The British Museum with my E-PL5

Alexis D wrote:

Thanks for the explanation.

I find it strange that anything taken from another country and especially something invaluable to those countries and their people can be just kept indefinitely and even openly displayed as if it's right.

I suppose might is right after all, in spite of the Magna Carter and all the talk of the system of law or the high moral and ethical grounds that some countries purport to have.

A Greek friend of mine (she is part of the Greek diaspora in London) and I once discussed the issue of the Elgin marbles, which Lord Elgin did not steal - he purchased them, since the natives of Athens at the time were quite happy to sell them. Her line of argument went along the lines of:

"These sculptures are an important monument to the cultural development of mankind, so it is important to show them in the context of a large and universally accessible museum where they can be seen alongside other important artefacts. If they had been left in Athens they would have been dissolved by the acid rain already."

When I worked in Athens in the 1980s the blanket of smog covering the city was already considerable. The Greek government's approach to solving this problem was to ban cars with registrations ending in an odd number on some days, and those ending with even numbers on other days! People just bought two cars and the pollution persisted.

She went on to point out that there is free admission to the British Museum to people of all nationalities; that the marbles you see are in fact replicas; that the original marbles are kept in climatically controlled conditions where they will not perish; that the Greek government is so bankrupt that they would simply sell them to someone else if they were returned to Athens.

Other important artefacts such as the Rosetta stone need to be viewed in the context of recent European history, notably the attempt to establish authoritarian control over the region by Napoleon Bonaparte, and the ultimately successful British and Prussian defeat of that attempt. The Rosetta stone was discovered by the French Napoleonic forces and then captured from them by the British forces, who returned it to the British Museum. In a spirit of scholarship the British have always allowed the French free and open access to the stone and indeed the seminal work on the interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyphs was done by a Frenchman.

The British have always had a willingness to try and understand and share other cultures, or rather some of us do. The ship that took Napoleon to his final exile on St Helena was HMS Bellerophon, and Bellerophon, as our better educated readers will recall, was the classical Greek warrior who rode the winged horse Pegasus. This did not stop many of the less well-educated British sailors of the day calling their ship the "Billy Ruffian". A bit like Magna Carter I presume.

As a photographic aside, take a polarizing filter with you if you want to photograph the Rosetta stone. The reflections off its enclosure are not insignificant.

Finally, contrary to the popular perception of Magna Carta being an early statement of the rights of man, it was actually an early (1215 CE) statement of the rights of noblemen.