Word: ancient
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...except I wasn't the one going away. What I did was set out to bid goodbye to a few favorite works of art that would soon be departing the U.S. for good. First I headed to California and the Getty Villa in Malibu, a museum devoted to the ancient Greeks, Etruscans and Romans. I wanted a long last look at its statue of a goddess from the 5th century B.C. Scholars are divided over just which goddess she represents, but whoever she is, at 7.5 ft. (2.3 m) tall, she's a formidable woman, one of the most powerful...
...years ago, Francesco Rutelli, newly appointed as Italy's Culture Minister, embarked on a campaign to demand the return of dozens of objects held by U.S. museums, ancient works that he said had been looted from archaeological digs in his country and smuggled out. In the months that followed, one museum after another went through something like the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross stages of accepting death. They bridled, they denied, they negotiated. Finally, they came to terms. In the case of the Getty, it agreed to return 39 objects in short order but got a temporary reprieve on the goddess...
...betting now it will be a long time before a U.S. museum director buys another ancient treasure with a wink and a nod or anything less than a documented-ownership trail longer than an Old Testament genealogy and much more credible. But the givebacks of recent years are just part of an accelerating worldwide struggle over the past. It has complications brought to the table by archaeologists, who say any commercial market for antiquities is an incentive to looters who plunder archaeological sites. And then there's the ordinary museumgoer, who has a crucial stake--being able...
...this climate, the question of ownership of the past has taken on a real edge. "Source nations" like Italy, Greece, Egypt, Turkey and China--homes to the world's ancient civilizations--think of antiquities as national property, essential to the construction of the modern nations' identity. Which in part they are. The problem is whether that idea can accommodate the no less plausible notion that the products of ancient civilizations are also the heritage of all humanity. Our encounter with Shang-dynasty bronzes, Central African carvings and Aztec-calendar stones is part of how we construct for ourselves a human...
Today it's the source nations that have the whip hand. Nearly all of them have so-called cultural-property laws that lay claim to any ancient objects found in the ground on their territory after a particular year--the cutoff year varies from one nation to the next--and make it a crime to export such material without a permit. A 1970 UNESCO convention has given those laws force in the courts of other nations, like the U.S., that have accepted it. Cultural-property claims by foreign nations are also enforceable in the U.S. under the ordinary law governing...