Raiders of the Lost Treasures: What the British Took from Us

I went into Archaeology with eyes wide shut. I chose it, Geography, Classics, and Ancient Greek for my Bachelor’s. I loved my studies, difficult as I made them, and ended up working professionally in Archaeology. I walked away from the ‘career’ when I saw how utterly corrupted it was. The turning point was when, working on a dig in southern Ireland, I noted the disappearance of artefacts from our storage room.

I told our director, who said he check it out, before one Saturday evening in a city centre Dublin pub, I was offered an ancient piece of pottery for $100. It was in a small cardboard box – with my handwriting on it. That moment in 1999 was nothing new, treasures have been changing hands for cash for centuries and you go to any ‘private collection’ and you’ll have to suspend belief as to how the establishment came by the artefacts. But national museums?

Lessons Learned

In 1992, while in London for a boxing tournament, I went to the British Museum for the first time. I had completed my first semester in university and was keen to see some proper world wonders. Greek grave goods, Canadian carvings, Egyptian relics, you name it. In three hours I gorged on global treasures. And I was all in on the British Museum until a Canadian friend wised me up 3 years later.

“You do know the story behind this?” She asked as we walked up the stairs and observed the totem pole stuck in the middle of the stairwell.  I didn’t. The 12-metre-tall Kayung totem pole was one of many stolen from Canada’s Northwest in the late-19th/early-20th century by British and American ‘explorers’.

“This was sold to the museum by one of them, [Charles] Newcombe. He and his buddies stole more from Canada under the idea that they were ‘preserving’ the local [Haida] culture. But they were the same as the European graverobbers in Egypt. Or those who robbed the treasures of Africa and Asia.”  That was me taught.

But was her indignation righteous or self-righteous? I was began to doubt my choice of career. It bothered me and also opened my eyes. I asked questions, read, listened and everywhere I went, I became increasingly aware of a serious problem in my chosen profession. My mind wandered back to a lecture in Ireland a year before.

“India, Greece, Ghana, Ireland and whatever you’re having yourself!”

“Of all the heinous looting that took place over the centuries, the rape of Greece, Turkey, Egypt and not just, should remain a stain on any museum that in the present day refuses to hand back their ill-gotten gains,” Pat Wallace told us in 1994.  Mister Wallace was, then, Director of the National Museum of Ireland. During his lecture in Wilkinstown, County Meath, he noted that “and we have yet to hear the voices of the dispossessed in India, Ethiopia.”

He joked, after the lecture, that the list of countries lining up to have their national treasures returned from the British Museum included – “India, Greece, Ghana, Ireland and whatever you’re having yourself!”

“They robbed us blind.”

Doctor Zahi Hawass met my Dad and I when we visited Cairo in December 2001. Zahi and I had been introduced at a symposium in Frankfurt years earlier, where he told me to contact him when I came to Egypt. I did and he showed us around the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation. Dad and he got along famously, stealing away for a sneaky cigarette as I wandered with the museum’s deputy director. Over strong Egyptian coffee Zahi explained the state of play.

“So many of our most important monuments and artefacts are scattered across the world. Britain, France, Germany, America, all. They robbed us blind.”

He didn’t rant, or show anything more than passionate displeasure for how his country is viewed.

“I asked, when last in London, why don’t you send back what you stole. You want to hear the answer I got?” We did. “‘You won’t know how to care for them.’”

How safe is the British Museum?

Peter Higgs, once a feared (in an intellectual sense) curator at the British Museum cared so much for Greek and Roman artefacts that he was fired in July 2023 after it emerged that almost 2,000 items from the museum’s stock had gone missing. Worse, the suspicion is that Higgs had sold them online. After the scandal came to light, thanks to a Danish collector, the museum’s director and his deputy quit. Higgs is yet to be charged as the investigation is ongoing. (https://observer.co.uk/culture/art/article/sale-of-the-centuries-the-great-british-museum-thefts)

Readers will be happy that Mister Higgs was not into Indian treasures or the Amaravati Collection might also have found new homes via eBay. Right now there is an excellent exhibition called “Ancient India” at the British Museum and one would hope that all artefacts that were ‘obtained’ from the subcontinent will be returned to their homeland. But we know this won’t happen.

Westminster refuses to hand over the Parthenon (Elgin) Marbles to Greece. A succession of British Prime Ministers have batted away any suggestion of returning to Athens what was “removed” from the Acropolis between 1801-12 by Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin. Even the ‘mad, bad’ Lord Byron called it vandalism and looting. They should be returned, but we know it won’t happen.

It won’t happen because, as Doctor Hawass told me as we said goodbye in Tahrir Square, “Remember who gave us civilisation.” He said it with a smile, hugged my Dad and I and hopped into a taxi.

It’s unfair to single out the British Museum, however if the most famous historical museum in the world were to step up to the mark and begin the process of returning treasures it bought or ‘obtained’, it would be a watershed moment. It might take more than an article from a disillusion ex-archaeologist to make it happen, but here’s hoping.

AmravatiArchaeologyBritish MuseumBuddhist stupasGhanaGreeceIndiaIreland