31–40 of 74 posts
I hope this key piece of British history gets exhibited in a place where everyone can enjoy it, like the The Prado museum in Spain.
What's wrong with British museums?
I hope this key piece of British history gets exhibited in a place where everyone can enjoy it, like the The Prado museum in Spain.
What's wrong with British museums?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's wrong with British museums?
Grandparent comment is a triple entendre: the historical British tendency to take priceless cultural treasures home with them for display is being inverted; the modern British tendency to retire/vacation in Spain is being noted; and I think there's also a jab at Brexit disallowing easy movement, as more people can more easily see a thing exhibited in an EU museum than in a British one due to the Schengen area.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To nitpick - you're both wrong. It's a square made of four smaller squares. Or maybe we're all right and art is subjective, who knows.
To further nitpick you're all wrong. The large ornate cross is not the necklace: >WHAT ELSE WAS FOUND? >The necklace is only part of this amazing burial and x-raying the soil blocks lifted from the site revealed further incredible finds. >Most excitingly, we found a large ornate cross with inset garnets and smaller crosses at the end of each arm. While it is still being micro-excavated, the x-ray clearly shows its in…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's wrong with British museums?
Think it's a jab at the British "stealing" other people's historical artifacts and displaying then in British museums.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Grandparent comment is a triple entendre: the historical British tendency to take priceless cultural treasures home with them for display is being inverted; the modern British tendency to retire/vacation in Spain is being noted; and I think there's also a jab at Brexit disallowing easy movement, as more people can more easily see a thing exhibited in an EU museum than in a British one due to the Schengen area.
Looks like it breaks multiple guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's wrong with British museums?
Think it's a jab at the British "stealing" other people's historical artifacts and displaying then in British museums.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Grandparent comment is a triple entendre: the historical British tendency to take priceless cultural treasures home with them for display is being inverted; the modern British tendency to retire/vacation in Spain is being noted; and I think there's also a jab at Brexit disallowing easy movement, as more people can more easily see a thing exhibited in an EU museum than in a British one due to the Schengen area.
Looks like it breaks multiple guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looks like it breaks multiple guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I read through the guidelines and couldn't find any rules it was breaking. What guidelines do you believe are broken by the top comment?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Think it's a jab at the British "stealing" other people's historical artifacts and displaying then in British museums.
I wonder why you wrote "stealing" with quotes. Presumably this is exactly what they did in numerous (majority?) of cases.
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).
So then your fallback position is, "we don't know which 'people' the necklace should belong to, but we know which government it should belong to -- the present day government of Egypt, which is the current government occupying the geographic area where the necklace was made. It belongs to that government."
We can call this the "occupying government" (OG) theory of ownership. It doesn't matter that that the present day Arabs were invaders number 50, but because they presently occupy the land, they own the necklace. Let's explore the consequences of this rule:
When Britain controlled that territory, that meant that it was the rightful owner -- since by the OG logic the rightful owner is whatever government was in charge at the time -- and it moved the necklace to a museum in London, which the owner has a right to do with their property.
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
1) "How were the Arab invasions legitimate? How were the Egyptian dynasties legitimate? They also ruled by force and enslaved their populations".
2) If your ownership rule is the OG but it's nullified if you believe (somehow) that a government can be illegitimate, then you create a situation in which the antiquities have no owner -- since the previous government doesn't exist, the original racial group is gone, so who is the owner if you are not going to follow the ownership laws of the government in charge?
So really at the end of the day, these types of arguments boil down to not liking the behavior of the UK in Egypt, which is fine by me, but they are not objective arguments if you try to apply the same standards of property ownership across thousands of years to all governments that would remove antiquities -- which is basically every government in history, whenever they found something beautiful and shiny, from the Romans carrying back booty to the Pharaohs carrying back booty, some of which was turned into beautiful jewelry.