'Monumental' scandal unfolds over missing artefacts at the British Museum

Huge losses

This could well be a minority view.

According to Christos Tsirogiannis, a forensic archaeologist who works with Trafficking Culture, the volume of missing objects is 'huge.' 

Christopher Marinello, the CEO of Art Recovery International, which specialises in recovering stolen art, was astounded by the revelations: "Our organisation gets reports of theft every single day from various museums, cultural institutions, and churches around the world. What surprised us was the fact that it was the British Museum, one of the most important museums in the world and a benchmark in security."

George Osborne, former finance minister in the UK, is Chairman of the museum's Board of Trustees. Calling upon all the emollience learnt in his previous role, he was quick to downplay the idea of a cover-up at the museum, adding that the leakage of artefacts through dishonest employees was not a problem unique to the institution.

Sacking fails to deflect scrutiny

Nonetheless, the Metropolitan police have now become involved. Since no arrest has been made, the sacking of Higgs might yet turn out to have been a crude attempt to keep the matter in-house and to close it down.

If so, that plan appears to have backfired badly. Director Hartwig Fischer resigned. His deputy, Jonathan Williams, also temporarily stepped back.

The exact circumstances of all these departures are – to use the favourite word of meteorologists this summer – murky. Any attempt to reconstruct the timeline of events would require the patience of a rarely talented archaeologist.

Suffice to say that artefacts – the nature of which is mostly uncertain, and the quantity of which is similarly obscure – have almost certainly gone missing.

Back in 2019, I wrote an article for this magazine entitled 'Homesick Art' in which I attempted to deal with the complex issue of repatriating artworks.

Among the most celebrated examples I mentioned were the Benin bronzes (pillaged by the British from Nigeria) and the statues known as the Elgin or Parthenon marbles. Almost five years later, neither of these issues has been resolved.

Lord Elgin was the protagonist in his own murky story. It was through his initiative that artworks dating back to the Athenian golden age landed up in drizzly London.

At the time of the Ottoman occupation of modern Greece, Elgin was ambassador to Constantinople. The Turkish army had been responsible for destroying much of what remained of the great temple, having stored their explosives on the Acropolis.

Apprised of the damage caused when the explosives went off, Elgin somehow inveigled the occupiers into allowing him to ship a large portion of the remaining statuary back to Britain. For decades, Greece has requested that they be returned.

It comes as no surprise, therefore, that observers there wasted no time pointing out how bad this made the British Museum look.

It probably doesn't help that Higgs worked in a senior curatorial position as the museum's head of department for Greece and Rome. He is known as one of the museum's so-called 'monuments men,' and was the lead curator of the exhibition 'Ancient Greeks: Athletes, Warriors and Heroes', which was first staged in 2021 and is currently on tour.

The main argument for returning the Parthenon marbles to Athens is the opportunity to reunify all the surviving fragments from the temple. Athens has a new museum with vacant spaces awaiting the missing statues.

Despina Koutsoumba, Head of the Association of Greek Archaeologists, said the British Museum could no longer maintain that it was better than Greece at protecting its cultural heritage.

This view was seconded by Lina Mendoni, the Greek culture minister, who said that the controversy over the stolen items meant there were questions over "the credibility of the museum" and that the ongoing furore "reinforces the permanent and just demand of our country for the reunification of the Parthenon Marbles at the Acropolis Museum in Athens".

Tim Loughton, a Conservative MP and chair of the all-party parliamentary group on the British Museum, responded with remarkable vehemence to these noises off, accusing the Greeks of 'blatant opportunism' – the kind of thing, coincidentally, Lord Elgin himself might justly be accused of.

No one can know whether the decay of the statues would have been hastened by remaining on the Acropolis. No one, moreover, can be sure how much a botched restoration in the Thirties, using copper brushes, impaired what was left of them.

But surely, even after the administrative heads have finally stopped rolling and sufficient bureaucratic blood has been spilt – can George Osborne himself escape the fallout? – the perception of a threat to these and other precious objects in the Museum won't go away.