Does we should return artefacts from other cultures

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pawelk1986
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10 Oct 2017, 9:57 am

Does we should return artefacts from other cultures that are in our museums

Like Ancient Egypt artefact that are currently on British Museum for exemple.

Or in case pf my country Poland, my country so called Berlinka, Berliner the rare books and manuscripts that previously belonged to Prussian State Library in Berlin.

But later Nazi moved it to safe place in Lower Silesia (Niederschlesien) now Dolny Śląsk, Poland, they moved it there because Americans and Brits make 24 h carpet bombing of German main cities in closing months of WW2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlinka_(art_collection) and Germans forgot to bring it with themselves
Later Later, Lower Silesia was awarded, by the Tehran and Yalta conferences, ceded to Poland.

Germany believes that Poland should return them to the collections. but our Polish government is standing on the state that first it is the Germans should return what they stole during World War II.

Germans have come up with such a racist joke about Poland, "Germans go to Poland for vacation, your BMW is already there" but when one of our Polish foreign ministers made a similar joke, it's crude too i must admit "Poles go on vacation to Germany, the art collection of your grandparents, and golden teeth of their neighbors and friends are already there" xD
There ware outrage how our Poles government could say such things about our your western neighbor. It's funny how biased and racist jokes are so funny until it not concerning ourselves :D

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlinka_(art_collection)

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/inde ... 503AAZANKC



kraftiekortie
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10 Oct 2017, 10:07 am

I believe we should, ultimately, return artifacts from other cultures TO other cultures.

This is actually a very difficult question. Because if one, say, returned Egyptian artifacts to Egypt, there is the danger that these artifacts will be destroyed forever by a bunch of religious fanatics.



pawelk1986
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10 Oct 2017, 10:27 am

kraftiekortie wrote:
I believe we should, ultimately, return artifacts from other cultures TO other cultures.

This is actually a very difficult question. Because if one, say, returned Egyptian artifacts to Egypt, there is the danger that these artifacts will be destroyed forever by a bunch of religious fanatics.


Yes, sadly it's very much true, especially in nowadays :(



BirdInFlight
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10 Oct 2017, 10:37 am

It was heartbreaking when I first saw footage of ISIS destroying in situ artifacts and buildings across the middle east. To destroy things of historical value is shocking. Those things are lost forever to the whole world now.

I think the British Museum should return the Elgin Marbles. They were taken wrongly and have been asked to be given back for decades.

What IS good is when countries AGREE to loan or allow to be housed, their cultural artifacts in another country's museums. There are agreements like that today.

I think it's great that people can visit a museum in their own country and get to see things from another culture, and learn about the history and way of life, without having to go to those places physically. It's simply not practical to travel to every country in the world to see their cultural history.

It would be a shame if no museum housed anything but their own culture. It's important to be able to see things from other times and places in history, "in person."

But amicable "loaning" agreements is the way to do that, not hanging onto plundered treasure without permission from the place of origin.



magz
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10 Oct 2017, 1:35 pm

What if the culture no longer exists? Who inherits the right to have the antics returned? What to base it on?
Geography? Language? Ethnicity?
Are today Egiptians or Iraqui the heirs of ancient Egyptians or Babilonians? With a totally different culture of different origins?
Or, more recent example: should treasures taken from, say, the Polish and Jews of Lviv be returned to today's Ukraine? Israel? Poland? Especially in a case when no living family members could be traced?

Just asking those questions as indicators of "it's not so simple, even if we wanted it".


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kraftiekortie
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10 Oct 2017, 1:49 pm

The Iraqis are probably the most "direct" descendants of the Babylonians...and the Sumerians, Akkadians, etc. Probably the most "direct" descendants of present-day Egyptians are the Copts---but Egypt has been a continuous political entity since before 3,000 BC.

If the sovereign nation was "Poland" at the time of the Polish artifacts you mentioned, Poland should get them.



magz
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10 Oct 2017, 3:24 pm

kraftiekortie wrote:
If the sovereign nation was "Poland" at the time of the Polish artifacts you mentioned, Poland should get them.

And what if they were created when sovereign Poland didn't exist and Lviv was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire?


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kraftiekortie
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10 Oct 2017, 7:19 pm

Poland didn't "exist" because of the various Partitions of Poland. It certainly existed in the minds of Poles, though.

It would depend upon the allegiance of those "Jews of Lviv." Did they consider themselves Poles? If so, definitely return them to Poland.



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10 Oct 2017, 7:47 pm

Like BirdInFlight, I too think that the UK should return the Elgin Marbles. I am less sure about the Egyptian Museum's holdings in Berlin, because the exhibition of them there gives people access to view them at close range. Egypt displays only a small part of the treasures it holds from antiquity, for a variety of reasons. So my answer is: it depends on a range of factors. Many Maori artefacts have been voluntary returned in recent years from countries that stole or bought them in the 19th and 20th centuries, with the returners usually saying "we are repatriating them because it is the right thing to do".



magz
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11 Oct 2017, 3:32 am

kraftiekortie wrote:
Poland didn't "exist" because of the various Partitions of Poland. It certainly existed in the minds of Poles, though.

It would depend upon the allegiance of those "Jews of Lviv." Did they consider themselves Poles? If so, definitely return them to Poland.

