Thoughts about the missing Egyptian artifacts

The narrative has long been in place:  For centuries, the predatory West raped the ancient world — Egypt, Greece, the Fertile Crescent, Persia — of her culture.  Greedy treasure hunters and archeologists stole her mummies, her statuary, her carvings, her jewels and her wall paintings.  Their museums gained world renown because of these ill-gotten gains, while the countries of origin moldered, deprived not only of their natural riches, but also of their historic legacy.  With the end of colonialism after World War II, the situation started righting itself, as now-properly abashed Western countries began returning these stolen treasures to their true homes.

The actual story is a bit different.  The cultures that had created those treasures had long vanished by the time the Western collectors showed up and started sniffing around.  Where once had been glory, now was abysmal poverty.  More than that, there was a profound disinterest in the past.  The citizens of Egypt, Greece, the Ottoman Empire, etc., cared nothing for the treasures beneath their feet.  Those that they couldn’t see, they forgot; those that they could see, they recycled.  They broke down ancient structures and used their stones to build their homes; they melted down ancient jewelry, and refashioned the gold in modern design.  The Egyptian mummies to which thieves had easy access had long since vanished — some within days of being interred — especially since their wrappings made good paper and, for centuries, their dust was thought to have curative powers.

What made these remnants of the past valuable was the interest the West had in the ancient world’s past.  To the Middle East, they were raw material; to the Westerners, things of beauty and wonder.  And so the West took them away, to museums and private collections.  In terms of what was happening in the Middle East 200 years ago or 100 years ago, Western activity was akin to digging in the garbage to collect someone else’s discards.  The only thing that bespoke value in the regions themselves was gold, so the archeologists figured out that, if they gave to the fellahin who unearthed the ancient gold a sum of money equal to that object’s weight, the latter cheerfully parted with their cultural past.

The relics, once in the West, were treated with a reverence denied them in the lands from which they emerged.  They were cleaned, restored, maintained, studied and much visited.  And of course, as their status rose, the people who had so cavalierly parted with them realized that they had lost something of value.  When they had achieved some measure of moral power, they demanded them back.  Often, the West complied with those demands.

I don’t know if that compliance was the right thing to do.  On the one hand, you could say of the artifacts that they “belonged” to the Egyptians or Iranians, because they came from their lands, and ended in the West only because the Westerners, though imperialism, systematically depleted those lands of their treasures — oil, agriculture, minerals, and historic artifacts.  That’s a good argument.  But there’s also much to be said for the fact that the modern Middle Eastern custodians of these treasures had done such an execrable job valuing and caring for them, and had parted with them so freely, that they lost the right to call them their own.

Be that as it may, many ended up back at home, in lands governed by dictatorships.  These, no matter how long they last, invariably seem to end in a welter of violence, flames, vandalism and theft.  Is it a surprise, then, that when a dictatorship ends, it’s often the case that the treasures, once ignored and abused, then revered in foreign lands, and then returned to their natal soil, should be amongst the first casualties?