In the basement of the British Museum in London lie 11 Ethiopian tabots—consecrated wooden and stone tablets believed to register the spirit of God. British soldiers looted them from a Northern Ethiopian Church during the 1868 Battle of Magdala. Initially auctioned off for prize money by the army, the tabots were eventually donated to the museum, where they remained in storage. In 2004, after increasing pressure to return them to Ethiopia, the museum began negotiations with Ethiopian government officials and, out of respect, moved them to their onsite collections in London. An Ethiopian Orthodox priest carried the tabots from the warehouse. He entered the vault alone, wrapping them in cloth and purple velvet. Then, he locked the door.
Tabots are so sacred that only clerics of the Ethiopian Church can look at them. Their invisible presence is attested in name only. On the museum’s catalog, there are 11 entries of “tabot” with no picture.
Contested artifacts like these litter the collections of the British Museum. As international museums like the Smithsonian and the Louvre move to return relics of cultural heritage to their respective communities, the British Museum has its hands tied by its own design. The British Museum Act of 1963 prohibits deaccession—the removal of artifacts from its collections—unless they are duplicates or ambiguously “unfit” to be retained. But for the museum to reckon with the vestiges of its imperial past, Parliament must allow the repatriation of looted artifacts.
The British Museum is run by a board of trustees meant to operate at arm’s length from the government. Their autonomy is part of a legislative framework designed to insulate the museum from the winds of politics, preventing valuable artifacts from being sold as bargaining chips in diplomatic negotiations or becoming debt collateral in times of financial crisis. On March 30, 2022, when Parliament discussed returning the tabots to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay—the Under-Secretary for the State Department of Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS)—returned to this principle. “My Lords,” he began, “the British Museum operates independently [from the] government, meaning that decisions relating to the care and management of its collections, are a matter for its trustees.”
However, because of the British Museum Act, the separation of museum and state is futile. Trustees do not have control over museum collections because Parliament must micromanage legislation around repatriation. Under scrutiny from the Boris Johnson administration, museums were told to maintain contested artifacts. Fellow Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak maintained a similar position when he canceled a meeting with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, turning the Elgin Marbles loan negotiations into a sensationalized squabble.
To bypass the Act, the museum stated its intent to loan the tabots to an Ethiopian Orthodox Church in Great Britain. This proposal aligns with the vision of Nick Cullinan, the new director of the British Museum, who seeks further collaboration with international museums to make the museum a “lending library” to the world. While loans offer an alternative to repatriation, they do not fully address the dilemma of cultural ownership. Britain has publicly expressed its interest in lending the Elgin Marbles, but Greece will take nothing less than permanent acquisition, arguing that anything else simply reaffirms the museum’s colonial understanding of “rightful” ownership. This dispute has locked the two countries in a standstill battle since Greece gained independence in 1835. Similarly, returning the tabots on loan seems particularly insensitive given their profound importance to Ethiopians and their relative unimportance to the British. As it stands, the status of these negotiations, as well as the 2019 request for the tabots’ return to Ethiopia by the country’s cultural minister, remains unclear.
In response to these controversies, the museum asserts the claim that cultural artifacts transcend national interests and must be protected for the sake of common humanity. The dilemma of this internationalist philosophy is that physical property “belonging to common humanity” cannot be accessible to “all of humanity” at the same time. As a result, preservation becomes the priority. This stance originates from the 1954 Hague Convention. With the memory of World War II’s destruction, the first international treaty upholding the universal value of cultural heritage was drafted with the assumption that “damage to cultural property belonging to any people whatsoever means damage to the cultural heritage of all mankind.” In contrast, nationalists believe that cultural heirlooms belong to their country of origin, surpassing the importance of preservation or international appreciation. These two strands of thought underpin the repatriation discussions of the last several decades. As a result, the museum has become roped into an ideological debate, not just a political one.
Resolving this debate is not easy. Even if the museum accepts nationalist claims for repatriation, the question of who owns cultural property remains disputed. The rise and fall of the empires has unsettled geographic borders. In the wake of their independence, nations have tried to cohere a sense of national heritage amidst the ruptures of imperial conquest. Lord Elgin ventured from Scotland to remove the Parthenon sculptures when Greece was still part of the Ottoman Empire. The Benin Bronzes were looted from the Benin Kingdom, which fell to British rule in 1897. In the aftermath of colonization, it is unclear whether the Bronzes should pass over to the Benin royal family, who only have ceremonial political status, or to the federal government of Nigeria (the state now governing the land of the former Benin Kingdom) on behalf of the Nigerian public. Parliament cites these complexities as justification for upholding the British Museum Act against repatriation. However, this argument is a disservice to the meaning of cultural property at the center of these debates. The museum equates cultural property with legal ownership when, in fact, these artifacts were acquired on a “finders, keepers” basis during a time that lies out of the law’s reach, before the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization had established guidelines controlling the illicit trade of artifacts in 1970. The museum’s internationalist justifications of cultural heritage are therefore illegitimate, an afterthought of acquiring artifacts through historical force or chance.
Restoring trustee autonomy would allow the museum to escape this limiting legal framework. There are one of two ways Parliament can accomplish this. The first is to pass direct legislation allowing for repatriation, such as the Holocaust Act, which returned artifacts looted by the Gestapo. A more feasible alternative is including the British Museum in the Charities Act of 2022, which would allow the Board of Trustees to depart from their legal and fiduciary duties in select circumstances to pursue pressing ethical obligations. With these amendments, trustees could reckon with the complexities of repatriation and treat each contested artifact on a case-by-case basis. In turning to ethical, historical, and aesthetic arguments for repatriation, they can consider whether, for example, an artifact was looted—as with the Benin Bronzes—or whether restitution would restore aesthetic unity, as with the Parthenon sculptures, and repatriate as a result.
Furthermore, the argument that the British Museum is uniquely tasked with preserving artifacts for the international community no longer holds water. The scandal of a museum employee stealing at least 1,800 artifacts to sell on eBay has shown that the British Museum is now vulnerable to the same preservation perils as other institutions. Many countries have developed national museums rivaling Britain’s own. Greece has its Acropolis Museum, and Nigeria has the Edo Museum of West African Art. The British Museum helped establish the Manhyia Palace Museum in Ghana to house its loaned collection of Asante regalia. The priority of preservation can coexist with the return of cultural emblems to the national line. When those lines blur, as with the Nigerian case, countries can deliberate amongst themselves on what they deem best as an act of national sovereignty.
Rooted in a sense of a historic place, returned artifacts can furnish tourism economies as countries negotiate their place on the global stage of culture. Many of them continue to reckon with the economic and political repercussions of colonial exploitation. Returning these artifacts can help them let go of this imperial legacy. Repatriation should be considered part of what it means to fulfill the British Museum’s commitment to being an institution “of the world, for the world.” Cross-cultural dialogue and restitution allow the legacy of the encyclopedic museum, housing the world behind glass, to evolve past these archaic beliefs and recognize the living presence of these artifacts in the real world.