3000 years ago, a king found a cool rock and engraved it with a picture of himself handing it to his young daughter with the caption “I gave this cool rock to my beloved daughter, Bar-Uli” https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_1919-0712-635
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3000 years ago, a king found a cool rock and engraved it with a picture of himself handing it to his young daughter with the caption “I gave this cool rock to my beloved daughter, Bar-Uli” https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_1919-0712-635
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The British Museum should give the cool rock back.
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Xavier Knol :verified_paw: :donor:replied to Brett last edited by
@bflipp @0xabad1dea it was bought fair and square, besides who should they even give it to , the radical Muslim Iranian government?
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abadideareplied to Xavier Knol :verified_paw: :donor: last edited by
@XEJKnol @bflipp yeah I feel that this specific artifact doesn't really qualify as stolen by the British since it was bought from an antique dealer who got it from who knows where who got it from who knows where; it may have been passed around for literal centuries by that point and its origin can only be roughly approximated through the language it's written in (which is also the main evidence that it's real, because Elamite is very, VERY obscure, you could not just pick up a book on how to write grammatically correct Elamite down at the book shop in 1919). If the Iranian government points at this specific rock and says "this is most likely from a place within our borders and we insist on this being returned", then fair enough I guess, but I don't think they're making a point of wanting every scrap of Elamite culture repatriated
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It’s more the principle of not buying stolen goods and making good on it when you find out you did. Because it most assuredly is stolen.
Maybe they can do like tourists do in Hawaii when they steal volcanic rocks and mail it back to Iran wrapped in a “sorry” note.
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@bflipp @XEJKnol since the chain of evidence goes back to a purchase made before modern international law around what happens to random artifacts that some person finds on the ground and wants to sell, I think it's up to the culture department of Iran to decide whether they feel it's stolen or if they truly do not mind which museum it's ended up in. Again, if they complain, then I'm all for sending it back, because "I got it from an antique dealer" no longer flies as sufficient background checking. But at the time, I don't think any government considered finding an old engraving on your own farm while plowing (the origin of a great many such finds) and selling it to an antique dealer to be theft.
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@0xabad1dea @bflipp @XEJKnol in fact many countries still consider it fine, they just require that you run things past them first