether you think you are better informed or misinformed.

Thank you for sharing more. I don't take Last Week Tonight as a thorough even-handed presentation of ideas, but more as a spotlight, trying to point attention at some ongoing problems in today's world.

I think the representativeness is the most important aspect to think about -- most likely the show focuses on and exaggerates absurdities / hypocrisies that are happening for a bigger punch, and as you point out, at the cost of its own credibility.

I know quite little on the subject we've been discussing - and I got more clarity reading what you wrote and thinking about it.

Stay awesome!

> Arab Egypt had ownership of the rosetta stone and a vast array of hieroglyphs for over a millennia and never understood it, and launched no program to uncover their secrets.

Significant parallel texts were unknown until the rediscovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799. The Rosetta Stone was only deciphered as quickly as it was because Champollion had studied Coptic, a then-known and later form of the written Egyptian languages in question. If it weren't for Coptic Christians preserving their language, our understanding of Egyptian would probably be 150 years behind where it is now. If significant parallel texts were known in Egypt in 1000 CE, I'd be surprised if the Egyptians themselves wouldn't have cracked it by 1800 CE.

Also, Arab scholars did try to decipher hieroglyphs. See Ayub Ibn Maslama, Dhu Al-Nun Al-Misri, Ibn Wahshiyah, and Abu Al-Qasim Al-Iraqi.

> Say you have the necklace of some Pharaoh. OK, who is the rightful owner? The present day Arabs inhabiting Egypt, who conquered it? Or the Greeks who conquered it before then? Or the Romans? Or the "ancient Egyptians" (this refers to many people, as Egypt was conquered several times by many different groups).

Realistically, it belongs to whoever some group of self-appointed liberals feels should own it. Things are complex, but we need simple narratives to be righteous.

> We can call this the "occupying government" (OG) theory of ownership.

Let's not