Elgin Marbles

[Moos]

Xackly. And nor is Stonehenge British.

[Brendan]

Or Greek.

[EDOldie]

No Stonehenge is English. Even I know that.

On that basis we could nick the Terracotta Army or the Great Wall as they ain't Chinese, belongs to the World.

[Brendan]

Nope that?s not really the argument. Anyway the terracotta army and the great wall are both as Chinese as Tower Bridge is British.

[EDOldie]

I think it is the exact argument. It's no good saying something belongs to you if it suits you rather than it being a just and fair ownership. That is theft. At the risk of repeating myself, it is also incredibly condecending to suggest that the care of said item is somehow better or safer in the hands of us rather than the people from whom the artifact originated.

I could end up with Greek citizenship (if there is such a thing) at this rate.

[mockney piers]

Stonehenge ain't English either. Nothing remotely resembling a nation existed then though research points towards the top bods who built stonehenge may well have come from what Is now Brittany, so conceivably the French could have a claim, though Brittany didn't even consider itself part of France until the late 18th century....complicated innit.

[louisiana]

EDOldie Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> I think it is the exact argument. It's no good

> saying something belongs to you if it suits you

> rather than it being a just and fair ownership.

> That is theft.

Ah, I hadn't realised we'd moved on to the Middle East and oil... Or the issue of ownership of 90% of the British - or at least English and Scottish - countryside.

Has nobody yet mentioned nine tenths of the law and the 'p' word?

[Moos]

EDOldie Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> I think it is the exact argument. It's no good

> saying something belongs to you if it suits you

> rather than it being a just and fair ownership.

> That is theft. At the risk of repeating myself, it

> is also incredibly condecending to suggest that

> the care of said item is somehow better or safer

> in the hands of us rather than the people from

> whom the artifact originated.

>

> I could end up with Greek citizenship (if there is

> such a thing) at this rate.

I guess that one's for me, and yes of course there's no basis for any argument that in the future the Athenian Museum would not be as good or better than the British Museum. Plus it would also be an awful lot more convenient and satisfying for visitors to the Parthenon to be able to see the Marbles in a visit to a nearby museum. But there's no denying that to date the care of the marbles in the British Museum has been better, nor that the state of the pollution in Athens is literally melting the temples on the Akropolis.

[Huguenot]

Since the Kuomintang never recognised the validity of the communist usurpers, you could argue that both the Great Wall and the Terracotta warriors actually belong to Taiwan.

Or you could argue that since both parties were shandy-drinking southerners, then both treasures are the property of the lineage of the deposed warlords of the north, and should be returned forthwith.

The 'better to look after them' is a straw man EDOldie. No-one on this thread has used it. The only person I've heard quoted who used it was one of the geriatric loonies who occupy the House of Lords, Woodrow Wyatt, when he referred to the Greeks as 'bomb-chuckers'. He's locked in the 1920s, and won't be making the decision.

[Townleygreen]

Thanks Huguenot. I found your explanation of the situation helpful and enlightening. There is clearly far more to this debate than many posters realised (including me).