Of course this article is about Indonesia - that's not a country that screams instability in any case

Perhaps your subjective standards are not universal when determining cultural/aesthetic significance of artifacts.

I saw a railroad spike in an American museum once, it wasn't decorative, or made of precious metal (just steel), but it meant something to the locals. I don't doubt the other adjacent pegs were scrapped or rusted away, but that peg was culturally significant due to the historical nature of the railroad itself.

Who has more claim on the item... someone who stole it and kept it for 100, 150, 200 years? Or people of egypt represented by their government,living in an area where the mummy was stolen from?

I have no idea why citizens of modern Egypt, which didn’t get formed until 1953, would be more entitled to up to 3500 year old artifacts more than the then actual owners (agree with the means or not)

"Your ancestors wronged my ancestors 1000 years ago, so now modern you owes modern me"

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).

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.

the "most right" answer doesn't mean its the right answer. compromise results in wrong answers when there is a right answer. this isn't a standardized test.

Whose culture and polity have no continuity with that of the people who made the mummy, but rather with that of later invaders.

Interesting take. If they were abandoned then I dont see how anyone could claim ownership of it.

And who is qualified to determine the "rightful owner"? The current government of the nation from which the items were taken is the one in charge of policy regarding their cultural and historical artefacts.

For other countries it's not quite as extreme, but in general the link between ancient culture in place X and modern country in place X is less strong than people try to make out.

Does the USA have a claim to all indigenous Artifacts created in the US? It doesn't seem that different than Egypt laying claim to Egyptian artifacts.

I do think the best thing to do is to return artifacts to their rightful owners, but figuring out who the rightful owners is, can be quite difficult.

I mean, if they stole some artifacts from a tribe, which was subsequently wiped out by a tribe of bitter rivals, do they give their artifacts back to the rival tribe that later went on to form a government? (Just as a hypothetical, hopefully this is general enough that it is clear that I’m not trying to describe any particular real situation).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kemetic_Orthodoxy#Worship

Otherwise, unless there is a clear claim of individual/familial ownership vis descendancy, then returning artifacts to a legal national government is still a least bad option. In this case the artifact belongs to the people and is stewarded by the peoples' government - the government doesn't "own" it in the way King Charles owns the Crown Jewels. (Ideally this government would be democratic, but international legitimacy should be enough for the UK to hand over the goods.)

There are a ton of exceptions - Rohingya artifacts shouldn't be sent blindly into Myanmar - but I promise the people involved are taking this seriously. It seems condescending and arrogant van Bommel really failed to "think through" her usage of a metonymy.

I'm not sure about Indonesia government but I'm confident if my forefathers made artifacts and it got 'returned' to US gov what would happen is a bunch of rich city dwellers would get to see it in an exhibit somewhere, some director will see a fat salary and meanwhile I have no share or compensation nor practical ability to access the artifact.

How do you expect such a clean and clear historic record considering these artifacts were taken from places subjected to deep exploitation by the same countries that today possess the artifacts? Surely keeping records of historical artifacts for use centuries later, would have been a lower priority for the local population than survival.

Would the Crown Jewels still be owned by Charles (or his heirs) if the UK ceased to be a monarchy? I hope not — when the monarchy falls all “royal” property should become public property.