This is I think a thing that is difficult for Americans to understand, because the only Americans who have a thousand years of family history in the place they currently live are also asking museums for their stuff back.
There’s a big difference between a culture that mostly ceased to exist in the past 200 years, because of the USA, and one that ceased to exist 3500 years ago.
Repay what? The people of modern Egypt have no connection or inheritance claim to the ancient artifacts, other than their having been created in a similar place where the modern Egyptians are currently living. They don't even share a remotely similar culture. The same is true of many other places that had their artifacts collected, in that the people have no legal claim to the artifacts other than their having existed in a place in time nor do they often have any shared culture with the people who created the artifacts.
Indeed, it is even arguable whether they are even genetically similar to the ancient Egyptians, due to the migration of the Arabs from the peninsula when spreading Islam over time.
From what I've read, the Egyptian genetics are still relatively similar to Egyptians from several thousand years ago, due to the relatively small number of Arabs involved in the Arab conquest of Egypt. However, the only kinds of inheritance that I believe are strong are familial or cultural. I don't believe in broad umbrella genetic inheritance claims without any establishable familial connection. Beyond this, I think the idea of geographic artifact ownership claims, based solely on the geographic origin of artifacts, have little to no merit.
Beyond this, I think the idea of geographic artifact ownership claims, based solely on the geographic origin of artifacts, have little to no merit.
That's fine, but the world disagrees with you, by and large.
And it needs to have some way of adjudicating these claims. Granted, fine-grained aspects of "familial" vs. "genetic" inheritance (throwing in migrations and multiple waves of forced assimilation) might muddy the waters a bit.
But the vastly bigger point is -- to a first-order approximation, the criterion of "proximate geographic origin" provides at least some form of an objective basis of ownership, and a reasonably workable and intuitive one at that. Meanwhile, as of the 21st century, the consensus view is that the ownership "claims" of recent colonial powers who extracted these artifacts coercively have no merit or basis whatsoever.
Per what the world at large seems to think about these matters. You can disagree of course, and go stand in front of your local museum and hold up a sign stating so, if you like.
(And nevermind the "solely" part please. Yes, there are corner cases like Anatolia where one group comes in and basically genocides the groups living there, so why should the current population get ownership of everything buried underground? Interesting questions, but again corner cases -- and the current population of Egypt seems to be the very opposite of such a case, for the very reasons you stated).
> That's fine, but the world disagrees with you, by and large.
I honestly don't like the way I ended that last sentence. If I could re-write it I'd replace "merit" with "basis in cultural lineage". I would agree that most people in the world don't default to feeling this way, but I also don't think most people have a well thought out idea of why they disagree. If it is considered that the current geographic ownership claims are retroactive ownership claims based solely on the current owners of the geography, for items that existed on the land long before the current legal nations came into existence, the claims make much less sense.
> the criterion of "proximate geographic origin" provides at least some form of an objective basis of ownership
This is part of the reason why I don't like how I used "merit", as it could get confused with legal merit, which wasn't really my intended meaning. However, the problem with this argument is that many of the cultural objects that were collected in years past were collected prior to the modern nations existing in those places. Due to this, this argument really would have little legal merit for virtually all the countries where artifacts have been collected, as those countries did not exist when the British collected the artifacts, and their current claims are a retroactive idea of ownership over what was collected before the current nation came into existence.
>the consensus view is that the ownership "claims" of recent colonial powers who extracted these artifacts coercively have no merit or basis whatsoever
There may be a opinion in the popular consciousness about this general topic, but there can't be a legal consensus, as every claim has to be evaluated individually. Without documentation on the origin and the original owners of the artifacts, and documentation establishing that said artifacts were retrieved illegally, it is impossible to establish legally that the current owners do not actually have ownership over the artifacts.
>the current population of Egypt seems to be the very opposite of such a case, for the very reasons you stated
This is very much not what I stated. The civilization that created the ancient Egyptian artifacts is completely distinct from the current culture. Besides having genetic similarities, which all humans do to some extent, modern Egyptians have near zero cultural lineage tracing to the ancient Egyptian civilization.
"Your ancestors wronged my ancestors 1000 years ago, so now modern you owes modern me"