Ethics

The question of who an artifact belongs to and where should the artifact be housed is a difficult question. It is too simplistic to say just return it/them. The questions remain, how will they be preserved? Who will be able to see them in their current or new location? Were they donated or sold to a country or a collector?

Does having these pieces in large cities like New York, Paris, and London as opposed to smaller cities where fewer people could view them matter?

If a country is not able to properly house or care for the artifacts should that be taken into consideration as to whether or not to return them?

I retrieved these articles below:

Even before the word "archaeology" was invented, people have been removing artifacts from their original context - or location. Objects have been taken to be sold for profit, saved as souvenirs, and put in museums. Often, historically important artifacts that have been placed in large, national museums have become points of national pride. Think of the Egyptian Rosetta Stone in the British Museum, or the Greek "Nike of Samothrace" at the Louve in Paris (the French call it the Winged Victory of Samothrace)

In the past few decades, some governments have politely asked for objects that they feel have been pillaged from their countries to be returned. During the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece attempted to pressure Great Britain for the return of the displaced Parthenon or "Elgin" marbles by announcing the building a brand new museum for them, the Acropolis Museum. Italy recently returned an obelisk that was taken from Ethiopia just before World War II.

Recently however, the demand for the return of these has taken a more formal, and perhaps less polite, turn. Egypt recently announced that it has decided to sue two museums, one in England and one in Belgium for the return two pharaonic relief - or tomb carvings. Egypt says that if the museums don't return the artifacts in question, archaeologists who work in...