Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't think one has to identify whom something was stolen from to know that it was stolen. If we are talking about people, then yes, but governments are different. They are not people. Governments are law makers . So you are claiming that British law shouldn't apply and I am asking you for the name of the government whose law you think should apply. That at least deserves an answer. The UK was ruling Egypt at the…
I suspect we're in some serious philosophy territory now. I find it problematic to insist that since governments make laws, they then are exempt from moral criticism. Just because a government can make a law doing something doesn't mean it's a morally permissible thing to do. I guess the word "stolen" could have a legalistic interpretation, but there's surely a moral one as well. And I think the legal discussion is e…
But if we venture into moral criticism, then let's remember that for many ancient artifacts, they were in the process of being destroyed by the various local governments until Europeans came along. Greek papyri were being burned in scrap heaps for heat. Ancient pottery was being smashed and recycled for raw materials. Many of these artifacts were pulled from local trash heaps and recyclers. Europeans had to come and decipher the hieroglyphs and Sumerian cuneiform because the local societies -- for whom these were the works of foreign civilizations -- had no idea what they meant and zero intellectual curiosity in studying these works. Arab Egypt had ownership of the rosetta stone and a vast array of hieroglyphs for over a millennia and never understood it, and launched no program to uncover their secrets. For them, pre-Islamic Egypt was at best a pagan society that they conquered long ago, and there wasn't much point in trying to understand it. The French and British travelled long distances and spent great personal fortunes on expeditions to study these artifacts and understand these ancient civilizations. It wasn't Arab Egypt that learned the names of the Egyptian dynasties and deciphered the Book of the Dead. It wasn't Arab civilization in Mesopotamia that deciphered Akkadian and learned the Epic of Gilgamesh. It was Europeans. Europeans prized and valued this cultural product of other civilizations, they preserved it, often rescuing it from destruction, and they purchased it from local antiquities dealers, and they put it in their museums. Of all the consequences of colonialism, this was on balance on the good side of the ledger, or at least ambiguous, so it's an odd thing to morally condemn, given the many richer targets for criticism in the colonial world.