And what if they belonged to a palace/church/synagogue that is still standing in Lviv?
I know, I always look for nasty examples. It enfuriates people when talking politics (always bring out something not fitting someone's views, so I am always seen as their opponent) but this trait is useful when programming ;)


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pawelk1986
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11 Oct 2017, 6:27 am

And what do you think about the Berliner, Prussian books currently in custody of Polish Jagiellonian University, in Krakow , the oldest Polish university and on of the oldest in Europe.
They hold Berliner collection(known as Berlinka in Poland) they got it by completely accident, it was hold in Lower silesia, to keep it safe from Allied bombing, and when Red Army together with Polish First Army stormed west toward mainland Germany, fleeing Wehrmacht left it in hiding, later Lower Silesia with former 3 rd Reich eastern terrorises, was ceded to Poland according to Yalta Agreement. When the provisional government of Poland began to inventory what we got they found it, initially keep it out sight of our Soviet our "beloved" fraternal allied "Red Army" :mrgreen: later it was transferred to Jagiellonian library.

The Germans gently but firmly (though in my opinion brazenly) demand the return of this collection as the property of the German people, but our Polish authority, in my opinion, is absolutely correct that first let the German people (as in Nazi :P ) give what they stole from the Polish people :D

In my opinion, it is very annoying that the Germans, depict themselves as poor victims of World War II, the war they themselves uncovered, in my opinion it is despicable.
Take, for example, a movie like "The Woman in Berlin" about poor Germans raped by Red Army soldiers, but no one mentions Polish, Russian, Belarussian or Russian, not mention Jewish women raped by brave ubermenschen from the Waffen SS and Wermacht, so it's nothing bad if untermanchen treat Germans the same way? :mrgreen:



kraftiekortie
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11 Oct 2017, 7:42 am

Do the Poles get along with the Ukrainians?

They were both screwed royally by the Russians.



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11 Oct 2017, 7:21 pm

The short answer to the title question is that we should return artifacts eventually.

But its the kinda thing to be done on a case by case basis.

Some parts of the world are more stable than others.

In the opening weeks of the Syrian civil war both the world's oldest church, and the world's oldest mosque, were destroyed. And that was accidental collateral damage from the fighting. None of the many factions intended it. But later in the war a faction arose that actually had the destruction of antiquities as part of its creed, and that was ISIS. So now much of the world's heritage is gone thanks to the combination of collateral and intetsional destruction in Syria.

As for the Prussian books held by Poland. Hard to say. Emotionally...its hard to feel sorry for Germany after all of the plundering they did in the war they started. And its hard to be angry at Poland. And Poland didn't actually "plunder" the documents. They kinda fell into Poland's hands by accident. However you could argue that the books aren't even of value to Poland, and only have meaning to Germans. So maybe you could intellectually persuade me to Germany's case. But emotionally its hard to side with Germany on this.



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11 Oct 2017, 7:31 pm

One category that particularly interests me is ancient coins, which are still abundant today (look on ebay some time). The modern-day Greek and Italian governments in some cases claim these are "cultural property" and should be returned. Coins are interesting, however, in that they were specifically manufactured for the purpose of circulation. And in what possible sense could a coin manufactured by an independent Greek city-state in 300 BC, in an area that is now part of Turkey, and which has been in circulation for a hundred years among collectors worldwide -- in what sense could that be the property of the present-day government of either Turkey or Greece?


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11 Oct 2017, 7:43 pm

If they really want them back, I suppose they should be returned. I'm a bit sceptical of this manic desire to see historical artifacts returned though. What's the big deal? What benefit is there in hoarding them all in the rough geographical area of origin? In many cases to be held by the descendants of people who subjugated or wiped out the creators. I suspect there are some people in Syria who wish the British museum had "stolen" some of the artifacts that ISIS subsequently destroyed. Hey ho.


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pawelk1986
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18 Oct 2017, 7:44 pm

naturalplastic wrote:
The short answer to the title question is that we should return artifacts eventually.

But its the kinda thing to be done on a case by case basis.

Some parts of the world are more stable than others.

In the opening weeks of the Syrian civil war both the world's oldest church, and the world's oldest mosque, were destroyed. And that was accidental collateral damage from the fighting. None of the many factions intended it. But later in the war a faction arose that actually had the destruction of antiquities as part of its creed, and that was ISIS. So now much of the world's heritage is gone thanks to the combination of collateral and intetsional destruction in Syria.

As for the Prussian books held by Poland. Hard to say. Emotionally...its hard to feel sorry for Germany after all of the plundering they did in the war they started. And its hard to be angry at Poland. And Poland didn't actually "plunder" the documents. They kinda fell into Poland's hands by accident. However you could argue that the books aren't even of value to Poland, and only have meaning to Germans. So maybe you could intellectually persuade me to Germany's case. But emotionally its hard to side with Germany on this.


Some of the documents were returned to the Germans, and more precisely their Eastern part of it :mrgreen:
In the 1970s, the first secretary of the Polish United Workers' Party (Edwardian Communist Party), Edward Gierek, gave in a gesture of goodwill to Erich Honecker, who was at that time the first secretary of the Socialist Party of the Unity of Germany, the SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands), the Bach manuscripts, Bethoven, Mozart and Goethe. He did this to improve friendship between the "fraternal socialist countries" like the former Polish People's Republic and the GDR.

Then researchers from the GDR, as well as the Federal Republic of Germany, became interested in how Poland, in general, was in possession of these manuscripts. At that time, German historians began humming that this property and cultural heritage of the German people, and as such are the property of both the GDR and the Federal Republic of Germany, and Poland should return all collections to Germany, but our Polish politicians at both the Communist and the present time assume that first "German People" should return what they stole from "Polish People" :mrgreen: