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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;GinoLR, post: 13507619, member: 128351&quot;]No, I&#039;m serious. Nobody wants the Smithsonian to give back the Hope diamond to anybody. Most of the artefacts that are on display at the Louvre, the Hermitage, the British Museum and so on are rightfully there, and no serious people want their repatriation.</p><p>The Elgin marbles are a special case. At the time Lord Elgin snatched them in Athens, he had no right (legal or moral) to do so. He had no authorization from the Ottoman government to dismantle the still standing ruins of the Parthenon and the Erechtheion, but he just bribed the local officer in charge. This was already seen as a disgrace in the early 1800s by many in Britain. Same thing for the Codex Sinaiticus (a Greek Bible on parchment copied in the mid 4th c. AD) which is the property of the Saint Catherine monastery in the Sinai, had been lent (not sold or given) to the Tsar for a limited period and dishonestly sold to the British Museum by the Soviet government after the Tsar had been toppled. In any world country, if you buy stolen goods, you are not considered their rightful owner. Same for the Benin Bronzes, artistic bronzes of the 16th-18th c. that decorated the palace of the king of Benin and were plundered by the British troops in 1897. That&#039;s plain war pillaging, all these bronzes must be returned to Nigeria, heir of the Benin Kingdom, w/o any discussion.</p><p>Would you consider the works of art confiscated from collectors who had the silly idea of being Jewish by the Nazis and sold to museums or private collectors since should not be handed over to their previous owner&#039;s families?</p><p>This is a civilized world and there are laws everybody, even states and governments, must abide. The antiquities market is legal, as long as selling and buying antiquities is legal at the time it is done. The Mona Lisa, for example, was bought (and not cheap!) by the king of France from Leonardo da Vinci himself. Thus nobody can discuss the fact this picture now belongs to the French state. Digging ancient sites, selling artefacts or ancient coins was perfectly legal until laws protecting the national heritage were passed in almost every country from the 19th to the late 20th c. This means that trading ancient coins is legal and legitimate if they were first bought at a time when it was not illegal. That&#039;s all. If extremely rare coins never seen before suddenly surface on the international market without any provenance, it is obvious that they come from an illegal digging or appropriation. The auction should be vetoed by the authorities, an investigation made to find their actual provenance, and they should be handed over to their legitimate owner.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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